godlessness
pharyngula | February 8, 2006My response to this odious essay by Dale Reich was, well, terse. He wrote a very silly editorial in which he claimed to have doffed the mantle of his faith to see what the life of an atheist was like, and found it empty and hateful…and his conclusion was to insist that we atheists need to start living up to our philosophy and be mean and brutal and cruel.
The heartening thing is that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where it was published, now has an editorial in reply and a set of letters from readers that unanimously condemn Reich's ignorance. It's good to see reason winning a popularity…
pharyngula | February 7, 2006
Or maybe not. At least I'm crunchy/slimy.
Hmmm…it looks like I make a cameo appearance in another entry, too.
pharyngula | February 7, 2006By Neddie Jingo! This is my ideal messenger:
I've banged on about this before, and others have said it as well: in a Breughel landscape of insanity, bad faith, desperately knotted thinking and crazed cupidity, Dawkins shines out of the darkness like a Bodhisattva, a pillar of mental health in a vortex of madness.
In the current climate of deadly foolish nonsense, I don't know why we consider any kind of religiosity a virtue in any endeavor, let alone science.
pharyngula | February 7, 2006
Alright, people, I'm gonna get tough. You know what I want, and you'd better give it to me.
I've got a bible here, and a 44oz. Diet Coke…lots of liquid containing a diuretic, to boot. In about an hour, I figure my bladder is going to be pretty full. You know what could happen.
I don't need information from you, and I sure don't want your money. This is a weblog, and the currency here in these parts is the link, the trackback, the comment. Fork 'em over, or I'm taking this Bible down the hall. You know I'd do it. I'm a godless atheist—I don't think your Bible means doodley-squat.
Intimidated…
pharyngula | February 7, 2006I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I'd be subscribing even if they weren't sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there's a lot of the content available online.
Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney's article on Learning to speak science. It's good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but…
(…
pharyngula | February 5, 2006Wow, but this post has inspired so many misconceptions.
I do not think Muslims should be insulated from satire. I do not think there is parity between a cartoonist drawing a picture someone doesn't like and a Muslim calling for the execution of the cartoonist. I am not on the Muslim's side here, and I am uncompromising in condemning rioting and destruction as criminal.
I do think religion needs to be thoroughly criticized—you haven't been reading Pharyngula for long if you think otherwise, and I thought I'd been quite careful to spell out that religion was a hate-amplifier in this situation—…
pharyngula | February 4, 2006I haven't commented on those Muslim cartoons so far. I'm conflicted.
Why, you might ask? It's a clear-cut case of religious insanity, exactly the sort of thing I ought to relish wagging an arrogantly atheistical finger at. And of course I will, in just a moment…but the difficult part is that there are actually at least two issues here, and religion is only one of them.
There are some things a cartoonist would be rightly excoriated for publishing: imagine that one had drawn an African-American figure as thick-lipped, low-browed, smirking clown with a watermelon in one hand and a fried chicken…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006I've got a couple of posts that have been nominated for The 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Post, so I've quickly brought them on board here at the new site. Voting isn't yet open, but here they are:
Idiot America. This one is something of a howl of anguish, and it's really more a lot of quotes from Charles Pierce's article of the same name in Esquire. If this gets the nomination, credit should go more to Pierce than to me—and that's OK.
Planet of the Hats. This article is probably the best representation for how I actually feel about religion. It's all metaphor, but if you don't get it, I won't be…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006
I know you will not believe me, but I swear it's true: I'm not of this earth. I fled here years ago because my home planet was driving me crazy. Let me explain.
My home world is very much like this one. It's populated by billions of bipedal primates, who are just like people here: sometimes foolish, sometimes wise, sometimes hateful, sometimes generous. They are grouped into cities and nations, and sometimes they have wars, and sometimes they cooperate. You really would have a hard time telling our two planets apart, except for one thing.
The hats.
My people are obsessed with hats. Almost…
pharyngula | January 31, 2006
I love this article.
