religion
stoat | September 23, 2010I don't, in general, read my fellow science blogs. Not because I hate them, you understand, but because they talk about other stuff. But I was lead to Inventing excuses for a Bible story, and getting them published in a science journal? and was immeadiately struck by (a) how strident it seemed, and (b) how backwards it all seemed. (a) I can excuse: I'm sure I seem the same fairly often, but hopefully not too often (b). Side note: I was "accused" recently of being tedious in my writing on wikipedia, at which I vigourously protested. But it became clear that she actually meant "tendentious"…
pharyngula | September 23, 2010Believers get another phenomenal reward: if they have student loans, they can all be forgiven by working for a non-profit, which includes most churches. I can approve of the idea of rewarding people with debt forgiveness if they dedicate themselves to charitable works, but most priests are more interested in spreading the useless noise of the gospel rather than helping real people, and most churches do not deserve their status as a charity — and if they do, they ought to open their books to the same level of scrutiny as a secular non-profit, and they typically don't.
Say, why don't we forgive…
pharyngula | September 23, 2010How can you simultaneously be such leaders of advancing secularism and pandering cowards to the demands of religion? The police have arrested 6 people who posted a video of a Koran-burning. They did not break into a mosque and steal somebody else's book, they had their own copy and destroyed it … they did nothing illegal. But they're still arrested, and the police are making excuses.
In a joint statement, Northumbria Police and Gateshead Council said: "The kind of behaviour displayed in this video is not representative of our community as a whole.
Our community is one of mutual respect and we…
gregladen | September 23, 2010Andrew Brown has written a blog post about the atheist rally in England at which Dawkins gave his now famous speech. Brown quote mines Dawkins in a way that is utterly abominable. Dawkins, in his speech, discusses a somewhat complicated relationship between certain facts ... not too complicated but complicated enough that an ignoramus would misunderstand, as Brown had demonstrated. Here's what Dawkins was saying, nice and slow:
1) Pro-pope interlocutors have stated that even if Adolph Hitler was baptized as a catholic and went to church and stuff, he really can't be counted as a catholic.…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2010Jerry Coyne has an important post up responding to this awful essay by Peter Doumit, posted at the BioLogos website. Doumit's essay has nuggets like this:
Divine revelation comes in two forms: the Word of God (including both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition) and the Work of God (including the natural, physical world and the laws that govern it). Both are equally valid forms of truth, as they stem from the same Source. And since truth can never contradict truth, a truth revealed in one cannot ever be in conflict with a truth revealed in the other. Once this is fundamentally understood,…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2010If you are looking for some popcorn reading, have a look at this post from John Farrell, over at HuffPo. He takes John West of the Discovery Institute to task for parroting ye olde “Darwin was a big, fat racist!” canard. Here's the conclusion:
So, what is one to make of these ceaseless ideological attacks on Charles Darwin? Apparently, having failed at the Dover Trial to get their revised "intelligent design" philosophy into public school science classes, the Discovery Institute now resorts to the only strategy they have left to undermine science and science education: smear the…
jrosenhouse | September 22, 2010Let's see to what my homeys have been up.
Richard Dawkins, that little rabble rouser, is rightly vexed by the respectful treatment the Pope has been receiving during his trip to England.
Addressing a crowd of roughly 15,000 people, Dawkins unleashed this:
Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.
He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell: and most concerned with…
pharyngula | September 22, 2010Something like, "The probability that a religious leader is a sex offender is directly proportional to the the virulence of his homophobia." It's happened again.
Two young men in Georgia said Tuesday that the pastor of a 33,000-person Baptist megachurch, Bishop Eddie L. Long, had repeatedly coerced them into having sex with him.
In two lawsuits filed in DeKalb County, the men said that Bishop Long, a prominent minister and television personality, had used his position as a spiritual counselor to take them on trips out of state and perform sexual acts on them.
It's gotten so I can't see…
oracknows | September 22, 2010I've expounded on the principle of crank magnetism. Basically, crank magnetism is the tendency of cranks not to mind the crankery of other cranks, even if the two forms of crankery are mutually exclusive. But it's more than that. It's the tendency of a single crank to be attracted to several forms of crankery. We've seen it in creationists who are also attracted to "alternative medicine," in anti-vaccine loons who are also attracted to alternative medicine and various conspiracy theories, including "9/11 Truth." I've seen it in Holocaust deniers who are also attracted to both "alternative"…
pharyngula | September 19, 2010That's a line from Richard Dawkins' fire-breathing speech at the papal protest, and it's a good one, except for the fact that the way the church is run, it might actually be the case.
