religion
oracknows | November 21, 2007It's that time again.
Oh, it's a day early because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but it's here nonetheless. It's time for the 74th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, this time hosted over at Med Journal Watch. I can't figure out why Christian is being heckled by skeptics, though, as he gives his address.
Don't forget that it won't be long before the next Skeptics' Circle comes around the pike. In fact, it will be longer than usual, thanks to the early appearance of this edition. The next meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will appear on Thursday, December 6 and will be hosted by Pro-Science, a blog…
omnibrain | November 21, 2007One of the earliest references to a controlled experiment is from Daniel 1: 1-16 in the Old Testament of the Bible. In this 'experiment' Daniel pits his nutrition regime of "pulse" to eat and water to drink versus the best cuts of meat and the most highly rated wine. Check out the experimental methods and results below:
1:1 In the third yearof the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.
1:2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of…
pharyngula | November 20, 2007If there actually were a god, Cyclone Sidr would have spun through Bangladesh, selectively eliminating all the two-faced scumbag missionaries who exploit the poor in the name of their deity. Chris Mooney cites an example from the Baptist Press:
In the hours before Cyclone Sidr reached the coastal areas of Bangladesh, Southern Baptists and other Christians began praying -- aware that the Category 4 storm potentially could usher hundreds of thousands into an eternity without Jesus.
…
"Last night a lot of people died and entered an eternity of suffering," Neely said. "Almost none of them has…
gregladen | November 20, 2007I live in Minnesota and work in South Africa. That means that every time somebody I don't know hears that I've been to South Africa more than once or am going there for an extended period, they say "Oh, is it mission work ... my [cousin/aunt/uncle] is a missionary there."
Thankfully, I have yet to meet a missionary in South Africa, but when I lived in the Congo, I often lived among them. And there are two kinds. The good ones (as far as I know they all speak only Italian and KiSwahili and are Catholics) and the evil ones (American, Australian, and British, mostly).
OK, they've helped me…
pharyngula | November 19, 2007It sure seems that way. Yet another tawdry series of escapades by Christianists:
The 80-year-old leader of a suburban Atlanta megachurch is at the center of a sex scandal of biblical dimensions: He slept with his brother's wife and fathered a child by her.
The story has some cheering news, though.
At its peak in the early 1990s, it claimed about 10,000 members and 24 pastors and was a media powerhouse. By soliciting tithes of 10 percent from each member's income, the church was able to build a Bible college, two schools, a worldwide TV ministry and a $12 million sanctuary the size of a…
pharyngula | November 18, 2007Today's Freethinker Sunday Sermonette first tells the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is utterly wacky by intent…and then has a most amusing cartoon retelling of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is even more insane. Who needs the FSM when you can discredit religion more effectively with its own words?
evolvingthoughts | November 17, 2007
I have always enjoyed reading the work of Frans de Waal, a primatologist who focuses on the social structure and psychology of apes, particularly the two chimp species, and monkeys. His previous books, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist, and Peacemaking among Primates have all entranced me and inspired my reflections on such diverse topics as evolutionary psychology, the origins of political and social structures, and, of course, the evolution of religion.
His recent book, Our…
pharyngula | November 16, 2007Salma, Salma, Salma…you heard about my thread to name the feeblest reason for believing in Christianity, and you couldn't just leave a comment like everyone else? You had to go running to the press to submit your entry?
Mexican actress SALMA HAYEK was so upset by childhood jibes about her flat-chest, she would pray to God for larger breasts. The Ugly Betty star reveals she was bullied for having small breasts as a youngster - and decided to turn to her Catholic religion for help. She says, "My mom and I stopped at a church during a road trip we were making from our home in Mexico. "When we…
omnibrain | November 15, 2007The one... the only... Jesus made from Sushi and Chopsticks!
Actually... that's a cucumber for the head, ginger for the body, and shrimp fins (or whatever they're called) for the legs. I tried to make a crown out of onion but it didn't work too well.
I ate the body of Christ afterwards. That makes me religious right?!
pharyngula | November 14, 2007That's a poll on Christianity Today — and I'm afraid "none" wasn't one of the options. Instead, readers got to pick from insipid nonsense like "the reliability of the Scriptures," "The exquisiteness of the physical world," and the winner, "The life and character of Jesus." As Ophelia notes, those aren't even arguments. Isn't it rather pathetic that this is all they can dredge up for their readers, platitudes and errors?
pharyngula | November 14, 2007I've been ignoring this rain prayer nonsense from Georgia lately, despite the fact that every day I'm getting email about it. It was just too ridiculous to believe—no one, especially not the governor of an American state in the 21st century, could be that loony.
And then I watched this video.
