religion
pharyngula | October 27, 2011If you tuned in to that local debate on Christian radio, you know that one of the points the Christian fool trotted out was the tired old claim that the Nazis were no true Christians — no True Christian™ would ever commit such horrible acts. It's an annoyingly feeble and unsupportable argument, but it has a lot of life in it, unfortunately.
This same argument has come up in Faye Flam's Evolution column for the Philly Inquirer, and has gone on through several articles thanks to that hack from the Discovery Institute, Richard Weikart. It started with an article titled "Severing the link between…
pharyngula | October 27, 2011You must watch this episode of the Daily Show — it's all about science. Lisa Randall is on it plugging her new book, Knocking on Heaven's Door (she actually doesn't get to say much about it, but I've ordered it for my iPad anyway — I know what I'll be reading on the plane to New Orleans tomorrow), a good section on the recent confirmation of global warming, and my favorite bit of all, Aasif Mandvi blithely leading a chipper Republican operative to agree with the most egregiously ignorant, anti-science claims.
Mandvi: Why are surgeons the only ones allowed to perform surgeries?
Blithering…
jrosenhouse | October 26, 2011Sorry for the disappearing act. It seems like every time I work up a good head of blog steam, something happens to knock me off track. This term is turning out to be unusually busy. But I did want to poke my head up to take note of this recent essay, at HuffPo, by John Shelby Spong.
Spong, a former bishop in the Episcopal Church, writes books with titles like Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and A New Christianity for a New World. He is very critical of all facets of traditional Christian belief. Frankly, his version of Christianity is so theologically liberal it seems awfully…
pharyngula | October 19, 2011Want to spend an hour cringing and twitching? This is the abridged version of "Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision", and you will suffer if you watch it. It is a wasteful, terrible thing to do to a child.
One rabbi interviewed is at least honest about circumcision: "It's painful, it's abusive, it's traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn't in a covenant ought to be put in prison…I do abusive things because I'm in covenant with god." What nonsense. What a wretched excuse for abusing children.
(Warning: lots of shots of babies getting chopped, as well as closeups of adult penises…
jrosenhouse | October 8, 2011The latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine turned up in the mail this week. Lots of interesting material, as always. One article that caught my eye was “Building on a Religious Background,” by C. L. Hanson. Hanson grew up as a Mormon, but is now an atheist. She currently lives in Switzerland and has a blog.
Hanson writes:
One of the most important lessons I've learned is that a single claim can seem either obviously crazy or perfectly reasonable, depending on how you have been exposed to it. Consider the Mormon belief that God was once a human and that humans can become gods. As a…
jrosenhouse | October 7, 2011The brou ha ha over original sin continues apace. Andres Sullivan has replied to Jerry Coyne. It's a very bad post, arrogant but contentless. Jerry has already delivered the well-deserved spanking.
Sullivan uncorks nuggets like this:
I would argue that original sin is a mystery that makes sense of our species' predicament - not a literal account of a temporal moment when we were all angels and a single act that made us all beasts. We are beasts with the moral imagination of angels. But if we are beasts, then where did that moral imagination come from? If it is coterminous with…
jrosenhouse | October 6, 2011The big original sin debate goes on. Ross Douthat has weighed in, as has Andrew Sullivan in this post. Both gentleman go after Jerry Coyne. Jerry has already stolen some of my thunder by replying himself (here and here.) He's a much more efficient blogger than I am. Still, I'll throw in my two cents.
Douthat writes:
Shea touched off the dust-up by arguing that there's nothing particularly radical, at least from the perspective of the Catholic tradition, about interpreting the first books of Genesis as a “figurative” account of a primeval event, rather than as literal historiography that…
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2011Huffington Post has a short article up about the phenomenon of Jews who don't believe in God. Turns out there are a lot of us:
Atheism is entrenched in American Judaism. In researching their book American Grace, authors Robert Putnam and David Campbell found that half of all American Jews doubt God's existence. In other groups, that number is between 10 and 15 percent.
Those figures have some in the Jewish community alarmed. A recent issue of Moment, a magazine of Jewish thought, asked influential Jews if Judaism can survive without God. The answers were split.
