religion
jrosenhouse | August 15, 2011In his latest HuffPo piece, Karl Giberson writes:
The story of Adam and Eve originated as a Hebrew oral tradition, which is a long ways from an English prose translation. And there are more complex filters related to culture, author intent, literary form, historical setting, anticipated audience and so on.
Application of these filters leads many readers to conclude that the biblical story of Adam and Eve was never intended to be read as literal history. The world “Adam” for example, is the generic Hebrew word for “man.” “Eve” means “living one.” The story is about a couple with the…
pharyngula | August 7, 2011This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of crap.
(via Skepchick.)
(Also on FtB)
mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2011Guess who Mitt Romney picked as co-chair of his "Justice Advisory Committee"? Robert Bork. Yes, this Robert Bork:
Banning Porn, Art and Science : Bork also called for shrinking the size of the First Amendment until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. "Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic."
Here are some other blasts from the past:
Opposition To Civil…
pharyngula | August 2, 2011I'm not going to say a word about this video: it's theologian Paul Begley reading from the book of Revelation.
What I think of Paul Begley and his explanation cannot be adequately expressed in words so I'm not even going to try to write them. Use your imagination.
Here's the scientific explanation. Contrast the two.
A drought has left the OC Fisher Reservoir in San Angelo State Park in West Texas almost entirely dry. The water that is left is stagnant, full of dead fish -- and a deep, opaque red.
The color has some apocalypse believers suggesting that OC Fisher is an early sign of the end…
pharyngula | August 2, 2011This is a horrific story out of Victoria, where a church school had two rather nasty pedophiles tag-teaming the student body, Gerald Ridsdale who was the school chaplain, and Robert Best was the principal. They were raping pre-teen boys in their offices; over the years, many victimized kids committed suicide. This sounds like a real horror story.
But here's the kicker: the Catholic church, as always, doesn't see the problem. The two bad guys are gone now, but the government wants to dig deeper — I think 26 dead children is adequate cause — but the church says no further inquiries are…
pharyngula | August 2, 2011A member of the Australian parliament, Fred Nile, has been pushing an interesting cost-saving measure. You know how Australian schools are saddled with chaplains and religious instruction? Well, he wants to keep that nonsense and kill the ethics classes that students can take as a secular alternative.Seems backwards to me, but then he is presumably a Christian, and so is perverse and backward by nature.
So Charlie Fine wrote an op-ed defending the ethics courses. Fine is 11 years old, and smarter than a member of parliament.
The facts show that only 33 per cent of the world is Christian, and…
jrosenhouse | July 27, 2011I'm not quire sure what what to make of this. t doesn't appear to be from The Onion.
More than half of U.S. voters approve of God's job performance, according to a new poll, making God more popular than all members of Congress.
The poll -- which was conducted by the Democratic research firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) -- surveyed 928 people and found that 52 percent of Americans approved of God's overall dealings, while only 9 percent disapproved.
Questions about God were asked as part of a larger survey assessing American opinions of congressional leaders in the midst of the ongoing debt…
pharyngula | July 27, 2011How fun! Fulwiler noticed that her claim to have five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists actually didn't, you know, make sense to any atheists, me included, so she's now trying hard to rationalize it. She has a new post talking about reasoning with atheists that is even more confused and hilarious than the last. Here's her first excuse:
I evidently did not make it clear enough that all of my examples were meant only to illustrate the intellectual consistency within Catholicism, and therefore assumed that you would be in a discussion with an atheist who would stipulate belief in…
pharyngula | July 27, 2011This looks like a really good rule.
Do not allow others to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
Maybe it was on that set of tablets Moses smashed — it's certainly a more useful law than the ones about how to cook goats or what kind of clothes to wear or the injunction to do nothing useful on Sunday. But no, that's from the hobo ethical code.
Isn't it nice that hobos have a better moral foundation than priests?
pharyngula | July 27, 2011Anybody know if this story is true or just an amusing joke? I like it either way.
In a small Texas town, (Mt. Vernon ) Drummond's bar began construction on a new building to increase their business.. The local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening with petitions and prayers. Work progressed right up till the week before opening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.
The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his…
pharyngula | July 27, 2011Excellent news: the tide is rising against the Vatican in Ireland. More people are speaking out, the newspapers are publishing pictures of the pope labeled "persona non grata", there's a simmering resentment everywhere. It's leading to comments like this one, which sees a secular Ireland coexisting with religious sentiment, but no longer with the long arm of the Vatican meddling with the state.