Good grief. I watched that blithering idiot babbling about god listening to their prayers to relieve the drought, and I heard the onlookers muttering "Yeah!" and "Amen!" and all I could think was …
Demented fuckwits.
I keep hearing about the sophistication of faith, and how we arrogant atheists…
neurotopia | November 14, 2007Here we see the consequences of social promotion; no, not the practice of advancing students who haven't demonstrated competency in their subject matter, but of inappropriately advancing a concept that hasn't attained scientific credibility.
When said concept, in this case Intelligent Design, is shown to be scientifically vacuous, we send it back to the drawing board. We don't push it along into textbooks and classrooms.
"All of us are smarter than one of us," Hamm said.
In the case of a schoolboard filled with creationists, clearly this does not hold.
pharyngula | November 13, 2007An announcement from Minnesota Atheists:
Mother Teresa: Closet Atheist or Teflon Saint?
Sponsored by Minnesota Atheists
Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007
1:30-2:30 p.m.
Bedlam Theatre, Minneapolis
Around the world Mother Teresa has become an unassailable icon of charity, love and endless toil for the benefit of the "poorest of the poor." Her image as the savior of the poor people of Calcutta earned untold millions in donations, multitudes of awards, including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, and a fast track to sainthood.
Persons who have questioned her mode of operation and publicized the true nature of…
jrosenhouse | November 13, 2007George Carlin once asked, “If you're going to have a rain dance, wouldn't you have to have rain dance practice? And what I'm wondering is, does it rain during practice? Because if it doesn't, how do you know if you have it right? And if it does, why bother with the dance in the first place. Need a little water? Call practice!”
The great state of Georgia is facing a drought. Clearly this is God's punishment for our wasteful ways. The solution is obvious: Ask God nicely to knock it off.
Gov. Sonny Perdue wasn't the least bit discouraged Tuesday after his hourlong state Capitol prayer…
tqa | November 12, 2007
The fine folks at the Discovery Institute aren't happy with tomorrow's PBS documentary on the Dover Intelligent Design case, and they're doing their best to make sure that everyone knows just how unhappy they are. They've been frantically tossing articles up on their Media Complaints Division Blog trying to make sure that their version of reality gets some exposure. I'm not going to bother going through all of their complaints right now. Most of their new material consists of a rehashing of discredited arguments from when the ruling came out. There's one post that caught my eye, though,…
razib | November 9, 2007Picked up a book, Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, a nice little survey spun off into a short book. The authors primarily used a sample of respondents (N ~ 350) from some atheist clubs in the San Francisco area. The respondents were older (median ~ 60), well educated (median ~ college completed) and politically liberal (only 3 percent were Republicans). They also drew upon a smaller sample from Idaho and Alabama, as well as previous surveys give to thousands of college students in Manitoba (the authors are Canadian). Not only did they do an analysis of the…
grrlscientist | November 7, 2007tags: evolution, politics, education, Kitzmiller, Dover School District, intelligent design, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, NOVA, streaming video
Occasionally, very rarely in fact, I wish I had a television, and this is one of those days. I just received an ad from Kate Becker, regarding a new NOVA program, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" which will air 8 pm on Tuesday, November 13 on your local PBS station (you might have also noticed that they are advertizing this program on this site).
This program documents the war over evolution that came to Dover, Pennsylvania…
oracknows | November 7, 2007This is getting depressing.
Yesterday, I did a brief post on the tragic story of a nine month old baby named Gloria Thomas whose father, a homeopath, put his faith in homeopathic medicines to treat her severe eczema and who as a consequence did not receive the necessary medical treatment she needed and died of massive sepsis, probably from a staph infection of her skin. It was clearly a case where faith in an irrational and unscientific system of medicine directly contributed to an unnecessary death by delaying necessary care.
But misguided faith in alternative medicine is not the only kind…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf to man". I'm beginning to wonder if there is a difference between gods and wolves.
Ask yourself this: why did we domesticate wolves instead of cats the way we did? Why don't we have pet tigers? The answer has to do with the social structure of wolves. They have a pack-mentality. Each wolf is subordinate to some other wolf unless it is the alpha male. This instinctual behaviour, typical of the species and its…
laelaps | November 6, 2007Back when I was a blogging greenhorn, right about this time last year, an evangelical YEC thought he had come up with an intellectual coup de grâce to make me see "the light"; "Antony Flew believes in a god, so there." (Ok, so I'm paraphrasing just a bit) Chalk it up to ignorance, but I had never even heard of Antony Flew, and saying that he believed in a deity had about as much effect on me as saying "Charlie Parker thought the sky was purple" (and given his problems with drug addiction, maybe he sometimes did). Still, over and over again Christian apologists have invoked Flew's name and I…