religion
oracknows | September 13, 2010Regarding this whole skeptic thing, if there's one thing I've learned about pseudoscience and bizarre, unscientific beliefs, it's that, just when I think I've seen it all, the world slaps me in the face (facepalm, to be precise) to show me that I haven't seen it all after all. Such was what happened when a truly bizarre conference started popping up around the skeptical blogosphere at blogs like Pharyngula, Unreasonable Faith, and Starts With A Bang. If you think that one thing that kooks can't deny is that the earth revolves around the sun, you'd be wrong. Witness the Galileo Was Wrong…
gregladen | September 13, 2010Justin Carl Moose used his Facebook page to advocate violence against health care clinics where abortions are preformed, and urged violent attacks on people who work in such facilities. But, just like if you get stone drunk and photographs of you half naked wearing a lampshade on your head in some dive appear on Facebook then you can get in trouble, Moose's Facebook activities have come back to haunt him. A secret undercover FBI agent approached Moose and asked for help building a bomb to blow up a clinic. Moose complied, and is now under arrest for conspiracy. I wonder how many other…
pharyngula | September 11, 2010That's the usual excuse we here from defenders of Catholicism — that the accusations of pedophilia and sexual abuse are only the work of a tiny minority of rotten people. I can accept that it's a small minority that are the actual perpetrators, but the culture of the church protects its own…and the privileged, special, precious people aren't the congregation, it's the priesthood.
Belgium has plumbed the depths of its own local apple barrel, and made a horrifying discovery.
"We can say that no congregation escapes sexual abuse of minors by one or several of its members," the commission…
gregladen | September 10, 2010Everyone who went out and purchaced Islamic Holy Books for the big burning on September 11th needs to just take it down a notch, put the Qurans on the book shelf next to the Bhagavad Gita and that copy of Catcher in the Rye you've always planed to read and switch to plan B for celebrating the defeat of Western Culture by the Mossleman bin Laden. (No relation.) Because the nutjob in Florida who caused all this fuss has backed down.
According to "Reverend" Terry Jones, the Islamic Center Rec/Mosque to have been built at Ground Zero will not be built on that site, and according to Jones, these…
pharyngula | September 9, 2010The Catholic church has announced a few requirements for the papal visit to the UK:
The 100,000 Roman Catholics expected to attend the pope's open-air "great mass" in Glasgow have been urged by their cardinal to endure the "sacrifices" the event will involve. Tens of thousands of pilgrims in Glasgow will have to get to next Thursday's event at Bellahouston Park on public transport after their private coaches were cancelled.
Umbrellas have been banned, there will be no seating provided, and pilgrims will have to stay in the park for at least five hours on security grounds.
…
"At the great…
jrosenhouse | September 9, 2010Over at Huffington Post, Denis Alexander hawks his new book Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Darwin, coedited by Ronald Numbers. It features an essay by Alister McGrath entitled, “Evolutionary Biology in Recent Atheist Apologetics.” McGrath, if you are unfamiliar with him, is a Christian apologist whose most recent book is a defense of the notion of heresy. It features a foreword from Rick Warren, who writes, "We know that truth is eternal and unchanging. If it's true, it's not new.” Charming. Somehow McGrath is not someone I trust to lecture me about the perils of ideology.…
gregladen | September 9, 2010"Maybe Hawking should leave God alone," claims Marcelo Gleiser.
Poor god. Getting beat up by a guy in a wheel chair.
Gleisser essentially argues that Hawking can't make the claims he makes about the irrelevance of god in an origin physics. Yet, Gleisser freely implies the possibility of god-like entities in discussing on how it all started. So, the way it works is like this: If you agree with Gleisser, you can use the same kinds of arguments he uses. If you disagree with Gleisser, you should, well, shut up and stuff.
If I was Hawking, and Gleisser was in the vicinity, I'd double…
pharyngula | September 9, 2010You know, I'm something of an expert in the public desecration of sacred objects, and I'm seeing the same madness going on right now with Terry Jones and his plan to burn copies of the Koran that I saw in the response to throwing a cracker in the trash — only amplified to a ludicrous degree. People just aren't getting it; they're so blinded by an inappropriate attachment to magic relics that they're missing the real issues.
I publicly destroyed a communion wafer once (OK, a few times). There was a simple reason for it: a few Catholics had responded hysterically to a student who didn't swallow…
pharyngula | September 8, 2010It has become quite amusing to watch the Defenders of the Faith reach for increasingly more hysterical phrasing to describe what the Gnu Atheists are doing. I thought we were writing and talking, but according to William Oddie, we're carrying out a distressing onslaught.
The atheists' utter loathing, all the same, is at times a little frightening in its sheer vicious irrationality. These people are in the grip of a barely restrained hysteria. Take the current issue of the New Humanist, subtitle: "Ideas for godless people"; this issue gives a good idea of what it must be like being godless,…
pharyngula | September 8, 2010Universities are supposed to be places where students are free to think and argue…but too often, if a student says something that contradicts the religious dogma of the institution, it's an excuse to be censored. Here's an example: a Mormon student at BYU wrote a letter for the school newspaper criticizing the LDS position on gay rights while still supporting Mormonism as a religious belief.