Such sweeping changes could occur in what was once Catholic Ireland: the state could become as secularist as France, with all allusion to the Almighty officially excised. Yet even in France, the holy…
pharyngula | July 26, 2011Here's a perfectly appropriate prayer to start a NASCAR race: he thanks God for GM performance technology, and Ford, and motor oil, and Goodyear tires…he must be hoping for a little kickback from auto suppliers. Aww, it's funny, anyway.
pharyngula | July 26, 2011Is this like some bizarre religion-wide side-effect or something? Because Catholicism and Buddhism seem like such wildly different faiths, but here we go again, chronic incidents of child rape by priests…Buddhist priests. And like the Catholic side of the story, they've got some of these priests dead to rights, with DNA/paternity tests and admissions and all kinds of testimony, and once again, it is the crime of the religious hierarchy to both enable it and hide the culprits from justice.
A Tribune review of sexual abuse cases involving several Theravada Buddhist temples found minimal…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2011Edward Feser has now posted two responses, here and here, to my previous post. I'm sure everyone will be shocked to learn that I don't think he replied very effectively, but if you're curious go have a look. SIWOTI Syndrome is not a hang up of mine, and it doesn't generally bother me to let my opponents have the last word in these little flare-ups. My only reply is that I stand by everything I said in my earlier posts.
pharyngula | July 25, 2011I'm getting a clearer picture of Jennifer Fulwiler. She's very much a Catholic, she thinks she's an expert on atheists, and she likes things in fives. First it was five misconceptions atheists have about Catholics, and now she's written five Catholic teachings that make sense to atheists. As if she'd know. She claims to have been an atheist once, but her list of stuff that makes sense indicates that she was an awfully Catholic atheist.
Purgatory. Why? "it made sense to me because it explained how heaven can be a place of perfect love, and God can still be merciful to people who had some…
pharyngula | July 24, 2011What has the world come to? Valley Park Middle School in Toronto has made a very special provision to make Muslim students happy: they allow them to use the cafeteria for private prayer (to which I have no objection), and then obligingly segregate the boys from the girls, and because it is so very important, also take the young girls who are menstruating and ostracize them in the back of the room, where they are not allowed to participate. OK, not making them join in a prayer is nice, but the implicit public shaming for their physiological state? Outrageous.
There's a petition. Let's add more…
pharyngula | July 23, 2011Christian knees are trembling, sensing imminent doom brought on by juvenile fantasy literature. Which is ironic, considering that they worship a big sloppy book that fits perfectly into the genre. Anyway, first there was the Harry Potter series, which turned all the teenagers into Wiccans (what?); then there was the Twilight series, that has led to an upsurge of teenagers drinking blood (I missed that one, too). What next?
Think carefully: What might happen if a "third wave" of popular entertainment inspires gullible teenagers to seek possession by demonic entities, thinking it's good for…
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2011Edward Feser has posted a reply of sorts to my two essays from last week (Part One, Part Two.) Turns out he's pretty touchy about people who are dismissive of the cosmological argument. The post is quite long and only a small portion of it is directed specifically at me. Since most of that portion is just a temper tantrum about the lack of respect shown to the philosophy of religion, I feel no desire to respond in detail.
But there is one place where the magnitude of Feser's rudeness is so out of proportion to the strength of his argument that I do think some response is called for. In…
pharyngula | July 22, 2011Religion leads to moral bankruptcy, and can be used to justify anything. What else can you say when crazy theologians argue for murder?
Rabbis Dov Lior and Yacob Yousef had endorsed a highly controversial book, the King's Torah - written by two lesser-known settler rabbis. It justifies killing non-Jews, including those not involved in violence, under certain circumstances.
The fifth chapter, entitled "Murder of non-Jews in a time of war" has been widely quoted in the Israeli media. The summary states that "you can kill those who are not supporting or encouraging murder in order to save the…
pharyngula | July 22, 2011The Campus Crusade for Christ is changing their name. They've decided that they aren't just about "campuses", which is great; maybe they can quit poisoning our universities then. They've also, after a mere 60 years, realized that "crusade" has negative connotations to a lot of people, so they're dropping that, too. Their new name?
"Cru".
Cru? Just cru. Cruel crude crucifiers cruisin' for crumpet crumbs. I don't know, I guess they're just trying to be hip and happenin', or something, when they're really just a fusty old antiquity dedicated to dogma.
They're also rather defensive about the fact…