religion
pharyngula | November 6, 2007I was shocked to open Current Biology and find the leading news article was titled "Call to atheists," and it was actually a pleasantly neutral article that simply reported on Dawkins' efforts to organize atheists and promote a positive view of secularism — I guess I'm simply so used to so many media references that get immediately defensive of religion and treat atheism as something scary. It's very nice.
Right after reading it, however, I got a note from Melissa. If you want to see something that should choke a cockroach, watch the parade of Democrats getting in line to stand up and defend…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2007Writing in The New York TImes Stanley Fish discusses two new books on the problem of evil.
Since Fish hails from the pompous, pseduo-intellectual school of writing, in which it is considered extremely low-brow to actually make a point with force and clarity, he has little light to shed on the issue. He does manage to take a few swipes at the atheist trinity of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, however:
What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy - the existence of suffering and evil in a…
retrospectacle | November 6, 2007The New York Times has an interesting piece up about Antony Flew, formerly vocal atheist and revered philosopher, who's been co-oped by the Intelligent Design brigade in his dotage. In 1950, Flew published a discourse on atheism "Theology and Falsification" which pointed out something quite astute: that the term "God" is so amorphous as to be impossible to either prove or disprove. Seems like common sense now, but at the time it sent shock waves through an academia only recently comfortable with evolution and secular science.
Years later, Flew was forking over his legacy to the creationists,…
razib | November 4, 2007In my post below I wanted to emphasize that religion has several distinct and independent dimensions. Too often in our modern era religion is reduced purely to the dimension of confession or belief because of its relative accessibility to outsiders. Here is some of that complexity on display, from page 371 of The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815:
Less comical but more dangerous was a prelate like Etienne-Charles Lomenie de Brienne, whose composition of a materialist treatise at the Sorbonne in 1751 did not prevent him entering the priesthood and becoming Vicar-General of Rouen the…
pharyngula | November 4, 2007I have not been shy about my contempt for the crackpot, Roy Varghese — he's one of those undeservedly lucky computer consultants who struck it rich and is now using his money to endorse religion. He's a god-soaked loon who pretends to be a scientific authority, yet he falls for the claim that bumblebees can't fly and therefore there flight is evidence for a god. Really. He's that deluded.
I've been too kind, however. You must read this New York Times article, The Turning of an Atheist, in which it turns out that Varghese is also a contemptible manipulator.
It's the story of Antony Flew, the…
razib | November 3, 2007From a New York Times Magazine piece about Antony Flew. Here is the most shocking part:
When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort -- slightly more, anyway. "There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this," Varghese said. "There is stuff he'd written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
Sorry about that pun - it's been around for a while since Antony Flew, quandam philosopher and "Darwinian", announced he was converting to a kind of deism. Jon Pieret, who often comments on this blog when he should be writing for his own, covers the facts as far as we can ascertain them.
I am deeply sympathetic to Flew here. I too suffer from nominal aphasia. I tell my students that I forget my own kids names, and I only have two. Of different sexes. They laugh, but it's true...
nisbetmc | November 3, 2007
[Image from Salon.com feature on panelist Barbara J. King]
Full details are now available for the previously announced panel on Communicating Science in a Religious America at February's AAAS meetings in Boston.
180-Minute Symposium
Communicating Science in a Religious America
Sunday, Feb 17, 2008, 1:45 PM - 4:45 PM
Synopsis:
Over the coming decades, as society faces major collective choices on issues such as climate change, biomedical research, and nanotechnology, scientists and their organizations will need to work together with religious communities to formulate effective policies and to…
grrlscientist | November 2, 2007tags: atheism, online quiz
Okay, the questions on this quiz are kind of annoying, something that I discovered only after I took it, but as I said, I took it, so here are my results;
What kind of atheist are you?created with QuizFarm.com
You scored as Scientific Atheist
These guys rule. I'm not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
Scientific Atheist…
tqa | November 1, 2007
It's not often that I start a post with an apology (that usually comes later) but I think I have to this time. Dr. Watson, I'm sorry that I've got your name in the same title as Westboro Baptist. As unpleasant as you've been at times, you're not anywhere close to being in the same league as the Phelps infestation. It's just that I've got a pretty good reason for talking about you and the villainous horde in the same post, and splitting up the names in the title didn't read well. I'm pretty sure that I can keep the two of you out of the same sentence in the remainder of the text.
