religion
pharyngula | March 4, 2011I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!
Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That's one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.
Of course, it's only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let's give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.
It is exactly right. I've had the experience of putting…
pharyngula | February 28, 2011You can't possibly be surprised at this turn of events anymore.
The Reverend Grant Storms, a Christian fundamentalist pastor known for his campaigns against New Orleans' gay Southern Decadence festival, has been arrested for masturbating in a public park in front of children.
But wait! Let's let Pastor Storms tell his side of the story.
Storms told deputies that he was merely having lunch at Lafreniere Park, 3000 Downs Blvd., in his van when he decided to relieve himself using a bottle instead of using the restroom, an incident report said.
Stay classy, Grant, stay classy.
jrosenhouse | February 27, 2011I am arriving very late to the party on this one, but I would like to reply to one portion of this post from Jean Kazez. She writes:
Likewise, I don't see much point in discussing religion/science incompatibility in the public square. We can all agree on very plain and simple things--if science, then no creation in 6 days. If science, then no dinosaurs living at the same time as humans. Lots of limited incompatibilities like that are indisputable. But the more sweeping assertion that science rules out most of religion is complicated and technical (what is science? what is religion?…
pharyngula | February 27, 2011As we've learned watching the Rethuglicans lately, the assault on abortion rights is only the first step — they also want to shut down the wickedness that is contraception. But they're not going to stop there, oh no! If you want a peek at our theocratic future, read this incredibly long-winded disquisition on exactly what you are allowed to do even in the marriage bed. Everything is forbidden, except vaginal penetration and the ol' in-out. You aren't allowed to even do these things as foreplay, culminating in procreative intercourse.
The expression 'that use which is against nature' refers to…
pharyngula | February 26, 2011This country recently managed to pass a rather lame compromise on health care: there is now a mandate that requires everyone to have health insurance, even if it is from a hodge-podge of insurance companies, with the intent of fairly distributing the expense. Unfortunately, one group got singled out with an exception from this requirement. Can you guess who?
Yep, Christians.
Did you know that if you are a Christian you are exempt from the taxes, penalties and regulations imposed by the recently enacted health insurance law?
All you have to do is to affirm a statement of Christian beliefs…
pharyngula | February 25, 2011Not that I have much expectation that these charges will be acted upon, but a couple of German lawyers have filed charges against Ratzinger in the International Criminal Court. My sense of justice rises in terrible joy at the accusation, though.
Their charges concern "three worldwide crimes which until now have not been denounced . . . (as) the traditional reverence toward 'ecclesiastical authority' has clouded the sense of right and wrong".
They claim the Pope "is responsible for the preservation and leadership of a worldwide totalitarian regime of coercion which subjugates its members…
pharyngula | February 25, 2011There have been some recent controversies in how Catholic hospitals handle ethics — most prominently in the case of the Phoenix hospital that carried out an abortion to save a woman, and got rebuked by the church for it. The Catholic church faces an ethical challenge here, and guess what their response has been: not to change their dangerous and amoral doctrines, but to emphasize emphatically that the church dogma must be followed.
The flaw is in the workers, who must be better indoctrinated in Catholicism. How that would help a dying pregnant woman is a mystery the church will not explore.…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Here is the last of Anthony Horvath's ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn't much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It's short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It's nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.
The blurb for the book declares that "these stories draw from what is known publicly to imagine what would happen in this most private of moments." Yet there is essentially nothing…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011Polk County, Florida has a public school board that meets in the county school district auditorium to discuss the secular, governmental functions of running the public schools. Despite their purpose, though, they insist on opening with a prayer, a practice which has encountered some criticism and which they have dealt with evasively and dishonestly.
Earlier this month, the School Board began a new practice in which the board placed a disclaimer on the meeting agenda and held a prayer before the meeting officially began.
The policy change came after a letter from the Freedom From Religion…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011
Anthony Horvath is responding to my reviews with some flustery bluster. He's insisting that you must buy his stories in order to have any credibility in questioning them, which is nonsense: I'm giving the gist of his fairy tales, and he could, for instance, clarify and expand on the themes of his story, explain what I've got wrong and where I'm actually seeing the True Christian™ message, but instead he chooses to run away and hide while flogging people to buy his stories.
