religion
oracknows | March 20, 2011Well, well, well, well.
Last week, I wrote one of my usual patented bits of insolence directed at "America's doctor," Dr. Mehmet Oz. What prompted my irritation was a recent episode in which Dr. Oz featured psychic scammer John Edward, the self-proclaimed "psychic" who claims to be able to speak with the dead. In actuality, Edward is nothing more than a mediocre cold reader, but he's parlayed his skills into a lucrative career as host of his own TV show (Crossing Over With John Edward, which ran for several years back in the 1990s and early 2000s), author, and touring psychic medium. His…
pharyngula | March 19, 2011I concur with Ophelia Benson: "interfaith" is a code word for the religious clubhouse. It's used to exclude secularism and promote a unity of faith, any faith, where it doesn't matter what BS you believe, as long as you really, really believe. I think we ought to rename the ideology of all those people who cheerfully and indiscriminately embrace every faith without regard for content as "tinkerbellism".
That our government is embracing all faiths is just as much a violation of the separation of church and state as if they were to declare Episcopalianism as the state religion…its only…
pharyngula | March 18, 2011Jennifer Fulwiler is an ex-atheist, she says, and is now a Catholic. With her deep knowledge of both Catholicism and atheism, she is writing a book about her conversion experience and has now posted a short guide to understanding atheists for her Catholic fellows. Oh, did I say deep knowledge? My error, I meant to say "bubble-headed delusions".
She lists five misconceptions Catholics have about atheists, and tries to explain how atheists really think. She gets one right.
First she argues against the idea that atheists feel like they're missing something in their life, which is one of the…
oracknows | March 18, 2011
Many are the times when I've pointed out that many "complementary and alternative medicine" CAM or "integrative medicine" (IM) modalities are very much more based on religion or mystical ideas akin to religion than on anything resembling science. I realize that my saying this is nothing new, but every so often I see something that reminds me of this concept to the point that, self-important logorrheic blogger that I am, I can't resist commenting, particularly when I'm amused by the story. This particular story is amusing, to me at least.
You see, it's about what happens when one religion…
pharyngula | March 17, 2011You know the Catholic church just wants to do good. That's why North Dakota bishops (the most enlightened kind!) issued a fatwah against certain heinous so-called charities last week.
The two Roman Catholic bishops in North Dakota issued guidelines last week naming several well-known, and in some cases, church-related, organizations they say Catholics should not support, with money or volunteer work.
Bishop Samuel Aquila of the Fargo diocese and Bishop Paul Zipfel of the Bismarck diocese, released a joint document "Guidelines on Charitable Giving," on Ash Wednesday, March 9.
You may be…
pharyngula | March 17, 2011Martin Nowak has written a peculiar paper, recently published in Nature, in which he basically dismisses the entire concept of inclusive fitness and instead promotes a kind of group selectionist model. It's an "analysis" paper, and so it's rather weak on the evidence, but it also seems mostly committed to trashing the idea that inclusive fitness models are the whole of selection theory, which is a bit weird since no one argues that. Jerry Coyne and others will be publishing a critique next week, which should be fun.
I would like to draw your attention to a different kind of critique, though.…
jrosenhouse | March 16, 2011My last post has provoked a few replies. Especially the part about the problem of evil.
In my review of the new book by Giberson and Collins I was critical of their treatment of the problem. Michael Ruse, always classy, opens his response thusly:
Given that they are both committed Christians, as well as totally convinced that modern science is essentially right and good, the book is intended to defend Christianity against the critics who argue that science and religion are incompatible. Expectedly, it has got all of the junior New Atheists jumping with joyous ire, and all over the blogs…
stoat | March 16, 2011If you believe in a good, kind, etc God then [[problem of evil]] is to explain away the various obvious features of the world at variance with this belief. People always succeed in doing so, because they want to. A good trick with any form of human badness is to invoke Free Will: obviously God doesn't want you to be naughty, but he couldn't very well stop you, could he? But things like death-dealing earthquakes and the accompanying tsunamis are a bit more of a puzzler. However, in a rather daring and novel piece of theology I heard at Thought for the Day, 15 March 2011 the Revd Dr David…
pharyngula | March 16, 2011Scarcely do I put up a post arguing with Jerry Coyne, when I notice he has put up another with an example of evidence for a god from John Farrell. And lo, I did look, and verily, I did become depressed at how stupid and pathetic it was.
