religion
oracknows | June 25, 2007Longtime readers of this blog may recall Pat Sullivan, Jr. He first popped up as a commenter here two years ago, when I first dove into applying skepticism and critical thinking to the pseudoscientific contention that vaccines in general or the thimerosal preservatives in vaccines cause autism. He's a true believer in the mercury militia and, even to this day, posts on his blog about the unsupported belief that vaccines cause autism somehow. Eventually, he "outed me"--and no doubt will do so again when he notices traffic coming in from this post (yawn). In any case, I haven't really thought…
pharyngula | June 24, 2007A "visionary" is recommending a new way of seeing "visions" of the Virgin Mary: stare directly into the sun. It works! Sort of.
Zackey reportedly advised a Gauteng woman, Amal Nassif (37), earlier to look at the sun, and if she had faith, the Virgin Mary would appear.
Nassif stared at the sun for about a minute and lost her sight.
"I can't seen anything. There is a large dark blind spot," she was quoted as saying.
I have a "vision," too — if you hit yourself in the head with a hammer really, really hard, you'll see Jesus! That makes about as much sense as Zackey's. Who, by the way, is…
pharyngula | June 24, 2007Here's your course of action. First, tune up your brain with Encephalon #25. Feeling smart now?
Next, browse The Carnival of the Godless #69. Now you're smart and aggressively, skeptically godless. Sharp as a knife.
Now you're ready to read Revere's Sunday Sermonette. You will be entertained. It's an account of a Georgia pastor wrestling with theodicy, and he refreshingly concludes that a) yes, god is screwing with you and making you suffer, and b) his explanation is that god is making sure you don't forget him. God is a petty tyrant who torments you to remind you that he exists.
You should…
mikethemadbiologist | June 24, 2007Scott LeMieux exposes the illogic of Melinda Henneberger's NY Times op-ed about abortion and Democrats. What I can't figure out is what does Henneberger want?
Once again, we have a Democratic concern troll who fails to see even the basic contours of the landscape:
Do you want abortion to be legal and safe, or illegal and unsafe?
That is the issue. Unfortunately, there is no real compromise to be had*, and even if there were, it wouldn't matter to these 'moderate' [*cough*bullshit*cough*] voters. Sympathetic noises or compromises will not satisfy those voters Henneberger describes as…
pharyngula | June 23, 2007What is wrong with these people?
God Hates the World
Be sure to catch the cute little toddler's solo at the end. Tell me, is this child abuse yet?
pharyngula | June 23, 2007Why, this must be the smartest dog in the universe.
Her husband decided to ask their 4-year-old dog another question, the square root of 25. Micah tapped his paw five times.
To prove this wasn't a fluke, the couple and a friend tossed out more math than teachers during exam time. Micah consistently pawed the correct answers, appearing to solve such problems as square root division, finding the numerators and denominators of fractions, multiplying and dividing, even basic algebra.
"He can calculate problems given in English, Spanish, French and German," Cindy Tuten said.
I know how the dog…
razib | June 22, 2007Only on YouTube could a Dramatic Chipmunk eventually lead me to the vlog of two teen atheist girls engaging in a promotion of scientism.
razib | June 21, 2007U.S. troops form uneasy alliances in Iraq:
Instead, Al Qaeda quickly regained a sanctuary in the province and imposed its extremist interpretation of Islam. U.S. and Iraqi security forces scarcely venture into west Baqubah, where smoking is prohibited, as is the sale of women's clothing by men. Even placing a cucumber next to a tomato in the markets is forbidden because they have been gendered male and female.
Many people think they can introspect their way toward understanding how other human beings model the world around them. That's a human bias, we have an innate psychology and in many…
razib | June 21, 2007Greg Graffin & Will Provine report on the results of the Cornell Evolution Project in The American Scientist. Emerging out ot Graffin's Ph.D. work it is a survey of prominent evolutionary biologists (see the full list) in regards to their views about religion and science. Their conclusion is:
Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution, not because they occupy different, noncompeting magisteria, but because they see religion as a…
pharyngula | June 21, 2007Never underestimate the power of small groups of crazy people. All it takes is motivation, small-mindedness, and persistence, and any group can promote ignorance and limit people's choices.
