religion
pharyngula | July 9, 2007Now their insane denial of the legitimacy of modern psychiatry leads to an insane woman butchering her family. It's appalling: the parents were scientologists who refused to give anti-psychotic drugs to their daughter, and the end result is that they and another daughter are slaughtered.
This is where delusional, irrational, wishful thinking leads you — to a rejection of reality that has the potential to crash in on you in lethal ways.
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2007There have been several calls for Democrats to be more welcoming of 'people of faith.' Typically, these have been admonitions that Democrats need to stop acting like Democrats and more like conservative evangelicals (e.g., Mara Vanderslice; also here). However, it has never occurred to most of these 'people of faith' that perhaps they have a little house cleaning to do on their side of things. Well, one faithy person recognizes this (italics mine):
Sometime after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I made a remarkable discovery. I had gone to one of my local Christian bookstores to find a…
evolvingthoughts | July 9, 2007
A woman who stabbed her entire family, killing her father and teenage sister, in Sydney, turns out to be a psychotic. She had been diagnosed and prescribed drugs to control it. But her parent, Scientologists, disapproved and convinced her to stop them.
I feel enormously sorry for this poor woman. She was doing the right thing and her stupid parents' religion (that parses both ways, and rightly) interfered. One might say they brought it on themselves. Chalk up more deaths to this insane religion scam.
Reports here and here.
clock | July 9, 2007I had a great pleasure recently to be able to interview Senator - and now Democratic Presidential candidate - John Edwards for my blog. The interview was conducted by e-mail last week.
As I am at work and unable to moderate comments, the comment section is closed on this post, but will be open on the previous post (here) where I hope you will remain civil and stay on topic. You are also welcome to comment on this interview at several other places (e.g,. DailyKos, MyDD, TPMCafe, Science And Politics, Liberal Coalition, the Edwards campaign blog as well as, hopefully, your own blogs).
I…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
oracknows | July 5, 2007The other day, I wrote about how several of the suspects arrested in the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow were physicians or in training to be physicians. At the time, I expressed dismay at what I viewed to be a betrayal of the very basis of our profession, that we try to help people and make them better, not kill them. The post engendered a lot of discussion (and the expected amount of doctor-bashing based on my supposed naivete in stating that most physicians go into medicine to help people, a statement that I stand by).
Now, via Kevin, MD (who apparently got this by way of…
evolvingthoughts | July 4, 2007
Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts.
One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers.
Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…
oracknows | July 4, 2007Happy 4th of July to all my American readers!
For more serious ruminations about the 4th by yours truly, check out posts I've done on the topic before:
Fourth of July thoughts
One last fourth of July thought
In the meantime, I'll be rounding on my partners' patients all morning, as I drew the 4th of July as one of the holidays that I have to cover on call. I'll also be dreading tonight's fireworks display. Now don't get me wrong; I like a good fireworks display as much as the next guy. The problem is that our town's display is close enough to our house that the explosions reduce our…
pharyngula | July 3, 2007A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend's father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!
At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.
It's ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday…
oracknows | July 3, 2007One of the things that I found most disturbing about the recent failed bombing attempts in London and the car attack in Glasgow, aside from the terrorism and potential for huge losses of life, is this:
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) -- British police focused Tuesday on at least four physicians with roots outside Britain - including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket - in the investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London.
At least four of the eight suspects were identified as doctors from Iraq, Jordan and India. One of the doctors from India, 27-year-old…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2007tags: science, religion
You all know that scientists are less religious than the general population, but contrary to most people's assumptions, the reason for this has little to do with either the study of science or with peer pressures to conform.
"Our study data do not strongly support the idea that scientists simply drop their religious identities upon professional training, due to an inherent conflict between science and faith, or to institutional pressure to conform," said Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the study.
Basically, the…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2007In his post on atheism and civil rights, Ed Brayton takes me to task for my assertion that books like those written by Dawkins and Hitchens are not the cause of the public image problem faced by atheists. I had written:
Atheists don't face a public image problem because of the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. They face a public image problem because of the bigotry and ignorance of so many religious people. Not all religious people, certainly, as the strawman version of their arguments would have you believe. But a much higher percentage than people like Matthew care to admit.
Ed replies:…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2007Rereading my post from Friday, I notice that I never actually answered the question I posed in the title. Is atheism a civil rights issue?
Happily, other bloggers have stepped into the breach. Mike Dunford gets us started:
Atheists, unfortunately, do face a great deal of discrimination. Actually, I should rephrase that. The discrimination is not faced by all atheists. It's faced by those people who, for whatever reason, choose to publicly identify themselves as nonbelievers. For one set of examples, you need look no further than child custody cases. Volokh has a laundry list of appeals…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2007ScienceBlogling Chris, responding to comments on a post he wrote about what he views as misplaced blogging priorities, writes:
....we can talk about what I do outside of the blogosphere to promote the non-scientific causes that are important to me. And cutting off your response before it ushers from your snarky fingers, a person who writes 9-10 rants a day on their blog, often responding to long articles elsewhere in cyberspace, and who has a day job (especially one in academia) is not, I guarantee you, doing a damn thing offline to promote any of the causes I mentioned or any like them.…
clock | June 29, 2007July 1st through July 4th. Here are the detailed instructions how to participate.
pharyngula | June 29, 2007I guess y'all are having a drought, and your farmers are worried. I sympathize, and I do hope you get some good healthy summer storms soon. But, well, your governor is a dufus.
With the state's weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.
Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray "individually and in their houses of worship."
"Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady…
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2007My SciBling Matthew Nisbet says no. I think he really means it, since he put the title of his post in all caps.
Matthew writes:
One of the common claims that has been amplified by the Dawkins/Hitchens PR campaign is that “atheism is a civil rights issue.” (For an example, see the comments section of this recent post.)
This false spin serves as a very effective frame device for radicalizing a base of atheists into an ever more militant &dquo;us versus them” rhetoric, an interpretation that is used to justify sophomoric and polarizing attacks on religious Americans.
Indeed, “atheism is a…
pharyngula | June 27, 2007What an attractively symmetrical graph:
People who don't go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in "agree for the most part" category have since gotten smaller.
nisbetmc | June 26, 2007The Barna Group maintains some of the best data tracking the consumer and opinion market for religious Americans, especially among Evangelicals. Though not an independent survey organization like Pew, over the years, I have found that their poll data is relatively consistent with poll findings from other organizations. In fact, often Barna has the most precise measures when it comes to segmenting the born-again Christian community across its diversity of doctrinal beliefs and group affiliations.
So yesterday, when Barna released a survey on American views of poverty and their personal…
pharyngula | June 25, 2007The operation was a success. Later, the duck, with his new human brain, went on to become the leader of a great flock. Irwin, however, was ostracized by his friends and family and eventually just wandered south.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He's afraid we're going to put a human brain in a rodent's head. No, really — it's not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals "before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie." Now, seriously, his worry isn't that mice…