religion
jrosenhouse | January 20, 2010Just in case you were thinking that religious institutions have not always bathed themselves in glory in their relations with science, here's Ronald Numbers to set you straight:
Historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history. ... Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower. The secular public, if it thinks about such issues at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress (witness the attacks on Galileo, Darwin, and Scopes). The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role…
gregladen | January 20, 2010You probably don't know that I went to Harvard, because I rarely mention it, but I did, and when I was there I literally worked and studied around the Divinity school. The lab I worked in was on one side of the Div School, and the Peabody Museum (home of the Anthro Dept) was on the other side of the Div School, which was, in turn, half surrounded, like a morsel of food about to be eaten by a voracious amoeba, by the Biology Building.
And, I was amused to learn that the Harvard Div School was a hotbed of atheism. Or so I was told. But I did not pay much attention.
Well, I'm reminded of all…
razib | January 19, 2010Tom Rees reports on an analysis of the GSS which point to the correlation between low verbal skills and a Biblical literalist outlook. Well, I've talked about this at length. Religion & IQ, Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first?, Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart? and Educational levels & denomination. Poking around the GSS the powerful correlates of belief in the literal truth of the Bible (variable "BIBLE") jump out at you.
gregladen | January 19, 2010This is bible thumpers breaking military rules, US law, and endangering the troops.
The war profiteers who do this admit it, and retorts that those who do not like the bible references printed on US military hardware are "not Christians." Presumably this means that their complaints are irrelevant.
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gregladen | January 19, 2010There is an interesting conversation developing on The Intersection (What Should Science Organizations Say About Religion? Answer: A Lot) to which this is my response:
The conversation you have modeled here (people talking past each other ... see the original post) is very close to what actually happens in an NCSE like conversation, except that someone following the NCSE approach (as I usually do in this context) also mentions that for most religions this is not an issue, etc. etc. (I usually throw in a few quotes from this or that pope).
And, noting that many religious people have no…
pharyngula | January 18, 2010I guess we've been outdone. While the godless are raising money for the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, a Christian group is sending boxloads of solar-powered digital Bibles to Haiti — just what they need, I'm sure.
Called the "Proclaimer," the audio Bible delivers "digital quality" and is designed for "poor and illiterate people", the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.
According to their website, the Proclaimer is "self-powered and can play the Bible in the jungle, desert or ... even on the moon!"
I'm trying to imagine an audio speaker that works in a vacuum. And why you would need…
pharyngula | January 18, 2010I don't know about you, but I sure am reassured that our soldiers are well-equipped since I heard that one weapon supplier has been enchanting rifles with secret references to the Bible. It gives a soldier special powers to be thinking, "he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." as he peers down the barrel of a gun, preparing to blow the brains out of a Muslim. And don't you think the Muslim would appreciate knowing that his killer was imbued with such saintly sentiments?
If Jesus had actually existed, that's probably exactly the purpose he would have…
terrasig | January 18, 2010
From "Lesser Known Wise and Prophetic Words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr." by liberal writer and California Democratic Party delegate, Deborah White:
"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.
The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2010tags: religion, school, religion, catholicism, comedy, humor, fucking hilarious, Dave Allen, streaming video
Irish Comedian Dave Allen (1936-2005) remembers his introduction to religion -- his first day of school.
David Tynan O'Mahoney (Dave Allen) was popular in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada in the 1960s, 1970s and also in the 1990s; he became known in America through reruns of his shows on public television.
Allen's act was typified by a very relaxed, intimate style -- he would sit on a chair, smoking and holding a glass of whiskey. An atheist[1] (according to Allen himself, "…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2010tags: religion, IDiots, satire, parody, comedy, humor, fucking hilarious, Hitler, DOWNFALL, streaming video
The so-called Discovery Institute is a pretentious über-Christian disguise for creationism and an ultra-Conservative social agenda called The Wedge Strategy. So-called Intelligent Design theory is plagiarized from William Paley's long-refuted Blind Watchmaker argument, and is merely creationism in a not-so-cunning disguise.
