religion
oracknows | November 18, 2010In terms of promoting woo and quackery, there is one person who stands head and shoulders above all the rest. True, she doesn't just promote woo and quackery, but she does have a long list of dubious achievements in that realm, including but not limited to unleashing Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccine crusade plus Suzanne Somers and her "bioidentical hormone" and cancer quackeries on an unsuspecting American public. She's also subjected us to both Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz to the point of actually launching them on their own shows, promoting the mystcial mumbo-jumbo wish fulfillment that is The…
pharyngula | November 17, 2010Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study?
A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice.
What's "ground-breaking" about that? She's simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical…
pharyngula | November 15, 2010Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.
We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.
The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through,…
gregladen | November 14, 2010The question recently came up as to whether the term "Moslem" (as opposed to "Muslim") is considered insulting or somehow anti-Moslem*. More specifically, I made the claim (though I did not put it this way exactly at the time) that "Moslem" was a dogwhistle signifying teabagging anti-Obama racist scumpuppies.
I have since been told by various teabagging anti-Obama racist scumpuppies that I was wrong, but I was told this in such a way as to convince me that I must be right, even though I was going on gut feeling at the time.
Subsequently, I decided to do some research.
I separately entered…
pharyngula | November 13, 2010I've noticed that the bad practice of "he said, she said" journalism so common at the NY Times disappears when the subject is religion. There, instead, the standard role of the journalist becomes one of the credulous, unquestioning observer. It's evident in this new article on the revival of Catholic exorcisms, being discussed at a conference.
The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.
That's not a…
pharyngula | November 11, 2010A young woman, Asia Bibi, had a few words to say about Islam.
She said that "the Quran is fake and your prophet remained in bed for one month before his death because he had worms in his ears and mouth. He married Khadija just for money and after looting her kicked her out of the house," local police official Muhammad Ilyas told CNN.
Yes, the police got involved! More than involved: Asia Bibi has been sentenced to death for blasphemy.
She was also fined $1100.
Meanwhile, Walid Husayin has been writing an atheist blog, anonymously, in Palestine. He also mocked gods on Facebook. Now he's…
pharyngula | November 8, 2010The Pope has been touring Spain for the last few days (I wonder how much that has cost the country), trying to drum up some fervor for Catholicism in a country which was once the devout heartland of the faith, but is now reduced to being only nominally Catholic with just 15% of those calling themselves Catholic actually bothering to go to church. The revenue stream is drying up! Must get the suckers into the pews!
The most amusing episode in the tour is that a mob of gays and lesbians lined one of his parade routes to stage a kiss-in. Those militant radicals! Now they've resorted to…
pharyngula | November 5, 2010This is billed as a special news report: do angels exist?. I remember using "special" in exactly that way in grade school, too. Do Fox News reporters also ride the short bus to work?
I suppose I should be grateful that they brought in one skeptic to moderate it a bit, but otherwise…it's an excuse to quote the Bible a bunch of times and drag in some truly stupid people to testify. Joey Hipp ought to be in jail: after being told, he says, that his wife's spine was so mangled she might not be able to walk, he strolls up to her hospital bed, takes her hand, and makes her stand up…what kind of…
pharyngula | November 4, 2010You can't blame diverse religious groups for the presence of pedophiles and abusers. Pick any profession, teachers, doctors, scientists, dentists, whatever, and you'll find that there are some low number of criminals and psychopaths in their midst. But religion is somewhat unusual in that this seems to happen routinely.
The police suspect that the ultra-Orthodox community in which the resident lived knew of the alleged incidents but chose not to report them to the police or authorities.
In this case, it's a pedophile rabbi, but it's the same phenomenon we've been seeing with Catholic child-…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010Lauren Rose went to vote yesterday, wearing a t-shirt that read "liberal anti-theist". Her polling place was in a church (as is mine, as are a great many polling places across the country), and the poll-workers tried to get her to cover up, and when she refused, started loudly praying for her. All this at a polling place splattered with Republican campaign signs.
