religion
mikethemadbiologist | December 30, 2006You might not know this, but, due to pressure from Republicans beholden to batshit lunatic creationists theological conservatives, park rangers at the Grand Canyon are not allowed to discuss how old the Grand Canyon is. Really. I'm not making this up. From PEER:
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than…
mikethemadbiologist | December 29, 2006After reading this article about Democratic consultant Mara Vanderslice whose speciality is outreach to "theological conservatives", my head was about to explode. Thankfully, digby points out that courting social conservatives will make the Democratic Party, well, more conservative--or as a relative put it, "There's always a quid pro quo." And Jonathan Singer explodes the myth that it was social conservatives who elected Democrats (maybe if Vanderslice were a little less faith-based and a little more reality-based, she would understand what a control group is). But this statement by…
pharyngula | December 28, 2006Jason brings to my attention an eye-opening article on the bible-publishing business:
The popularization of the Bible entered a new phase in 2003, when Thomas Nelson created the BibleZine. Wayne Hastings described a meeting in which a young editor, who had conducted numerous focus groups and online surveys, presented the idea. “She brought in a variety of teen-girl magazines and threw them out on the table,” he recalled. “And then she threw a black bonded-leather Bible on the table and said, ‘Which would you rather read if you were sixteen years old?’ ” The result was “Revolve,” a New…
razib | December 27, 2006John Lynch has a post up about Richard Dawkins' lack of theological sophistication in The God Delusion. John is basically reiterating the point that Dawkins did not truly engage theological arguments for theism on a very high or sophisticated level. In fact, John levels the implicit charge that Dawkins' engagement of theology mirrors the level of good faith that Creationists render toward evolutionary science. Though I am a Neville Chamberlain atheist I am ambivalent about the theological tack. I've told Chris that I think that making a stand on theology isn't the best strategic choice,…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing:
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles--twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars.
In…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Commenter Sastra, replying to my previous post on this subject, offers what I thnk is a perfect characterization of much of the response to Dawkins' book:
From what I can tell, most of the sophisticated critics of Dawkins feel that he failed to address what I like to call the Argument from Generalized Vagueness. God is something so great, so other, so important and significant and unlike anything in our experience, that the only way we can bring it down to our level and understand it is by referring to it in veiled metaphors. It's all very vague, and encompasses all sorts of general things…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Yesterday I linked to P.Z. Myers discussion of a common anti-Dawkins meme. Specifically, that Dawkins' arguments in The God Delusion are hopelessly superficial, and that his failure to ponder seriously various works of academic theology render his book incomplete at best, and vapid at worst.
Richard Dawkins himself has weighed in on Myers' comments:
Congratulations to P Z Myers on this brilliant piece of satire. It applies not just to Allen Orr's review in NYRB, but to all those many reviews of TGD that complain of my lack of reading in theology. My own stock reply (“How many learned books…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 26, 2006, which means that more of you are likely to remember it. However, given the discussion from last week, I…
pharyngula | December 27, 2006They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett:
"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach . . . and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the…
terrasig | December 27, 2006A week after my colleague Orac posts on the conundrum of bringing religion into medicine, Michael Conlon reports on a nurse's book about how religious and cultural influences can compromise medical care:
Any nurse can walk into a bad situation. The one Luanne Linnard-Palmer can't forget came as she readied a little boy for a blood transfusion only to be told by his mother "You know you're damning his soul to hell!"
The child's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that rejects blood transfusions. Her son had sickle cell anemia and had become extremely weak.
"It blew me away," Linnard-Palmer…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006In my post about H. Allen Orr's review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, I commented that Orr begins with a standard anti-Dawkins argument: that he doesn't give adequate consideration to all of the internecine philosophical and theological disputes that surround religious questions. P. Z. Myers has the perfect reply to this argument:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he…
clock | December 24, 2006A cool animation:
"How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!" (under the fold):
Hat-tip: Ed Cone
mikethemadbiologist | December 22, 2006Pam at Pandagon describes two workers in Texas "who were fired after praying over another staff member's cubicle and anointing it with olive oil." Where had I heard about similar lunacy before? The Alito hearings. From the archives, where it was titled "At Least It's Not Crisco...:
...or K-Y jelly. From the Wall Street Journal via Salon:
The Wall Street Journal has just reported that three Christian ministers claim to have snuck into a Senate hearing room in order to anoint the chairs that will be used for Samuel Alito's confirmation hearing next week.
"We did adequately apply oil to all…
jrosenhouse | December 22, 2006Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origin of Belief. Actually, though, Orr says almost nothing about those latter two books.
Orr begins by describing his admiration for much of Dawkins' previous work. (He describes The Selfish Gene as the best work of popular science ever written).…
clock | December 22, 2006So, why do Creationists and other quacks try so hard to sound all 'scienc-y'? (June 15, 2005)
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Check this guy out - Jim Pinkoski - in the posts AND in the comments here, here and here.
OK, he's a creationist, but he is not even trying to be consistently within ONE version of creationism. He freely switches between YEC and OEC and IDC and when asked ONLY for internal logical consistency, not even evidence, he starts using all caps and bold and calls everyone stupid and liars and exhibits all symptoms of a persecution complex. What gives? He appears…
mikethemadbiologist | December 21, 2006Well, the Republicans aren't in charge of Congress anymore, but they still can bring the crazy. Nitpicker, in decrying Rep. Virgil Goode's disgusting anti-Muslim bigotry, links to this piece about "the Family", which is essentially a far-right Christianist cult. God save us from those who believe so fervently in him.
clock | December 20, 2006Somehow I feel that I've been tagged by Janet for this meme, because it is public that we celebrate Hannukkah. But we really make it low-key, family-only, and have only been doing it for about a dozen years so far. Actually, this is the first time that we had guests for the first night.
1. Latkes or Sufganiyot?
Latkes. Mrs.Coturnix is a superb Latke-Meister.
2. Multi-colored candles or blue-and-white?
Coturnix Jr. lights the blue-and-white candles, Coturnietta lights the multicolored.
3. Do you place the Hanukiah by the window or away from the window?
In this house, away from the window…
oracknows | December 19, 2006
Here's a great idea:
I was staying in a hotel in New York earlier this year, and I noticed that as well as the usual Gideon's bible, there was also a copy of the Quran. So that got me thinking - why limit the principle to religious books, why not get some science in there too?
So, I've decided that from now on, whenever I stay in a hotel room, I'm going to leave behind a copy of ... The Origin of Species...
And now ... I'd like to call on everyone who reads this to do the same thing - next time you stay in a hotel, leave behind a copy of this seminal work. After all - what's the cost of one…
clock | December 19, 2006I know you know this, but it is worth repeating every now and then (May 18, 2005):
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Some interesting statistics, via Jane:
Some statistics:
* About 92 percent of American own at least one copy of the Bible.
* The average household has 3 copies.
* About 67 percent of Americans say that the Bible holds the answers to the basic questions of life.
* The Bible is the world's all-time best seller.
* At least 20 million copies are sold each year.
* Gideon International annually distributes more than 45 million copies.
Biblical knowledge (Biblical…