It is time for LDS supporters of Prop 8 to be honest about their reasons for supporting the amendment. It's not about adoption rights, or the first amendment, or tradition. These arguments were not found…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2010As part of my research for my book on evolution and creationism, I have been reading a lot of books and articles about how to read the Bible. From this reading I have learned a great deal, but I also find certain things a bit puzzling.
For example, consider the book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally, by Marcus Borg, published in 2001. According to the back of the book, Borg is a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University.
For obvious reasons I was especially interested in what Borg had to say about Genesis. Early in…
pharyngula | September 6, 2010You can now download the latest issue of Awake, the Jehovah's Witness's strange little magazine. The theme of this issue is those marching militant atheists, so it's a little bit personal.
Unfortunately, I was only able to read as far as the second sentence before I was blinded by the irony.
A new group of atheists has arisen in society. Called the new atheists, they are not content to keep their views to themselves.
That's right. The door-knockin', rabidly proselytizing cult is rebuking atheists for not keeping their views to themselves.
I guess that's fair. Twice now I've watched in…
pharyngula | September 6, 2010No, no, no. This is doing it all wrong. A young man in Valencia received a communion wafer at Mass, took it out of his mouth, and broke it in front of the priest (google translation), and then a scene from the Three Stooges erupted, with slapping and kicking and random cartoon violence in which no one was hurt, except for their dignity.
While I applaud the young man's irreverence, by making it a scene in a church he was making a serious error, for two reasons.
People have a right to do whatever silly, harmless rituals they want. Start disrupting church services, and next thing you know,…
pharyngula | September 3, 2010There is a wonderful program in place at a bible camp in Massachusetts: the children get phone calls…from God. He tells the kids to proselytize for him, to be just like Jesus, and if they're really, really good, that he'll swoop in some day on his magic sleigh and harvest their souls to bring to heaven with him (OK, that last bit is an extrapolation). I like this plan, though. It sets the kids up with concrete expectations that will be shattered later, and then there's always the wonderful day when Mommy and Daddy explain that that really wasn't God, it was just Pastor Greg pretending to be…
pharyngula | August 30, 2010Oh, my. Tony Blair seems to have declared war against us.
"We face an aggressive secular attack from without. We face the threat of extremism from within."
Arguing that there was "no hope" from atheists who scorn God, he said the best way to confront the secularist agenda was for all faiths to unite against it.
He said: "Those who scorn God and those who do violence in God's name, both represent views of religion. But both offer no hope for faith in the twenty first century."
The spectacle of these pious phonies flailing against the secular agenda could be worth a giggle. "Down with…
pharyngula | August 30, 2010Oh, no. Atheists are the arrogant ones, so how can this Irish Catholic write such pretentious nonsense?
Religion unleashes a boundless curiosity in us that elsewhere is afraid to reveal itself for fear of appearing naive.
Yeah, tell that to Galileo, Simplicio.
I guess freethinkers must lack that boundless curiosity — no godless questioners at the forefront of science, then. It's also a strange sentiment to express in an article by a writer attending a Catholic meeting who asks no questions, reports no answers, and has nothing to offer except to cavil against all those non-believers who fail…
gregladen | August 29, 2010The statement is not a lot different than before, and it is still one I agree with:
... CFI is committed to the position that reason and science, not faith, are needed to address and resolve humanity's problems. All religions share a fundamental flaw: they reflect a mistaken understanding of reality. On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere.
source
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oracknows | August 29, 2010Yesterday, I expressed my displeasure over a truly idiotic press release by the Center for Inquiry over the "Ground Zero mosque" entitled The Center for Inquiry Urges That Ground Zero Be Kept Religion-Free. I happen to know that a lot of supporters of CFI were very unhappy about the press release as well, because apparently the president of CFI, Ron Lindsay, is feeling the heat. Because I wrote to him complaining, I received the following mass response:
Thank you for providing us with your comments concerning the recent press release issued by the Center for Inquiry on the Ground Zero…
The Center For Inquiry on the "Ground Zero mosque": Incompetent satire or abandonment of principles?
oracknows | August 28, 2010I hadn't planned on blogging at all today, much about on this particular topic. As some of you may have noticed, I'm trying to cut back on the blog habit, particularly on the weekends. Gone are the days when I'd foolishly try to emulate P.Z. Myers and have several posts up in a day; lately most days there is only one post up. Moreover, over the years, I've drifted away from writing about religion, except when it explicitly intersects with science, in particular medical science. In fact, the whole creationism/evolution kerfuffle, which I used to write about quite frequently, has become an…
gregladen | August 27, 2010The Center for Inquiry in Amherst NY has come out against the mosque. I've been pretty much avoiding this topic (not for any particularly good reason) other than to note the gagging teabaggers beating up on non-pink people that they assume are Kaaaaiiiiliiii terrorists or something.
But DuWayne Brayton posted a link, with commentary, to the CFI's statement on the mosque, and, I find myself respectfully disagreeing with DuWayne and going in with the CFI on this one.
Religion did this. The terrorist attack was a religious event. I don't want a mosque or a temple or a church or community…