religion
tqa | September 24, 2007
If you love predictability, you've got to love the Discovery Institute. Whenever someone publishes a paper about human evolution, it's a pretty safe bet that someone there will soon take the time to explain how having learned something new means that we somehow know less than we did before. You can set your watch by it, almost.
The latest example comes from Casey Luskin. He "discusses" a paper that came out in Nature this week that reported on some fossils from Dmanisi, Georgia. Several skulls have been described from this site already, and the current paper focuses on post-cranial (less…
pharyngula | September 23, 2007I had not known that the UK actually had a legal requirement "in all state schools for pupils to take part in a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian nature." How … quaint. That must create a fair number of atheists, since I think I would probably have reacted with some resentment if my school had shuffled me off to chapel every day, just on the general principle. And I've learned something else: the UK government has an infestation of holy muckity-mucks, almost like ours! When Dr Paul Kelley tried to turn the school he runs into a a fully secular institution, he was told he couldn't do…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2007According to The New York Times, Russia is having some church / state issues:
One of the most discordant debates in Russian society is playing out in public schools like those in this city not far from Moscow, where the other day a teacher named Irina Donshina set aside her textbooks, strode before her second graders and, as if speaking from a pulpit, posed a simple question:
“Whom should we learn to do good from?”
“From God!” the children said.
“Right!” Ms. Donshina said. “Because people he created crucified him. But did he accuse them or curse them or hate them? Of course not! He…
pharyngula | September 22, 2007As many of the readers here know, one of the most common criticisms of us uppity atheists is the idea that the religion we critize doesn't exist: that the true power of faith is thoughtful, intelligent, and deep, and plucking out random weird beliefs isn't really representative. When I hear that (and I have, often), I just have to roll my eyes and give the apologist a scathing look — if they believe naive god-wallopers weren't the dominant form of religious belief on the planet, then I can at least castigate the self-declared 'sophisticated' theology for being an exercise in willful blindness…
oracknows | September 21, 2007
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder of Woo looking for just the thing to be interesting and entertaining to both me as the blogger and you as the reader. As happens occasionally, nothing was really doing it for me. Nothing was getting me fired up to launch into yet another installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. I thought about going back to the well of Life Technology (believe it or not, there is still some woo there to which I have not yet applied my special brand of Respectful Insolenceâ¢), but somehow I just wasn't in the mood. Let's face it, after…
tqa | September 19, 2007
When a soldier enlists in the Army, he or she takes an oath:
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
For SPC Jeremy Hall, a soldier currently stationed in Iraq, defending the Constitution involves more than his Army…
pharyngula | September 19, 2007People keep sending me interesting news stories! More than I can handle! So let me do a little linkdump here, and you can sort through them and see if anything is of interest.
Ben Stein is visiting Baylor! You knew they'd rush to squeeze in one more dramatic scene of the oppressive atmosphere at a Baptist university while the Marks/Dembski noise is still hot. The ass-prod, Mathis, is going to be cruising the campus for footage, and he claims the biology majors are reluctant to talk to him: "If you were a biology student, you wouldn't dare touch this." The implication is that biology majors…
oracknows | September 18, 2007As the resident World War II maven on ScienceBlogs, I noted with interested PZ's mention of a story from Germany about a German Cardinal's jaw-droppingly bad choice of words:
A German cardinal has triggered a storm of criticism in Germany by describing atheist art as "degenerate" -- a term usually avoided in public discourse because of its association with the Nazis.
Cardinal Joachim Meisner was speaking at the blessing of his archdiocese's new art museum, the Kolumba, in the heart of Cologne, on Friday.
"Wherever culture is separated from the worship of God, the cult atrophies in ritualism…
jrosenhouse | September 17, 2007I only have time for a quick blog post (Prison Break comes on in twenty minutes!), but do have a quick look at this post over at Richard Dawkins' site. (Hat tip to Larry Moran for directing me to it).
It's a diagram showing all of the book length responses that have been inspired by the recent books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
Two things struck me about this. The first is simply that there are quite a lot of books out there responding to Dawkins and Harris that I didn't know about. Some of them even seem to have been written by reputable people and published by serious houses. I'll…
purepedantry | September 17, 2007Last week, I posted a long argument for why I believe pairing science and atheism is a poor strategic choice for scientists. The response to that article has I think been largely positive, but I do want to address the criticisms of it now that I have had a chance to read all the comments and posts about it.
Let me state clearly, though, that I think all of the counter-arguments are legitimate. The world is a complicated place, and I have no special insight into its workings.