Having neither facts nor logic at their disposal, the polemicists of the so-called Discovery Institute have been forced to resort to lies and subterfuge. One of…
pharyngula | January 14, 2010Have you ever seen the True Christian, the kind that will calmly and confidently tell you the most insane and ridiculous things as if he were ordering a cup of coffee? Meet Randy Demain. He has raised the dead, and does it all the time. It's easy. You just go up to an old corpse and tell it to get up, and poof, it'll hop up and start running around.
It helps if you annoy him by interrupting his sermonizing, so he's a bit cranky about the effrontery of the dead person for interfering with his preaching.
The psychology of these wacked out liars and fantasists for Jesus is fascinating. Also…
oracknows | January 13, 2010Yesterday, I expressed dismay at how Dr. Mehmet Oz, the protege of Oprah Winfrey who now has his own popular syndicated daily show, recently named the quackery known as reiki as number one in his list of "Dr. Oz's ulimate alternatie medicine secrets," leading me to characterize him as having "gone completely over to the Dark Side." You, my readers, kindly provided me with a YouTube video of actual segments from the show in which Dr. Oz has a reiki master demonstrate reiki on an audience member:
Ugh. Get aload of this introduction:
Now you're about to see things that are going to challenge…
pharyngula | January 12, 2010On Sunday, I was stuck on a long boring drive — there is no scenery between Winnipeg and Morris, only a pale gray void with wisps of snow blowing through it — and was thinking about some of the conversations I'd had the night before. I was a bit envious. My own upbringing in religion was rather tepid, an exposure to bland liberal Lutheranism of the Scandinavian Phlegmatic sect, and had no drama at all to it, and was more like a Unitarian Universalist church with a historical creed attached to it that no one cared much about. Yet here I'd been talking with ex-fundamentalist ex-Mennonites,…
pharyngula | January 11, 2010Here's what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.
(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)
emjohnson | January 10, 2010
Image: Atheistcartoons.com
Of course, you can always count on World Nut Daily to explain the illogic of celebrating a victim of capital punishment while supporting its practice:
The reason capital punishment was necessary, God explained, was because human life was so special. There had to be a blood atonement for the death of an innocent man or woman.
There's a much longer and detailed explanation of the absolute requirement for the death penalty in God's economy in Numbers 35. That's where we learn that the land is actually polluted by the unatoned shedding of innocent human blood. There's…
grrlscientist | January 10, 2010tags: The Conspiracy Game, religion, wingnuts, crackpots, humor, funny, satire, parody, Da Vinci Code, streaming video
It's Sunday morning once again, and thus, it's time for a reality check. This time, let's play a little game; The Conspiracy Game!
grrlscientist | January 9, 2010tags: Super Sunday: The Baptazia Dance Club, religion, dance, funny, weird, Baptazia, streaming video
Religion might be viewed by some as the modern dancing disease. Others might view Sunday morning church services as a cheap gym or dance club.
Audio from Clipz & Die with MC IC3 & MC Shabba - OneNation Valentines Festival 2007.
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2010In fact, I happen to be one of them. Admittedly, my religion (Judaism) and theological beliefs are very different from theopolitically conservative Catholics and Protestants. But ScienceBlogling Chad Orzel makes a really good point about religious scientists (and I thought all he did is teach physics to dogs):
...it is not in any way an "unconscionable" political statement for professional scientific organizations to state that science and religion are compatible. It's a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that in the real world, there are numerous examples of people who are both…
pharyngula | January 8, 2010I was one of those weird kids growing up: nose always in a book, bored by sports, happy to go to school. This was a bit strange because my father had been a broken-nosed lineman on the varsity high school football team, was always playing hooky to go fishing, and once he graduated, went off to a succession of manly muscular jobs, working on the railroad, as a lumberjack, and eventually as an auto mechanic. I think he was perpetually baffled by the bookish nerd he'd fathered, but then, he had six kids and everyone of us ended up different, independent, and stubborn in our own ways. And that…
pharyngula | January 7, 2010One of those lunatic religious right sites compiled a list of the top ten "anti-christian attacks" of 2009…and the pathetic thing about it is how feeble and largely imaginary the attacks are. They range from a rantin' anti-choice pastor getting arrested for harassing women at a clinic to the existence of those uppity gays who complain when Christians lie about homosexuality. There isn't one crucifixion or involuntary lion-feeding on the whole list. Read this dissection of the compilation — those poor guys are really desperate for some notable oppression.