religion
grrlscientist | March 14, 2010tags: Tommy Davis, scientology, religion, cults, mind control, Thetan, silly, offbeat, beliefs, Xenu, L Ron Hubbard, television, BBC, CBS, streaming video
This is an interview with Tommy Davis, international Scientology spokesman, regarding the tragic death of Jett Travolta due to the medical neglect that their cult demands from its adherents, including Jett's parents. Davis is very scummy because he never gives a straight answer to any question asked. I also have embedded some other videos of Davis, where he reveals his less than angelic side.
Incidentally, Tommy Davis (the guy being…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2010tags: Sea Organization, Sea Org, Tommy Davis, scientology, religion, cults, mind control, Thetan, offbeat, beliefs, Xenu, L Ron Hubbard, television, Life after Scientology, ABC1, streaming video
Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.
They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep,…
gregladen | March 13, 2010Accoring to Aubrea Wagner, the 17 year old winner of the Christian World View essay contest in which students were asked to write an essay on the following theme:
Write a letter to Charles Darwin explaining why you believe biblical creationism is more plausible and reasonable than Darwin's theory of evolution.
Aubrea's essay is here in PDF form. The web site with other essays, the rules of the contest, and additional information is here.
I invite you to review this essay and comment on its veracity and validity.
Hat tip: Scott Lohman
tqa | March 11, 2010
In what seems to be a bit of a continuation on his earlier post (which I talked about yesterday), Larry Moran has another post up on the whole "is science ever compatible with religion" thing. At the end of the post, he asks a very good question - one that gets right at something that's very important:
So, what exactly are the limitations of science that we are supposed to adhere to? Earlier I criticized the concept of methodological naturalism because it seemed to rule out investigations of the paranormal as well as investigations of miracles. Robert Pennock, another philosopher, was…
pharyngula | March 11, 2010Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled "Catholic child abuse in proportion"; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. 'Only' 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren't that bad. Which means…
Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won't stop a steady…
cevans | March 10, 2010
A couple of years ago, I was poking around in a European art museum and came across an exhibit of exquisitely beautiful Eastern Orthodox religious paintings, "icons." Beyond being visually striking -- they have an austere, hieratic, distant quality -- they are also, I realized at the time, in a way, scientific.
Alright, I know, that's a wild statement. But hear me out.
A religious icon is more than a painting. It has a semiotic value that's highly codified, a language and practical purpose of its own that sets it apart from all the other representational art preceding our modern era of…
tqa | March 10, 2010
While reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, I came across something I hadn't heard of before - the "city hermits" that lived in medieval London. The concept struck me as odd - hermits (at least the non-crab variety) were something that I had always thought of as a purely wilderness phenomenon. A life of solitude? In a city? Really?
As I read on, I became less confused:
The figure of the hermit has another significance also; the stories of the city throughout the centuries have been filled with lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life…
pharyngula | March 9, 2010The Philippines has a problem with a rising number of AIDS cases every year, and members of the government have been promoting a sensible response: Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has sponsored a program that distributes free condoms, for instance. You can guess who opposes prophylactics, though.
"The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life," said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity "the only effective…
pharyngula | March 8, 2010There was this young child at a Catholic pre-school who was kicked out because his or her parents were lesbians. Now people are protesting, because that's not what Jesus would do (I won't quibble over their justifications — Jesus probably would have told the mob to stone the perverted parents to death — it's OK that they're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons). And the local newspaper runs a poll.
Is it valid to protest a Boulder Roman Catholic school's decision to bar the child of a lesbian couple from attending?
Yes
 43.98 %
No
 40.32 %
I'm not sure
 1.443 %
I don't care if…
pharyngula | March 7, 2010There are two very encouraging facts about this article on scientology in the NY Times.
One is that it got published. Once upon a time, newspapers and magazines hesitated to criticize scientology at all, because they'd immediately sic an army of lawyers on the publication, and any journalists involved face some fierce harassment. They probably still do that, but their triumphantly oppressive days are over.
The other is this fascinating disclosure.
The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church's spokesman, gave the numbers of…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2010tags: scientology, religion, cults, mind control, Thetan, silly, offbeat, beliefs, Xenu, L Ron Hubbard, television, BBC, streaming video
Speaking of Mormonism and other cults .. erm, religions .. I thought I'd give you a peek at Scientology. In this television report, hidden cameras go inside the London Scientology Organization to expose their inner workings. It seems that even the Mormons could learn a few mind-control techniques from the Scientologists.
I find it really depressing to think that one Scientology survivor exchanged one form of mind control for another: after he escaped…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2010tags: children, religion, cults, mind control, television, silly, offbeat, beliefs, funny, education, streaming video
This amusing video is from a British TV show, Outnumbered. In this clip, young Ben asks the vicar some awkward questions about Jesus -- questions that most religious people have been asked at one time or another.
razib | March 6, 2010This is funny:
Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.
They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.
Check this conclusion:
Ms. Collbran says she still believes in Scientology -- not in the church as it is now constituted, but in its…
pharyngula | March 5, 2010It certainly isn't the Netherlands.
This isn't news any more. News would be an official Catholic organization that wasn't a front for repressed perverts and apologists for child abuse.
pharyngula | March 5, 2010A young child at a Boulder pre-school has been kicked out for an awful crime. The child was enrolled in a Catholic preschool, and also has two mommies. I'll leave you to guess which of those two is the awful crime.
According to teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School, a meeting was held Tuesday to discuss the issue. The staff was told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents' sexual orientation. The staff members were also told not to talk to the media.
Another interesting twist is that the staff at the school are described as "disgusted" with the…
pharyngula | March 5, 2010Back when we bought our house, one of the things that we liked about it is that it's a somewhat quirky place, with an odd layout and a few old 50s touches. One thing I didn't care for is the decor of the upstairs; it's got this vivid scarlet carpeting everywhere, and one of the bedrooms was (it's been repainted now) wallpapered with bright green shamrocks. I joked that we could open a brothel for leprechauns up there if we wanted to make a little extra money.
You know, if I'd been moving into the Vatican, instead, I'd probably have made a similar joke — all that garish, gaudy excess and all…
jrosenhouse | March 4, 2010Before leaving behind Denis Lamoureux's book I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution, there is one lengthy excerpt I would like to present. If I presented only a small portion of this you would think I was taking it out of context. If I paraphrased it you would not believe me. I will simply have to present the whole thing, as a painful illustration of the sheer depths to which special pleading can aspire.
Here is Lamoureux's explanation of why God of love would do his creating through a cruel and wasteful process like evolution. I promise you I am not making this up.
This question needs…
jrosenhouse | March 4, 2010In my recent post on Interpreting Genesis, one of the commenters suggested to me the writing of Denis Lamoureux as a good example of defending a non-literal interpretation of Genesis. A quick visit to Amazon revealed that his big book on this subject, Evolutionary Creation, was over four hundred pages long and was quite expensive. Happily, last year Lamoureux, who is a professor of science and religion at the University of Alberta and holds doctoral degrees in dentistry, theology and biology, published a Cliff's Notes version of his book called I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution. I…
pharyngula | March 4, 2010Allow me to purge a few interesting stories from my mailbag:
Keshia Canter was working the drive-up window at a burger joint when a sanctimonious customer handed her a pamphlet.
Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin. By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?
To answer the question, yes. Yes we can. If a…