Further, if any people find my arguments pejorative, I apologize. It was my intent that this discussion be conducted…
tqa | September 16, 2007
I've been continuing to put some time into criticizing Michael Behe's expert report on the creationist texts involved in the California Creationism Case. This is a slow process, partly because I'm also working on other projects and partly because it's difficult to read the Bob Jones "Biology for Christian Schools" text without encountering a range of unpleasant side effects. I've been fighting the increased blood pressure and the nausea, and soldiering on. Along the way, I've encountered some real gems that I thought I'd share with you.
Today, I'm going to give you two quotes: one on…
pharyngula | September 16, 2007Perhaps it was just poor framing when Cardinal Joachim Meisner said:
"Wherever culture is separated from the worship of God, the cult atrophies in ritualism and culture becomes degenerate," he said.
The word "degenerate" is hardly ever used in Germany today because of its known association with the Third Reich.
Well, yes, I can imagine that there is some sensitivity to the use of the word … but perhaps they should also consider the substance of his remarks. He has basically just said atheists are incapable of producing art: no music, no beauty, no poetry, none of the great works of the human…
oracknows | September 16, 2007Even though I only rarely blog about politics, I'm with Ed Brayton, P. Z. Myers, and Amygdala on this one. Truly a wonderful thing has happened to the Presidential race.
Alan Keyes has entered the race for the 2008 Republican nomination for President.
No one can bring the crazy and stupid to a Presidential race the way Alan Keyes can. (My only hope for even better would be if Ted Nugent were to throw his hat into the ring.) His combination of self-righteous pandering to the religious right, nutty Libertarian views, and just plain silly statements far exceed anything any of the other…
pharyngula | September 16, 2007While Revere is showing a rerun of that glorious anti-religion riff (it's worth listening to again!), here's another clip of Marcus Brigstocke being right in every particular once more.
tqa | September 15, 2007
Yet another round of the unholy wars has broken out again here at Scienceblogs. Matt Nisbet and PZ Myers are at each others' throats. Again. If you read the other blogs here, you know that this isn't anything that's exactly novel. The two have some fundamental differences, and every so often those differences brush up against each other. When Matt and Paul's differences interact, we usually see something that chemists and science geeks like to refer to as a "highly exothermic" reaction. (In other words, things go "Boom!")
I don't always get involved when these disputes come up, and when I…
oracknows | September 15, 2007Now here's a church service that I could get into, the Church of the Time Lord. As an article in Metro.co.uk says:
A congregation are to be invited to compare a Time Lord with the Lord of Time at a special Dr Who-themed church service, it was disclosed today.
Teenagers and young people in their early 20s are being targeted for the "cafe-style" Communion service, with music and video clips from the hit series, at St Paul's Church in Grangetown, Cardiff.
The Anglican church was used as a location two years ago for an episode of the series starring Christopher Eccleston as the ninth Doctor.
Fr…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2007My first published piece of writing on evolution and creationism was a review of Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God for Skeptic magazine, published in 2000. In light of my recent posts at this blog, you might find it hard to believe that I actually wrote the following:
Like Miller, I deplore the rhetorical excesses of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who would blur the line between methodological and philosophical naturalism. Though I would quibble with a few of his specific examples, the chapter Miller devotes to these excesses is one of the best in the book.
Needless to say…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2007In the comments to Jake's post from yesterday, Russell Blackford left a comment that perfectly summarizes my own views on Richard Dawkins and The God Delusion:
This is what I find obnoxious about atheists who want to attack Dawkins for writing a book like The God Delusion, which is not actually strident and angry at all, but careful, fair, and good-humoured. Dawkins is not beyond specific criticism (e.g., I think he underestimates the force of the problem of evil and perhaps overestimates the force of the ultimate 747 gambit ... and a few specific sentences in The God Delusion could perhaps…
neurophilosophy | September 13, 2007The word "zombie" usually brings to mind the creatures depicted in numerous horror films - the mindless, rotting "living dead" who shuffle with their arms stretched out in front of them, devouring the flesh of their victims.
Zombies feature widely in popular culture, but the idea of the zombie originates in the Vodun religion. Popularly known as voodoo, this religion has been misrepresented and sensationalized, particularly in Hollywood films, according to which its followers practice bizarre rituals involving voodoo dolls and cannibalism.
In reality, Vodun is a complex belief system…
jrosenhouse | September 12, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young weighs in with a lengthy essay on the subject of promoting atheism. The essay makes some interesting points, and is centered around a 1922 article by John Dewey in The New Republic. Sadly, Jake takes the Matt Nisbet line on this issue.
I have already left a lengthy comment over at Jake's blog indicating some points of disagreement with his essay. But there was one item I felt deserved a post of its own. Jake writes:
Further, embracing a big-tent approach will not prevent scientific or even atheistic values from taking over. While the majority of the…