religion
grrlscientist | April 17, 2010tags: What Is Scientology?, scientology, religion, cults, mind control, Thetan, silly, offbeat, beliefs, Xenu, L Ron Hubbard, television, Boston Legal, streaming video
James Spader explains Scientology in an episode of of the television program, Boston Legal.
gregladen | April 17, 2010Somebody is wrong on the Internet, and apparently, it's Greg Laden.
"...Greg. Don't get us wrong, we want to see the Pope (and priests) answer for what they've done,..."
We just want it done OUR way, and not your way. So please sit down and shut up.
Signed,
We'll, we're not going to say who we are, are we!
Check it out!
How do we know this web site is not sponsored by The Vatican?
gregladen | April 17, 2010In his first foreign trip since sex abuse scandals in Europe and the US broke, Pope Benedict has said the Church has been "wounded by its sins".
msnbc
The pope did not directly refer to the sex abuse or its cover-up, but it is clear that this is what he meant. And, clearly, the pope has it backwards. Th church is not wounded. The church is the wounder.
The President of Malta, however, has it right:
Maltese President George Abela made the first direct reference to the abuse crisis in his welcome speech at the airport.
The Republic of Malta, whose population is strongly Catholic, has no…
jrosenhouse | April 14, 2010Massimo Pigliucci thinks Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have naive views about science and the supernatural:
My problem with Dawkins and Coyne is different, but stems from the same root: their position on morality is indeed distinct from Harris' (at least Dawkins', I don't recall having read anything by Coyne on morality), but they insist in applying science to the supernatural, which is simply another form of the same malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having.
Jerry Coyne replies by explaining…
gregladen | April 14, 2010"Mr. Tangarone, a 17-year veteran of the Weston school system, claims that a program he wanted to teach about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln was rejected by the school administration because it involved teaching evolution -- the scientific theory that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor."
Mark Tangarone, who teaches third, fourth, and fifth grade students in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program at Weston Intermediate School, said he is retiring at the end of the current school year because of a clash with the school administration over the teaching of evolution…
pharyngula | April 13, 2010
The mayor of Malta is quite anxious to have a statue removed from a prominent place on the road from the airport, before the Pope arrives. He might be embarrassed, after all. That's the statue on the right; it's called "Colonna Mediterranea", and some people fear an obelisk is too phallic. Because, like everyone, when I see a giant green monument with multi-colored patches and a series of constrictions in it, I think of my penis.
The mayor shouldn't worry. The Pope and the Catholic Church have no shame.The statue might serve a useful purpose in reminding the Catholic entourage to get their…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010The horrible evidence of a Catholic cover-up keeps piling up in these various sex abuse cases…what's going on? Certain minds are certainly drifting towards conspiracy theories, evil attempts to bring down the church with a web of deception. And if that's the case, who is behind it all? Isn't it obvious? It must be…The Jews!!!
A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a "Zionist attack" was behind the criticism, considering how "powerful and refined" the criticism is.
Unfortunately, the article is accompanied by a photo of the Pope…and this doesn'…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I'm already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
Uh-oh.
I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it's the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It's simply not a problem. It can't even be a problem for a…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010I'm a shoo-in now. Although my mind may have just blown up.
In what may come as a surprise for some, Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president. "I'd rather have an honest atheist than a dishonest religious person," he said.
Don't worry. He didn't mean it. He's actually just doing some sneaky sniping at Mitt Romney. He continues with a clarification of what he really meant.
It's better to have a person who says, 'Look, I just don't believe, and that's where my honest position happens to be. I'm frankly more OK with that than a person who says, 'Oh, I am very much a…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010Michael Behe is a professor at Lehigh University. He's also a crank, marginalized and mocked and belittled in academia, and regarded as an ignorant ideologue. But he's still holding his position and he's still allowed to express himself. That's the principled position we hold in academia — he's allowed to speak even stupidly, and we're allowed to fire back.
That's not the way creationists work, though. Bruce Waltke is apparently a respected Old Testament scholar who used to work at the Reformed Theological Seminary. Not any more, though. He made the mistake of speaking in a BioLogos-sponsored…
pharyngula | April 12, 2010Father Maciel was one of the most notorious influential pedophiles in the Catholic hierarchy — he led an order, the Legion of Christ, which seems to have consisted of likely catamites for his pleasures. Predatory sexual habits don't seem to be his only legacy, though: follow the money.
