religion
jrosenhouse | May 20, 2010I have now had a chance to read Elaine Howard Ecklund's new book Science vs. Relgion: What Scientists Really Think. It is worth reading, despite her annoying decision to include social scientists, but not mathematicians, in her definition of “scienitst.” I also did not care for her obvious preference for those scientists willing to talk sweetly about religion, but what can you do?
Most interesting to me were the statistics she gathered regarding the religious beliefs of scientists at major American research universities. The picture I had prior to reading this book was that scientists…
pharyngula | May 20, 2010It's that day when everyone should draw Mohammed. You can just do the traditional stick figure, or you can get fancy — I like this one, a kind of Mohammed transitional series in which you have to draw the line where blasphemy occurs.
I can't draw. The only thing I could think of was to sketch out this picture of a hybrid cow-pig.
It's Moo-ham-ed. Get it? OK, you're allowed to groan and close the page.
Would it add to the verisimilitude if I said he was mooing/squealing excitedly at the prospect of raping a 9 year old girl (not shown)? Sharp-eyed observers will also note that Moo-ham-ed is a…
oracknows | May 20, 2010Around this time last year, the major topic of this blog was the case of a young teen named Daniel Hauser. In fact, right around this time last year, this particular case was approaching its climax. Hauser, as you may recall, was the 13-year-old Minnesota boy diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma who refused chemotherapy. His stated reason was his religion, namely Nemenhah, a fake American Indian religion that his parents joined 18 years ago. However, I had my doubts that religion was the main reason why Hauser was refusing chemotherapy and his mother was supporting his decision to pursue "…
pharyngula | May 19, 2010Are the fundies imploding? Look at this summary of their own assessment of the status of the evangelical priesthood:
Another article reveals even more telling statistics based on a survey of 1,050 evangelical Pastors (note these are evangelical pastors not liberal pastors):
89% considered leaving the ministry at one time.
57% said they would leave if they had a better place to go—including secular work.
77% felt they did not have a good marriage!
75% felt they were unqualified and/or poorly trained by their seminaries to lead and manage the church or to counsel others. This left them…
pharyngula | May 19, 2010Karl Giberson, who I've bashed once or twice, has a fresh new pile of nonsense on the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne has already tackled it, but it pushes a few of my buttons, so I've got to say my piece, too.
To summarize the Giberson nonsense briefly, he claims that Intelligent Design creationism is not dead, but is thriving, and in order to defeat it, we need to shut the atheists up who are making people choose between gods and science. I disagree with every bit of it.
ID is not only dead, it was stillborn. No one believes in it; it is a sterile abstraction with no evidence that was cobbled…
pharyngula | May 18, 2010It's hard to believe, but Mother Teresa is getting her own US postage stamp. She was a horrible woman who practiced the Christian ideal of poverty as a virtue by doing her very best to keep as many people poor and miserable as possible — and I hate to see the post office promoting her delusional cult. I sure won't be buying any of them, but I just know that much of my incoming hate mail will be plastered with them after September.
Having a stamp is not enough for Bill Donohue, however. He is stamping his little foot and demanding that the Empire State Building be lit up in blue and white in…
pharyngula | May 17, 2010I'm glad someone occasionally looks into the other side of the net to see what they're talking about — I can't bear to read religious forums, myself. Here's why: take a look at what they're saying on BaptistBoard.
I believe women in politics have done a great disservice to the sovereignty and resolve of a our great Republic. Many issues that face our nation, from without and within, need to be decided from a place of strength instead of weakness. Women are gifted from God with a lot of skills that are good in the home, but not in the Government. They tend to base their decisions from a…
pharyngula | May 17, 2010In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were hitting them and pushing them back into the building, because they were trying to run out without putting their head coverings on first.
Now, in 2010, the religious ministry has given orders to the religious police to allow even male rescue workers to enter girls' schools in an emergency.
Wow. So it…
pharyngula | May 17, 2010A pregnant woman in a Phoenix hospital was in a dire state: she was suffering from severe pulmonary hypertension, a condition made much worse by the pregnancy, and was at risk of heart failure. The hospital did what had to be done, with the approval of the family: the 11-week-old fetus was aborted, and the life of the mother saved. This was routine, and I think there was no moral ambiguity at all in this situation: either the mother's life was saved and the fetus was destroyed, or both mother and fetus would die.
Except that this was in a Catholic hospital. One of the people on the ethics…
clock | May 16, 2010
I got this video from Orac's blog where an interesting comment thread is developing. This also goes against those who lament the "echo chambers" but those tend to be the same people who write HeSaidSheSaid articles every day - they live in a binary world where only "who wins the two-horse horserace" matters and anything more sophisticated than that is 'elitist' and to be ignored as 'outside of mainstream' which - the mainstream - they, the savvy Villagers with nice hairdos on TV, get to define.
pharyngula | May 16, 2010Half the people in the world commit this sin against god: they are born women.