A South Carolina library system has closed down its summer programs for young adults after receiving threats and allegations that it was trying to promote "witchcraft" and "drug use."
The Pickens County Library System's half-hour summer programs for middle and high school students were supposed to take a light-hearted look at the topics "Secrets and Spies: How to Keep a Secret by Writing in Code or Making…
pharyngula | June 20, 2007A 7-year old boy is traveling around the country, standing on street corners and preaching hellfire at passers-by (you can hear him in a recording, too). He's part of a caravan of Baptists making an expedition up to the land of the Yankees to tell us all we're going to hell.
Is this abuse? The poor kid is wasting time on the Bible and haranguing random people at the behest of his parents. Oh, excuse me, at the behest of God.
The evangelical Baptist couple nurtured his talents with Bible readings in the womb and bought Samuel his first guitar at age four, said his mother. They read the Bible…
oracknows | June 20, 2007I've done my fair share of ranting about Scientology, be it about Tom Cruise's aggressive and arrogant antipsychiatry nuttiness a couple of years ago or the very recent piece I wrote about the disturbing and idiotically conceived anti-psychiatry museum run by the Church of Scientology. The Church of Scientology is, of course, a target-rich environment, given the sheer nuttiness of it all. Indeed, there'd be nothing other than laughter from me if Scientology didn't push a rabid anti-psychiatry pseudoscience in the name of religion and if it didn't go after its critics with the tenacity of a…
nisbetmc | June 20, 2007Today I received the latest issue of Dartmouth Alumni magazine to discover inside an interesting poll of graduating seniors at my alma mater. Long branded a conservative campus--with notable right wing alumni from the 1980s including Dinesh D'Souza and Laura Ingraham--perception these days doesn't seem to fit the reality of the student body.
According to the survey, when asked "Do you believe in God?," 42% of those surveyed answered "No." When then asked "Have your religious views changed while you've been at Dartmouth?," 25% answered "Yes."
In terms of partisan identity, among seniors…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2007tags: Donald Rumsfeld, creationism museum, religion, science, streaming video
Three students attended the grand opening of the controversial creationism museum and interview people who agree with it as well as those who do not. This video did not take any side. Their intentions were to simply get people's opinions. [6:07]
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was "neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing". He had no idea of the results made possible by molecular genetic studies, naturally, as nobody did at that time, but it appears that now that it is capable of being known, it turns out to be worth the knowing. Who'd have thought?
[Updated to add links]
The Etruscans lived somewhat to the north of the Latins on the Italian peninsula, and also on Corsica. Their language is not identifiably related to any…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles.
Tara, from the scientists' perspective, gave a list of rules for science journalists. Her commentators broadly agreed, ranging from gentle to vociferous. Chris Mooney leapt to the defence of what is, after all, his profession (and one he's damned good at if his book is anything to judge by), and…
pharyngula | June 19, 2007It wasn't that long ago that we got to hear lots of wailing about how secular/liberal values led to the Virginia Tech massacre (although, to be fair, most of the wailing was of the "god works in mysterious ways" sort). We had Chuck Norris blaming the "secular progressive agenda".
Though one can point to Cho's own psychotic behavior and our graphic slasher media as potential contributors to his deplorable murder spree, we must also hesitate to consider how we as a society are possibly contributing to the growth of these academic killing fields. I believe those who wield the baton of the…
pharyngula | June 19, 2007Salman Rushdie has been awarded a knighthood—it's well deserved, I say, as he is an excellent writer—but some people have reacted insanely. (Warning: Irony rich environment ahead.)
The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.
"This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision," Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. "The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he…
oracknows | June 18, 2007Thanks, archy and PZ.
You just ruined my day.
Really. If you thought that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church was bad, you really ain't seen nothin' yet until you've checked out Paul Hill Days. The Phelpses may be evil in the way that they torment people in their moment of grief with their "God hates fags" hatred, but these people are violent killers in the name of God.
No matter what side of the abortion debate that you happen to come down on, surely you must find this paeon to the murderer Paul Hill as vile as I do. Here's just a taste:
On July 29th, 1994, Paul Hill boldly defended…