Half? Goodness! That's a…
oracknows | September 19, 2011A couple of months ago, right before TAM 9, I took note of a rather disturbing post by one of the regular bloggers on the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism. Basically, the post was worrisome because in it Kent Heckenlively portrayed those who oppose anti-vaccine pseudoscience as "wicked," even quoting Psalm 94, which is a psalm that calls upon the Lord to bring his vengeance upon the wicked and destroy them. He also invoked Stephen King's novel The Stand. Normally, this wouldn't be such a big deal, except for its timing. Most skeptics will know that The Amazing Meeting is a yearly meeting…
jrosenhouse | September 14, 2011Picking up where yesterday's post left off, we have one more point to consider. Recall that the set-up here is that Edward Feser suggested a reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve story to bring it into line with modern genetics. In particular, Feser's scenario hypothesizes that Adam and Eve were selected from a population of hominids to receive the gift of an eternal soul. Those other hominids were biologically human, but since they lacked souls they were not metaphysically human. I replied in this post. Feser then replied to my reply here.
In yesterday's post I discussed two objections…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2011Edward Feser has posted a reply to my previous post about original sin. I shall reply in two posts, but that will be it from my side. If Feser wants to reply to these posts then he can have the last word.
The problem is this: Several lines of evidence tell us that there was never a time when the human population was exactly two. It also tells us that humanity is one endpoint of billions of years evolution by natural selection. This conflicts with religious accounts holding that Adam and Eve were created instantaneously and were the only humans on the planet at that time. Thus, if we…
jrosenhouse | September 12, 2011New York mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to include any religious clerics among the speakers at the 9/11 memorial service this weekend. Unsurprisingly, this caused some controversy:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has come under attack by some religious and political leaders for not including clergy members as speakers at Sunday's official ceremony at ground zero on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that the planned ceremony…
jrosenhouse | September 9, 2011Jerry Coyne weighs in with a few thoughts about the various attempts, considered in my last post, to preserve the notion of original sin in the light of modern science. It turns out he's even less impressed by those attempts than I am. Go have a look!
Since Wednesday's post was already quite long, I didn't get around to mentioning one additional attempt to promote an evolutionary understanding of original sin. It comes from theologian John Haught. In his book God After Darwin he writes:
What, then, might original sin mean? Superficially, it means a systematic turning away from God by…
drorzel | September 8, 20111 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.
4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?
5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2011One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2011The Humanist has posted a fascinating interview with Leo Behe, son of ID luminary Michael Behe. The younger Behe does not share his father's faith, and has become outspoken about his lack of belief. That takes some courage, given his upbringing:
The Humanist: Talk about your early life and education.
Leo Behe: I was homeschooled from preschool through high school. I still had my share of friends, but I personally feel that the means through which I selected them (networking with other local homeschoolers) significantly limited the diversity that most children experience through interaction…
gregladen | August 18, 2011Plymouth, Minnesota plays a fairly important role in my life. It is a big suburb to the west of Minneapolis, a mainly liberal or progressive middle class bedroom community linked to first ring extra-urban commercial development based mainly on corn. Kellogs, Cargill, Mosaic, other companies that grow corn, use corn in making products, sell corn based products and generally control a large percentage of the corn market have their Headquarters out in the Western Suburbs and many of the people who work in those places live in Plymouth, which is fairly large.
When I first moved to the twin…
oracknows | August 17, 2011Many have been the times that I've pointed out that many forms of "alternative" medicine are in reality based far more on mystical, religious, or "spiritual" beliefs than on any science. Indeed, one amusing event that provided me the opening to launch into one of my characteristic (and fun) Orac-ian outbursts occurred a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Catholic bishops declared that reiki is not compatible with Catholic teachings and shouldn't be offered in Catholic hospitals. Then, earlier this year, the fundamentalists weighed in, when a preacher from the Poconos named Kevin Garman…
gregladen | August 17, 2011"Train up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it."
-Proverbs 22:6
This is a report of a Fundamentalist Christian couple who beat thier 7 year old child to death as part of the practice of corporal punishment to which they subscribed as per instructions given them by God. They were following the detailed methodology of child torture supplied in a book called To Train Up A Child. Which may or may not be related to a book called Train Up a Child: Successful Parenting for the Next Generation.
Nine children were subject to this abuse over several years…
oracknows | August 16, 2011One thing that's bothered me about religion even before I became the lapsed Catholic heathen that I am, is how God always gets the credit for good things but never the bad. A perfect example is related to the collapse of the stage in a storm at the Indiana State Fair that killed five people and injured scores of others. Apparently, the act that was to go on stage was saved by Jesus:
Call it a twist of fate or luck.
Whatever it was, members of Sugarland can thank stage manager Hellen Rollens for saving their lives by making a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold a prayer circle just before the…