An archeologist working in Israel, discovers an ossuary from the NT era: the inscription on the stone in Aramaic reads: "Twice dead under Pilatus; Twice born of Yeshua in sure hope of resurrection." And the name corresponds to what in Greek would be Lazarus.
There are bones, so presumably with luck there may be some DNA that could be sequenced, but my main…
pharyngula | March 16, 2011Uh-oh. Jerry Coyne is calling me out and reopening our old argument about whether there could be evidence supporting a god. I said no, for a number of reasons, but I haven't convinced Coyne.
The statements by P.Z. and Zara seem to me more akin to prejudices than to fully reasoned positions. They are also, of course, bad for atheists, since they make us look close-minded, but I would never argue that we should hide what we really think because it makes it harder to persuade our opponents. On the positive side, a discussion like this one is really good for sharpening the mind.
He's also gone…
oracknows | March 15, 2011There are times when I'm wrong again and again.
No, I'm certainly not referring to my writings about vaccines which, as much as anti-vaccine loons like to claim they're wrong, are not. Nor am I referring to my writings about "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM). While it's possible that I've made mistakes here and there, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about being utterly and demonstrably wrong, something that, although it might happen in my real life with distressing frequency, is pretty rare on the blog.
Then came Dr. Oz.
You remember Dr.…
pharyngula | March 14, 2011You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn't the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists' fault.
Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis "God's warnings."
"I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people's atheism and materialism," an online Christian press…
pharyngula | March 13, 2011Minnesota's own pious Republican idiot (uh-oh, I repeated myself three times) has chastised Obama for his wickedness in a recent letter. His crimes are many. In a recent speech in Indonesia, he 1) referred to our national motto as E pluribus unum, not "In god we trust", 2) quoted a small part of the Declaration of Independence that did not include the word "Creator", and 3) mentioned that the US is unified under one flag without saying the magic phrase, "under god". Now I know that Bachmann is an amazing expert in American history, so I think Obama should give this letter all the attention it…
pharyngula | March 10, 2011Whoa — Richard Dawkins will be on Revelation TV — it looks the the British version of the Trinity Broadcast Network or similar jebus-walloping station — shortly, at 3:30 GMT. It will be streamed live on the net. I'm listening to a bit of their programming now, and it's ghastly, nauseating stuff.
I'm going to have to miss the interview, since I'll be teaching at that time. Maybe someone will tell us about it here.
pharyngula | March 10, 2011I lived in Philadelphia for seven years — it's a great city, and it's also an amazing ethnic patchwork. The residents are proud of the fact that the city's neighborhoods have so much character, although it also means that there is a bit more racial tension lurking in the city, and there are also extremes of poverty and wealth. One other thing you notice living there is that some neighborhoods are extraordinarily Catholic, and that Catholicism just soaks into the area.
I imagine that there's some deep anxiety in those neighborhoods right now: the Catholic church has just announced the…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011Today, you may notice people wandering about with strange smudgy marks on their foreheads. You may also know that today is my birthday. And you might be wondering if those two observations are related.
Yes, they are. I traditionally celebrate my birthday by punching god-botherers in the forehead. Some of those people may have been victims of my fists, and are badly bruised. Others, more cunning, put the marks on their heads so that when they see me coming, they can say, "Hey, you already got me!" Either way, the appropriate remark to individuals you see with these smudges is, "I'm sorry, I…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He's always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he's got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.
I've always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here's a short article that lays the math out for us.
According to them, Noah's great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., 'exactly' 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a…
pharyngula | March 8, 2011Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn't been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it's been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs' stupid article on the Huffington Post.
I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington's contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her…
pharyngula | March 7, 2011Religion is toxic. Here's a case in London in which both the acute and the chronic poison are in clear view: a Moslem scientist has been threatened with murder over his views on evolution. He tried to explain how Islam and evolution are compatible.
Masjid Tawhid is a prominent mosque which also runs one of the country's largest sharia courts, the Islamic Sharia Council. In January, Dr Hasan delivered a lecture there detailing why he felt the theory of evolution and Islam were compatible — a position that is not unusual among many Islamic scholars with scientific backgrounds. But the lecture…
gregladen | March 4, 2011Or worse. Below the fold. Not work safe. Don't be holding the kitty or you might squeeze it by accident:
UPDATE: My friend Aseem points out that this is the original on which the little christian kids base their song: