religion
pharyngula | June 21, 2009A young man in Kansas had a traumatic event in his life. Here's a simple outline of what happened.
Chase Kear has a serious accident, fracturing his skull.
↓Bystanders call for emergency medical help on their phones.↓
Doctors arrive in a helicopter.↓
Doctors administer emergency care.↓
Helicopter arrives at hospital; doctors take him into surgery.↓
Surgeons remove portion of his skull to protect his brain from swelling.↓
Kear is treated with antibiotics to prevent infections.↓
Swelling reduces, doctors restore Kear's skull.↓
↓Bystanders pray.↓
Family prays.↓
Family…
pharyngula | June 21, 2009It's a sad story. Amreen was Muslim, and Lokesh was Hindu, but these two young people loved each other and got married anyway. Isn't that the way it should be, that religion is something that shouldn't dictate the important matters in your lives? Unfortunately, the other people in their small town of Phaphunda couldn't allow that. The village council met and ordered them to annul the marriage — and their families seem to have felt likewise, that their love had to be destroyed.
So Amreen and Lokesh took poison and killed themselves.
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, Cuttlefish has written…
oracknows | June 21, 2009This reminds me of my trip to England two years ago, when my wife and I did visit Stonehenge:
However, what I'd really love is to have the title this guy has:
Druid King Arthur Pendragon told the BBC shortly before sunrise: "It's a very nice atmosphere and everything's fine at the moment.
"There have been more police present this year, more security, but everything's passed off very jovially and everyone's in a good mood.
"And the police for the most part are wishing people a happy solstice and so are the security guards."
Druid King? How cool is that? Think of it: Druid King Orac.…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2009tags: universe, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
In this video, we learn that God created the entire universe for the enjoyment of us humans on Earth. To believe otherwise is arrogant and deluded! [4:08]
razib | June 20, 2009Due to the nature of following current international events I've been checking out YouTube more than I usually do, and one thing led to another and I ended up on a video of prayer services at a Zoroastrian temple in Yazd. Watching the prayers (go to 1:30) I was struck by how Muslim they seemed to me. I have read that Muslim prayer 5 times a day was in part an attempt to one up the Zoroastrians, who pray 3 times a day. In any case, I decided to see what a Coptic prayer was like, Coptic being the ritual language of the Christians of Egypt. I don't know if the Coptic prayer was in Coptic or…
gregladen | June 20, 2009Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
I had a dream last night that I was in the kitchen cooking Calamari, when several medium sized octopi crawled out of the pot and led me to the basement, beckoning me to come near the computer. They formed a stack, one on top of the other, and the top octopus took the mouse in one tentacle and opened a web browser. Then it typed in a URL and up came a post by PZ Myers extolling me to blog about an entry on the Chalcedon Foundation web site. I awoke in a cold sweat and tried to forget about the…
pharyngula | June 19, 2009Barbara Bradley Hagerty has lately been polluting NPR with a series of superficial fluff pieces on religion — I've just groaned and turned the radio off when she comes on. She also has a book out, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and just the title is sufficient to tell you it's noise to avoid. If that's not enough, though, you can also read a revealing review of the book.
That is why the work of a religion writer is different than that of a science reporter or a sportswriter. Most journalists — or at least most good journalists — are supposed to question…
pharyngula | June 18, 2009Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.
The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed--one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed,…
razib | June 18, 2009My friend Joel Grus has a book out which some readers might be interested in, Your Religion Is False. You can get it on Amazon. FYI, Joel is responsible for the banner on this weblog, which he cooked up in an hour in the spring of 2002.
oracknows | June 18, 2009
Last night, I was sitting on the couch, my laptop, appropriately enough, on my lap creating my paean to Homeopathy Awareness Week in which I had a little fun discussing homeopathic plutonium. Because Homeopathy Awareness week is not yet over, I'll probably have one more bit of fun at the expense of The One Woo To Rule Them All before it's over. However, while I was getting into the possibilities suggested to me by diluting and succussing plutonium in order to treat all sorts of "Pluto-y" illnesses, I happened to flip through the channels, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a…
gregladen | June 17, 2009I had no idea that there were Public Broadcasting Stations that aired church services and such things. I suppose this is because I don't live in Alabama or someplace.
Anyway, PBS has done (mostly) the right thing by baning this practice.
The Public Broadcasting Service agreed yesterday to ban its member stations from airing new religious TV programs, but permitted the handful of stations that already carry "sectarian" shows to continue doing so.
The vote by PBS's board was a compromise from a proposed ban on all religious programming. Such a ban would have forced a few stations around the…
gregladen | June 17, 2009The following press release has just come across my virtual desk:
Letter from Conservative Leaders Implores Senators to Filibuster Hate Crimes Bill
MEDIA ADVISORY, June 16 /Christian Newswire/ -- This week, a letter is being hand-delivered to every member of the United States Senate imploring conservatives to join Senator Jim DeMint's filibuster of the pending Hate Crimes bill, which would criminalize preaching the Gospel and put preachers in the crosshairs.
The letter explains that, in its current form, the Hate Crimes legislation would: "Silence the moral voice of the Church" -- "Punish…
pharyngula | June 17, 2009That's the title of the site, anyway, Proof That God Exists. It ain't.
It's a dreary exercise in the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are lead through a series of binary choices, in which you are asked to choose one alternative or the other, with the goal of shunting you to the desired conclusion, which is, of course, that God exists. Building on a fallacy is bad enough, but even worse, it can't even do that competently — it cheats. All of the options are designed to bounce you to only one line of reasoning, and if you don't play the designer's game, it gets all pissy at you and announces…
grrlscientist | June 16, 2009
Who: CFI-NYC Executive Director, Michael De Dora, Jr.
What: free public presentation, "CFI and the State of Science and Reason"
Where: Shetler Studios, 244 West 54th Street between Broadway & 8th Avenue, 12th floor, Penthouse 1.
When: 830pm Tuesday, 23 June 2009
What exactly is the Center for Inquiry? What does CFI stand for? How does CFI carry out its mission? What does CFI -- specifically the New York City office -- have to offer to society? And how can you get involved with CFI and the movement? Come hear the new CFI-NYC Executive Director Michael De Dora Jr. address all these…
grrlscientist | June 16, 2009tags: National Center for Science Education, NCSE, religion, fundamentalism, creationism, intelligent design, streaming video
This video gives you a brief overview of what the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) does to protect our schools from the tyranny of religious brainwashing posing as "science" [3:19]
grrlscientist | June 14, 2009
This is a strange "debate" between Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church, and Cumberland Presbyterian, created using an online church sign generator. The images show, from top to bottom, the responses and counter-responses over time.
And the next morning, Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church responds;
The following morning, Cumberland Presbyterian Church responds;
And the Catholics reply to that;
Of course, we all know that heaven isn't any more real than Harry Potter, but whatevs. These people clearly are entertained.
grrlscientist | June 14, 2009tags: religion, Bible, Ricky Gervais, creation story, humor, funny, parody, streaming video
This streaming video shows Ricky Gervais discussing creation as he reads from the Bible -- wow! This makes so much sense, doesn't it? I am going to give up my godless hedonistic ways right now!! [9:53]
pharyngula | June 11, 2009Jerry Coyne's criticism of accommodationism by evolutionists seems to still be shaking a few trees and is generating an endless debate. Ken Miller has posted a long rebuttal. It's mainly interesting for the way Miller flees from theism.
His first and only defense seems to be a denial of most of the implications of an interventionist deity…which is, of course, fine with me. He argues that all of his arguments about how a god could have intervened are carefully phrased in terms of conditional probabilities — he's not describing what actually happened, but how a god might have meddled in the…
jrosenhouse | June 11, 2009Ken Miller has now weighed in with a lengthy post criticizing Jerry Coyne's views on the compatibility of science and religion.
Since most of Miller's essay is focused on specific statements made by Coyne I won't go point by point through it. I suspect Coyne will post his own reply at his blog, and I look forwrad to reading it. I'll just comment that in certain places I think Miller has a point (I think Coyne is mostly right about the big picture, but there are certainly places where I wish he would have expressed himself differently.) In other places I think Miller is not presenting Coyne…
oracknows | June 11, 2009I know I've been very hard on Oprah Winfrey the last couple of weeks, taking her to task for her promotion on her show of medicine that is at best dubious and at worst quackery, as promoted by frequent guests like Suzanne Somers, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and the queen of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny "I'm not anti-vaccine but would never, ever vaccinate" McCarthy. Not that Oprah cares. After all, she's Oprah, and I'm only a lowly blogger who, although having one of the top medical blogs out there, is as an ant to Oprah's elephant of a media empire. Still, NEWSWEEK did a fantastic expose of…