Listen to the whole thing. It's excellent.
(via RDF)
pharyngula | September 19, 2010Since the pope has declared that the source of the Nazi evil was their atheism, we ought to be able to see that in their laws. Here are the guidelines for banned books in Nazi Germany. A few of them stand out.
Recall that many creationists claim that the horrors of the Holocaust were inspired by Charles Darwin? I don't quite understand, then, why ol' Chuck was on their list of banned authors, along with Ernst Haeckel.
6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (…
pharyngula | September 18, 2010A reader, who apparently did some work for Iran some years ago, now regularly gets missives from the Iranian embassy, and he forwarded this one to me. It's about Iran's official response to the proposed Koran burning in Florida.
I've checked out the email headers and can verify that at least it came from the purported source and there is an Iranian embassy at that address, but I can't vouch for the full legitimacy of the email.
Subject: Supreme Leader's Message
Dear Sir/Madam
Please find attached the text of the message of the Supreme Leader of the
Islamic Republic of Iran on the…
stoat | September 17, 2010 Bloody Pope. In a major speech reported all over the UK and probably around the world, the Pope whinged about religion being silenced [1]. Quite why he can't see the obvious problem in that is a mystery. Maybe self-awareness isn't his strong point. For extra fun, Ian Paisley denounces the Pope is worth a watch (really you want "The old Orange flute" in the Clancy / Makem version, but I can't find that). I must be getting old if I think that Ian Paisley makes sense.
Actually, despite the badge, I've no objection to him coming here, or even preaching. Nowt wrong with either. I just wish he…
gregladen | September 16, 2010
Summary of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII from Library Journal:
Relying on exclusive access to Vatican and Jesuit archives, an award-winning Roman Catholic journalist argues that through a 1933 Concordat with Hitler, Pope Pius XII facilitated the dictator's riseAand, ultimately, the Holocaust.
gregladen | September 16, 2010
Germany was a Christian nation long before the Nazi's came along in the 1920s. When the Nazi's took power in Germany, they were widely and generally supported. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, a majority of the German People (in a survey conducted by the US military) remained sympathetic to the Nazis and wished for a return of surviving Nazi leaders. Most Germans were either active members of the Nazi party or were sympathetic, and most were Christians, mainly Catholic. (There were a lot of non-Christian Germans at the beginning of this period, but the Christian Germans…
pharyngula | September 16, 2010The cartoonist who created the idea of a "Draw Mohammed Day" (and then retracted it after receiving many death threats) has had to drop out of sight because of continued threats to her life.
The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, "going ghost": moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program--…
pharyngula | September 16, 2010Well, what can we say? I thought Catholics were supposed to be scholarly, but Pope Ratzi babbled out a lot of ahistorical nonsense in his first speech on his UK tour.
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering…
gregladen | September 14, 2010Do you remember the controversy over nuns painting a naked guy as part of an advertising campaign? (Click here, not work safe if anyone is looking and they're a prude.) Well, apparently one thing led to another and one of the nuns got pregnant!
An ice cream company banned from using an advert displaying a pregnant nun has vowed to position similar posters in London in time for the Pope's visit.
Antonio Federici's advert showed a pregnant nun eating ice cream in a church, together with the strap line "immaculately conceived".
Brilliant!!! Details here at the BBC
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2010This comes from Jerry Korsmeyer's book Evolution and Eden: Balancing Original Sin and Contemporary Science, published in 1998. Korsmeyer is both a physicist and a theologian.
The tremendous amount of time it took for the simplest elements of matter to form themselves into stars, and to make the other elements, is consistent with the concepts of persuasive power and minimal creaturely response. A God with classical omnipotent power who could create anything at a word, would not produce the universe as we know it today. The messy aspects of evolution, the diversity of life bursting into all…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2010Via Jerry Coyne I have just come across this op-ed, from the USA Today, by Chris Mooney. The title: “Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide” My initial reaction: No it can't!
Mooney's argument is a standard one:
Across the Western world -- including the United States -- traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in “spirituality.” What's more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith.
Nowadays, unlike in prior…