Maciel left a trail of wreckage among his followers. Moreover, in a gilded irony for Benedict -- who prosecuted him despite pressure from Maciel's chief supporter, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006 -- Maciel left an ecclesiastical empire with which the church must now contend…
pharyngula | April 11, 2010The Connecticut legislature is considering a bill that would remove teh statute of limitations on child sex abuse cases. Guess who is opposing the bill. No, it's not NAMBLA. No, it's not a mob of sexually precocious toddlers. It's…the Catholic Church! You probably didn't see that one coming.
The reason they oppose it isn't some conservative legal principle. They spilled the beans already — it's the cost to the church.
The proposed change to the law would put "all Church institutions, including your parish, at risk," says the letter, which was signed by Connecticut's three Roman Catholic…
pharyngula | April 10, 2010
For many years, the NSF has been producing a biennial report on American attitudes (and many other statistics) about science called Science and Engineering Indicators. This year, as they have every year, they got the uncomfortable news that a majority of our compatriots reject human evolution and the Big Bang (that last one might have been partly because of the dumb way the question is phrased). What's different, though, is that for the first time the NSF has decided to omit the fact.
This is very strange. It is a serious problem in our educational system that so much of the public is vocal…
pharyngula | April 9, 2010We now have a smoking gun implicating Pope Ratzi in the cover-up of child abuse by priests.
Pope Benedict XVI has become embroiled in new revelations over child sexual abuse, over a letter he is said to have signed in 1985 before becoming pontiff.
Associated Press said it had obtained the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, resisting the defrocking of offending US priest Stephen Kiesle.
Cardinal Ratzinger said the "good of the universal Church" needed to be considered in defrocking, AP reported.
The good of the innocent seems to be much, much lower in the church's priorities.…
drorzel | April 9, 2010The National Science Board made a deeply regrettable decision to omit questions on evolution and the Big Bang from the Science and Engineering Indicators report for 2010. As you might expect, this has stirred up some controversy.
I wasn't surprised to learn this, as I had already noticed the omission a couple of months ago, when I updated the slides for my talk on public communication of science-- the figure showing survey data in the current talk doesn't include those questions, while the original version has them in there. I noticed it, and thought it was a little odd, but it had no effect…
jrosenhouse | April 8, 2010Peter Hess, Faith Project Director for the National Center for Science Education, argues that it is. He makes his case in this paper in the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy I learned of the article from this post over at Josh Rosenau's blog. Josh writes, “I think that Peter makes a strong case for ID being blasphemous.” My reaction is considerably less charitable.
We will come to the part about ID in a moment, but first we must address the following from Hess:
The reception of On the Origin of Species was not as the “warfare myth” portrayed it, with godless…
pharyngula | April 7, 2010The Bishop of Tenerife has voiced the latest excuse in the Catholic pedophilia scandals, and it is a predictable one. Women have heard this claim about rape over and over again: the victim was asking for it.
His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.
"There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what's more wanting it, and if you…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2010Every so often, Boston proposes raising the voluntary contributions it asks non-profit organizations to pay in lieu of property taxes (and other taxes), or instituting a consistent fee (right now, these contributions are negotiated with each institution). From The Boston Globe:
After 14 months, a mayoral task force has nearly completed its work examining the city's uneven system of individual agreements with such institutions, under which they voluntarily pay cash and provide services in lieu of property taxes. Some pay millions; others pay significantly less.
The city is pushing…
pharyngula | April 6, 2010Sorry, I'm going to have to ruin your breakfast again. The Stranger has a revealing article on pedophile priests — in particular, it focuses on the native populations of Alaska and Canada, which were used as a nice, obscure dumping ground for the very worst sexual predators the Catholic Church could provide. Small children were raped, entire villages are decimated by mental health trauma and suicides brought on by these monsters, and in one particularly appalling instance, a priest was caught raping a dying woman he was supposed to give the last rites. There's also an interview with a former…
pharyngula | April 6, 2010People send me stuff via email, and I browse through it all in the early morning, before I go offline and get to work, and that means I often wake up to some of the most disgusting, revolting, horrible messages: death threats, angry letters, and all kinds of interesting insults. But sometimes the worst comes from people who are on my side, like this message that really ruined my breakfast. It's from a Catholic anti-choice site, full of prim certainties about gods and babies and your reproductive organs, and it has this…this…letter to a young girl, written by Alice von Hildebrand.
Be prepared…