This is something that ought to change. Why are the polling places so dominated by churches? It's about the only time I ever have to enter one of those temples to hate and ignorance, and I'd rather not go at all, especially if they'…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010I've run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It's always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn't have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He's…
pharyngula | November 1, 2010You all know them: those awful loud little men who travel from campus to campus to preach apocalyptic hateful nonsense on the sidewalks, who rant and howl and condemn everyone who passes by as a sinner, damned to hell, and reserving a special hatred for women and gays. One of the virtues of being on a small campus in a remote rural part of my state is that we don't get many of those jerkwads here, but they infest the main campus and any other college that is more conveniently located.
What do we do about them? Tarring and feathering is illegal, and you can't just silence them because you don'…
pharyngula | October 30, 2010Ray Comfort is great at demeaning the whole of Christianity by doing all the stuff you imagine that not even a Christian would stoop to doing. His latest: targeting the elderly with cards to remind them of their mortality and imminent need of salvation.
The card, published by livingwatersnewzealand.com, was addressed to her by name and asked her to fill in the date and time of her death.
"Please don't forget to call me on the date you're going to die, then we can discuss your eternity," it says. However, the cards do not have a contact name or phone number printed on them.
"Hey, lady, you'…
pharyngula | October 29, 2010The Pope visited Scotland recently, to the great disappointment of all. They hired him at extravagant cost to do a magic act in a park, and all he did was wave his hands and mumble some Latin…and now they're getting the bill.
Scottish Catholics will be told this weekend that they have to make up an £800,000 cash shortfall for the cost of the papal visit.
Congregations were already asked in the run-up to the event in September to donate cash to an appeal target of £1.7 million to fund the historic first state visit by a pontiff.
Wow. The Scots got snookered.
oracknows | October 27, 2010On Monday I took a blogger by the name of Dr. Marya Zilberberg to task for firing a series of profoundly anti-scientific broadsides against science-based medicine (SBM). Although I did not attack Dr. Zilberberg personally, I was quite harsh in my characterization of her attacks, because, well, they were quite bad, full of straw men, special pleading, and the claim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, all topped off with a particularly egregious mischaracterization of what SBM is. Steve Novella also piled on, which was appropriate because Dr. Zilberberg's attacks were mainly…
pharyngula | October 25, 2010Michael Voris and his Vortex (of Insanity) have been mentioned here before, but now he's profiled on AP News. He really is nuts: he runs a YouTube channel and makes these strange videos where he demands that America become a Catholic dictatorship, all with a straight face.
Last time I mentioned him he got pricked by all our incredulous disgust with the Catholic Taliban, so he even made a clip all about us angry atheists, taking care not to link to any of our sites.
I hope this is representative of a tiny minority in the church, but I don't know…last time I crossed Catholicism I was exposed…
oracknows | October 24, 2010Wow. Just wow.
I realize that I haven't exactly been enamored of Richard Dawkins lately, at least not as much as I was, say, three or four years ago. Most of this came about gradually, although the final nail was driven into the proverbial coffin last fall, when Atheist Alliance International bestowed the Richard Dawkins Award to that quacktastic anti-vaccine and anti-science believer in woo and cancer quackery, Bill Maher, an atrocity that I likened to giving Jenny McCarthy an award for public health. Actually, the second to last nail was probably driven in back in May when Richard Dawkins…
pharyngula | October 18, 2010Mary MacKillop has been officially canonized as an Australian saint on the basis of two purported miracle cures — two women reportedly dying of cancer had spontaneous remissions after praying to her. Adele Horin puts them in context.
At the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world's worst famines.
Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in…
pharyngula | October 15, 2010It will be interesting to see if anyone squawks about this revelation: Army Chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy seems to have a wild and frolicsome sex life, while writing pious little books promoting Christianity. There's absolutely nothing suggesting male homosexuality in his online personal history, but isn't the occasional menage a trois or voyeurism session as sinful to an evangelical Christian?
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…