Ctenotrish sent along a copy of Greetings from Idiot America, by Charles P. Pierce (sorry, but it's behind a firewall, and you have to pay $2.95 to see it) from the latest Esquire. I don't think I've ever read this magazine before—it's one of those things with half-naked young ladies draped over the cover, which, strangely enough, isn't something that usually entices me to pick up a copy—but this one article has all the vigor and passion that most of our media have wrung out of their press, replacing it with tepid timidity and vacuous boosterism for whatever the polls…
grrlscientist | January 30, 2006Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
-- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
You can't identify an atheist simply by looking at them and in fact, your group of friends probably includes at least one atheist in their number. Even though belief in some sort of supernatural being is the dominant philosophy in the Western World, atheism still persists. Why? This book specifically addresses these questions, and many more;
What, precisely, is atheism, and why is it misunderstood so thoroughly?
Do atheists believe that human beings evolved through blind accident from…
pharyngula | January 30, 2006I sat down and watched both episodes of Dawkins' series, The Root of All Evil? this weekend (because I can!), and I have to say…I liked it very much. I've already commented on the first episode, and if you want to know what's in the second, Dawkins himself has an editorial that summarizes the main points: the pattern of indoctrination of children, the kneejerk rejection of honest criticism, the spreading corruption of education by dogma. It was marvelous to see it all laid out lucidly, in a tidy 50 minute spot. (Hmmm, just the right length that if I wanted to "infuse religion in student…
pharyngula | January 30, 2006An Angry professor led me to an article on Inside Higher Ed, which discusses a document by the Wingspread Conference by the Society for Values in Higher Education (pdf). I knew when I saw the word "Values" up there that I was in for some platitudinous academe-speak slathered around a set of bland pieties, and I was. Poking around on their website, I see that the Society for Values in Higher Education seems to consist of a lot of well-meaning and rather wordy types who see religion as an important "value" to inculcate in higher education—a nest of those liberal Christians everyone tells me I'm…
pharyngula | January 27, 2006Daniel Dennett has this new book out, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and I don't know that I want to read it. It was just reviewed by Michael Shermer in Science, and my general feeling was an uncomfortable vibration, liking some of what they said, but feeling at the same time that it was a tossup whether Shermer or Dennett is more annoying. Shermer has a tendency to be conciliatory towards religious babble, while Dennett has this overwhelming adaptationist bias that makes me cranky.
I've put a chunk of the review below the fold, let me know what…
pharyngula | January 26, 2006My small town isn't as bad as this, I'm happy to say.
"Where would the condoms be?" I asked with total sincerity and seriousness—I am an adult after all.
"We don't have condoms."
"You're a pharmacy without condoms?"
"Well," she scoffs, "that's not exactly the kind of behavior we want to promote now, is it?"
pharyngula | January 24, 2006I am so going to hell for linking to this. If you love Jesus, don't click on that.
(via Stupid Evil Bastard)
pharyngula | January 23, 2006
Carnival of the Godless #32 is available for reading. Once you've read through all that, there's also a somewhat interesting theistic point of view to consider. The author quotes Pascal:
Let the skeptics first learn what religion is before attacking it. If religion boasted that it offered a clear vision of God, and if it asserted that there was ample evidence of his existence, then the skeptic could simply argue that the evidence is not conclusive. But religion says the opposite. It recognizes that people are in darkness, remote from God, that God is hidden from their understanding. Yet it…
pharyngula | January 16, 2006Hey, Norbizness is supposed to be a funny guy. So what's he doing posting an excellent excerpt from a Martin Luther King letter?
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who…
pharyngula | January 16, 2006Give Up Blog posts a fascinating map of charitable giving by state, to shoot down a fatuous WSJ op-ed that tries to claim greater charity as a Red State virtue. I certainly don't see a positive correlation there, do you?
That claim brings to mind another common misconception, that religion is the driving force behind charity. Here's another map, of the distribution of the ungodly (not just atheists, but agnostics and other people who are not affiliated with any organized religion.)
Again, any correlation between these two maps looks like it would be fairly weak, and isn't going to support…