By any…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2007tags: Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, JK Rowling, sexuality, christian values, hatred
Albus Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
[Albus Dumbledore portrayed by Michael Gambon in HP films 3-5]
Image: Warner Bros (2003).
Okay, now we all know the horrible, terrible evil truth: Dumbledore is (GASP!) gay. Predictably, the religious wingnuts in American have gone .. er, nuts. They are throwing away all their copies of the Harry Potter books, are calling for the banning of the HP series, and are re-affirming their godliness by busily writing hatefilled screeds…
evolvingthoughts | October 31, 2007
To summarise: so far we have three general kinds of explanations of religion. There are sociological explanations in terms of the economic, societal and political conditions under which religions develop. There are psychological explanations in terms of experiences, existential dread, need for control and so forth. And there are sociobiological explanations that may or may not incorporate both of these. These latter accounts are founded on some aspect of a shared human nature, but they need not be essentialistic, in the sense that each human shares them, only that any population of humans…
pharyngula | October 30, 2007Guilt-ridden Christian: If I don't obey God, he's going to make me suffer for all eternity.
Evil-angelical Christian: I don't make you obey God, I'll be responsible for your eternal suffering.
That link will take you to a despicably manipulative video on GodTube — a dramatized letter from Hell in which a young fellow about to be thrown into the Lake of Fire screams at his still living, Christian friend for not doing enough to save him. It is genuinely vile. It is an attempt to turn a positive social value, friendship, into a rationale for browbeating people into abandoning reason and…
pharyngula | October 30, 2007Pope Ratzi confirms the bankruptcy of religion for me once again.
Benedict told a gathering of Catholic pharmacists that conscientious objection was a right that must be recognized by the pharmaceutical profession.
"Pharmacists must seek to raise people's awareness so that all human beings are protected from conception to natural death, and so that medicines truly play a therapeutic role," Benedict said.
Benedict said conscientious objector status would "enable them not to collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes such as, for example,…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2007At least, that is the conclusion you would inevitably come to if you read Town Hall on a regular basis. The wesbite that boasts of being the first conservative web community seems to have a yen for anti-atheist propaganda.
For example, here's Mike Adams in a column entitled, “Understanding Atheism::
If psychologists were really interested in the fair and balanced treatment of religion they would see the obvious connection between cognitive dissonance theory and atheism. And, of course, they would discuss it in their classes in conjunction with the application of Freudian and Skinnerian…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2007This week's New York Times Magazine has this lengthy article suggesting that the evangelical voters are modertaing their views a bit:
So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that he was quitting so he could work full time on "cultural issues." Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. "It just wasn't…
purepedantry | October 29, 2007Writing in the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple criticizes the equivalence of religion with the immoral and atheism with the moral:
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these…
razib | October 28, 2007Over at Ross Douthat's blog, a giggle-inducing comment:
It seems to me that Mormonism is indeed a lot more illogical than mainstream Christianity. It suffers from logical contradictions that Christianity does not- for example, how can someone be retroactively baptized? Why would God say that polygamy was OK for Brigham Young but then not OK anymore after Utah became a state? How do the Gods of multiple universes interact? Most importantly, how is it even logically possible for man to become God? This last bit, about man becoming God, is not just highly offensive to me, it's also logically…
neurophilosophy | October 28, 2007The New York Times Magazine contains a long article about the close ties between evangelical Christians and the Republican party.
evolvingthoughts | October 25, 2007
I now turn to the question of explananda - what is it that explanations of religion are adduced to explain?
Similarly to the general classification I gave before, there are several things that seem to need explaining.
1. The sociological explanandum: the existence of organised religion
Religions are salient objects in modern and historical societies. All of them have social structure, and it is that which calls for explanation. There are basically two approaches here, one tied to Weber's sociology and the other tied to Durkheim's. Weber believed that religion was symbolic, and founded…