He does throw out a hilarious complaint cloaked in his refusal to address anything I've written, like this:
As before, I…
pharyngula | February 22, 2011I'm reviewing a series of three fundagelical short stories about famous people entering a Christian afterlife. Anthony Horvath is going to pretend that his dogma is true, and in the first story place the dead Teresa in his version of heaven to play out events as his puppet. It's not a pretty story at all; the main lesson I took away from it is that Horvath is a proponent of a vile doctrine that cheapens our lives and turns an imaginary afterlife into an exercise in servility. Later in this series, he's going to send Richard Dawkins to hell in an explicit and horrible way, but it says…
oracknows | February 22, 2011Over the years, I've said it many times. Competent adults have the right (or should have the right) to choose or refuse any medical treatment they wish for any reason. It doesn't matter how ridiculous the reason might be. If a competent adult believes that magic water (i.e., homeopathy) can cure him of cancer, we can try to persuade him that such a view is at odds with reality, but in the end personal autonomy and the right to self-determination mean that there will be a few people who will refuse effective medication in favor of quackery. A major force in motivating people to choose…
pharyngula | February 21, 2011How tasteless, tacky, and dishonest can a Christian get? This will do: selling fictional fantasies about what will happen to people when they're dead.
What's going on? Are all universally saved, after all? Did Richard Dawkins become a Christian? Did he... remain an atheist, and STILL go to heaven? Such questions leap to mind when presented with title of the newest short story collection released by author and Christian apologist Anthony Horvath: "Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew, and Mother Teresa Go to Heaven."
Written over a span of two years, these three short stories detail what happens as…
gregladen | February 21, 2011A child who is killed by an abusive parent is, in a sense, avenged by the law which seeks to identify, charge, try, convict, sentence and punish such a parent. Abuse might include something obvious like striking a child with a weapon, but it can also include starving the child to death or other forms of neglect, or failing to provide life-saving medical treatment. In other words, if your child is deathly ill and you don't take him or her to a medical facility or otherwise seek treatment, and the child dies, you are at fault.
Unless, of course, you are all religious and shit.
If your…
pharyngula | February 21, 2011Here's some more sophisticated theology for you. "Prayer Warriors" in Colorado Springs are hopping into helicopters to fly over the city and deliver prayers from on high. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's the same urge I had when hiking in the mountains in the Rockies and Cascades, and every time I stood at the edge of a high cliff, I felt a temptation to unzip and sprinkle a little shower on the objects below me. I resisted, but gullible Christians apparently lack self control.
pharyngula | February 18, 2011McGrath is back, straining to refute atheism. This time, his argument is with the claim that faith is blind. Is not, he says! And then proceeds to muddle together faith with belief with morality with science until he's got a nice incoherent stew, at which time he points to a few floaty bits in the otherwise unresolvable mess and calls that support for his superstitions. It's pathetic and unconvincing, except perhaps to someone who wants to believe anyway.
Here's an example of where his whole argument falls to pieces. He wants to claim that faith is simply a reasonable extrapolation from…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011This week's Nature has a substantial and fairly even-handed article on the unease Templeton funding causes. Jerry Coyne is prominently featured, so you know it isn't an entirely friendly review.
Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
They also quote scientists who found the…
gregladen | February 16, 2011How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and ... well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer,…
pharyngula | February 16, 2011It's a triumph of hope over reason, and that means the residents of the Kiribati Islands, an archipelago of tiny islands with an average altitude of 6.5 feet, are doomed. They've got faith, you know, but one thing they haven't got is any reason. NPR reports on their dire situation as the waters slowly rise and the climate changes:
"I'm not easily taken by global scientists prophesizing the future," says Teburoro Tito, the country's former president and now a member of Parliament.
Tito says he believes in the Biblical account of Noah's ark. In that story, after God devastates the world with…
jrosenhouse | February 14, 2011Sociologist Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College has been a hero of mine ever since he published (in 2008) an excellent book called Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. He studied Sweden and Denmark, where atheists predominate, and showed rather effectively that when religious demagogues wail about the pernicious moral effects of a society losing its faith they are just making stuff up.
So you can imagine my disappointment at reading this asinine essay over at HuffPo. It's a poor representative of a tiresome genre: An atheist lectures his flock…