religion
pharyngula | July 22, 2011"Little girl, would you like some candy?" Somebody didn't think things through when they decided that this was a good strategy for proselytizing.
An Edmonton mother is outraged after members of a local church approached her daughter on a playground - offering a Bible verse, candy and a promise that if she memorized the passage they would give her more treats.
Kathleen Crowe says her nine-year-old daughter Angeline was playing in MacEwan park last week when she was approached by a couple from the Victory Christian Center who gave her candy and a Bible verse. Angeline was also promised more…
pharyngula | July 21, 2011Now that the Cloyne report is available, the perfidy of the Catholic church is directly measurable. Michael Nugent has tallied up a list of all the documented, unambiguous cases of Irish Catholic officials lying — just blatant, undeniable, flat out lying to investigators. I'm pretty sure that's against one of their commandments.
If you want to see a Catholic nuisance closer to home, look to Philadelphia. They have a new archbishop, and he's apparently because he's overtly political.
"I think that with Chaput you will see a much more politically active archbishop than we saw with Cardinal…
pharyngula | July 21, 2011We could be Christians. Answers in Genesis distributes a little quiz about modesty: I took it and failed. Most of the questions assume clothing is defined by God, that the purpose of clothing is to hide sexuality, and the focus is almost entirely on women — look at questions #9 and #10, for instance. That could have come straight from a Muslim handbook.
The Style Quiz
Take the following True/False quiz to discover what you really believe about clothing, and then compare your responses with the answer key below.
1. According to the Bible, the primary purpose of clothing is to cover the body.
2…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2011Michael Ruse is back with another post over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Let's take a look:
I have written before about Calvin College in Western Michigan and its troubles. I have now to tell you that things have wended their way to their expected and sad conclusion.
To give the background once again, starting with the College's own words.
As a college that stems from the Reformed branch of Christianity, the bulk of what we believe is held in common with the Christian church around the world and throughout the ages. Three confessions adopted by Reformed Protestants centuries ago…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011Last week, the Cloyne report was released. This document describes patterns of child abuse and in particular the willful intransigence of the Catholic church in correcting the problems in Ireland, and it's pretty damned damning. One significant detail: the Church's defense in recent months consists of claiming priestly pedophilia was a thing of the past, a product of the laxity and corruption of the general social atmosphere in the 60s and 70s, pushing the blame onto that awful liberal culture, not the church. Unfortunately, the Cloyne report assesses policies in the late 1990s, so we're…
pharyngula | July 20, 2011Somehow, I get the impression I wouldn't get a fair shake.
"Hey! You there! Hands up! I see you walking while wearing socks with sandals on a Sunday! We're takin' you in to the Ecclesiastical Court!"
pharyngula | July 20, 2011The UK has been having a debate about Sharia law in the House of Commons. Why, I don't know; it's so regressive and oppressive, such a step backward, that it ought to be simply dismissed out of hand. Maryam Namazie gave a speech opposing Sharia law, and here's a small piece of it.
After all, Sharia law is based on the Koran, the hadith (sayings and actions of the prophet Mohammad), and Islamic jurisprudence. They all agree that a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man's, a women can't sign her own marriage contract, men have the unilateral right to divorce whereas a women have limited…
pharyngula | July 19, 2011I think the loony Christian apologist has got something right. He has identified the greatest threat to Christianity:
The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not.
Hooray for the internet!
Now here is the problem, going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to…
pharyngula | July 16, 2011I guess the Catholic church is concerned about the rights of breast cancer tumors: they probably identify too much with a deadly metastatic disease, and don't want to seem them hindered. At least, that's the only way I can interpret the decision of the Toledo, Ohio diocese to ban all support for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Or maybe it's just because breast cancer primarily affects women, so letting them die is of minimal consequence to them.