It's an astounding thing that any women at all accept Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; these are profoundly misogynistic faiths. Throughout the Christian Bible, women are treated as chattel to be abused and misused, and uppity women are regarded as the worst of the lot, fit only to be slaughtered. There are parts of the Bible that read like snuff porn — but it's all OK, because it's the Bible, God's holy word, and if God is gonna have to choke a bitch, who are we to question it?
We can trace the attitude right back…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Talks About Doubt, Uncertainty and Religion, science, imagination, religion, god, doubt, uncertainty, beliefs, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman talks about the improbability of the existence of a god, and his thoughts about the mythologies that form the basis of religion.
pharyngula | May 14, 2010Yesterday, I mentioned this silly fellow Damon Linker, who complains that the New Atheists aren't sad enough about their godlessness. This seems to be the new gripe du jour; you can't be a serious atheist unless you're all broken up about the absence of god, and unless you tell all the believers how much you appreciate what their superstition brings to the world, and how now you're going to go home and cry because you have a god-shaped hole in your heart. It's deeply dishonest and stupid. If anybody tried to pull that nonsense on me in person they'd get a rude response that would reveal that…
pharyngula | May 13, 2010Please, please, all you critics of the "New Atheism": get some new arguments, or at least avoid the ones that are trivially ridiculed. Damon Linker is complaining about those darned New Atheists, prompted by the criticisms of Kevin Drum of a pretentious essay by David Hart (I also wrote a criticism of Hart; I've also criticized the dreary Mr Linker before).
Linker seems to be offended that Hart's superficial and poor argument was rejected; he calls the essay "powerful" — I found it ridiculous — and also claims, to my surprise, that Hart was atempting to show that Christianity was true. We…
pharyngula | May 13, 2010This essay on the accommodationists vs. the 'new atheists' gets off to a bad start, I'm afraid, and I had some concern it was going to be another of those fuzzy articles.
There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 "intelligent design" trial.
That's incorrect. The anti-evolutionists have not been defeated — they got smacked in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, and that's about it. The creationists are still thriving, and in some places (like Texas) getting even bolder and…
pharyngula | May 12, 2010The wingnuts had a party in DC! It was called May Day: A Cry to God for a Nation in Distress, and consisted of a small mob of prayerful crazies listening to people at the microphone beg God to force Hollywood to make more movies like Gibson's Passion, and by the way, make sure that hussy Dakota Fanning isn't in them. It's an odd way to help a nation in distress, by asking for more torture porn.
Alas, a Minnesotan was also there, and she embarrassed us with this little speech:
And father, we repent that we have not used godly wisdom when we have elected officials into elected positions in our…
pharyngula | May 11, 2010
Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, has been attacked while lecturing on free speech. He was not seriously harmed. There is a video clip showing the attack, the chanting spectators, and the police quelling the mob.
That's ugly. Muslims everywhere should be embarrassed, and should be repudiating the behavior of those thugs. Peaceful protest is one thing, but there is no offense in a cartoon that justifies leaping up and punching someone.
Here's something even uglier:
An al-Qaeda front organisation then offered $US100,000 ($A110,730) to anyone who murdered Vilks - with an…
gregladen | May 11, 2010Pope Benedict XVI has made the statement that the outrage and calls for action from outside the over the sexual abuse of children within the church is a for of "persecution of the Church." He further stated that the cause of that widespread sexual abuse of children that has been documented within the Catholic Church is caused by sin. For those of you who are not paying a lot of attention, or who prefer an appeasement strategy when it comes to El Popo, or who just don't know, let me spell that out for you: If the problem of regular sexual abuse of children by priests is caused by sin, then it…
cagapakis | May 11, 2010Unlike many of my colleagues, I'm not really interested in the whole "science vs. religion" thing, but I do want to point out the very thoughtful analysis of genetic engineering and synthetic biology by the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion, and Technology Project. On GM food, they write:
The official scientific and economic reports support the view of the 1999 Assembly, that GM is not a simple 'yes or no' issue and must be taken case-by-case, weighing up many different factors. Theologically, SRT has found no convincing reason to say it is a wrong act to transfer genes into a crop from…
pharyngula | May 10, 2010This is a poster from an Egyptian ad to encourage women to cover themselves to prevent rape.
I don't know who should feel more offended, the women who are compared to a piece of candy or the men who are compared to flies. I do know who should feel more threatened, though: the women who are seeing men promoted as being unable to resist temptation.