Their published reasoning is almost as ludicrous as that. Church officials say they won't support Komen because 1) some of the money might go to…
jrosenhouse | July 15, 2011I certainly have my disagreements with Michael Ruse on questions related to science and religion, but sometimes he really comes through:
There are days when, I swear to God, I am all set to enroll under the banner of Richard Dawkins and anathematize all religions and those who subscribe to them. I take a lot of criticism from my fellow atheists, including my fellow Brainstormers, for arguing that science and religion are compatible. I still think that, but increasingly I cannot for the life of me see why any decent human being would want to be religious, and increasingly I think one should…
jrosenhouse | July 14, 2011Picking up where we left off yesterday, most of Feser's post is devoted to a hypothetical dialogue between a scientist and a skeptic who thinks that science is all a lot of nonsense. The idea is to make Jerry Coyne's objections to theology seem silly, by showing the absurdity of comparable objections leveled at science. As I see it, however, Feser has been more successful at showing how science is different from theology. Here is the first exchange:
Skeptic: I'm trying to learn science so I can meet head-on the argument that we science critics are ignorant of the subject. So, under the…
gregladen | July 14, 2011This is not new but it is current. In 2009, Michele Bachmann donated several thousand dollars to an organization that carries out exorcisms mainly on teenagers who have bee posessed by multiple demons. This has become increasingly popular among Christians ... the idea that demons posses people on a regular basis. Right now, at least three of the possible contenders for the Republican presidential nomination: Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have been endorsed by, or raised funds for, or have promoted or are actively promoted ministers and ministries that are established on the…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2011We New Atheist types are often lectured about the need for studying theology. The idea is that if we tuned out the distressingly popular and highly vocal forms of religious extremism and pondered instead “the best religion has to offer,” then we would not be so hostile to religion. Recently, Jerry Coyne called the bluff and started studying theology. He reported on his findings in this post. Short version: He's underwhelmed. This led Edward Feser, a Roman Catholic philosopher at Pasadena City College, to throw a temper tantrum about how unserious he was in undertaking this project in the…
oracknows | July 12, 2011I'm on my way to The Amaz!ng Meeting today; so I'm not sure I have time for the usual bit of Orac-ian logorrheic blogging that I somehow manage to churn out almost every day. In fact, I had thought of just running another rerun so that I don't have to worry about it. But worry I did, at least a little bit, particularly after I saw something that really worried me a bit, and I'm not kidding.
Remember Kent Heckenlively? He's a regular blogger at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism whom I've taken to task from time to time for subjecting of his autistic daughter to what I consider to be…
pharyngula | July 12, 2011This is wicked. Maddow compiled crazy deranged comments from a collection of ministers who will be speaking at Rick Perry's big prayer event in Texas, where he purportedly will work out economic policies with these wackos. Near as I can tell, that policy will involve sending Oprah to Gitmo, herding the Jews off to Israel, and avoiding sex with demons.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Now you can be afraid, too.
pharyngula | July 11, 2011I hope this is something we can all agree on. Today is the The International Day against Stoning, a consciousness-raising event organized by Mina Ahadi, Patty Debonitas, and Maryam Namazie to call attention to the fact that some countries still practice public stonings as punishments for petty offenses against propriety. There are people in prison right now, awaiting that day when authorities drag them into the public square and people murder them by battering them with rocks.
As you know Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani is still languishing in prison. The authorities recently mentioned her case…
oracknows | July 10, 2011Remember Helen Ratajczak?
A few months ago, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine reporter Sharyl Attkisson was promoting Ratajczak's incompetent "analysis" of evidence that she views as implicating vaccines in the pathogenesis of autism entitled Theoretical aspects of autism: causes--A Review (which is available in all its misinforming glory here). I applied some not-so-Respectful Insolence to the idiocy contained within Ratajczak's article. One aspect of the article that I mentioned was how Ratajczak claimed that DNA from "aborted fetal tissue" in vaccines correlated with the rise of autism. The…
pharyngula | July 9, 2011People keep telling me that I have to read up more on real theology, you know, the stuff where smart old white guys sit around in seminaries and invent rationalizations for whatever the hell they want to believe. Unfortunately, I don't see any difference in principle (but hopefully, in outcome) between what, for instance, elders of the Mormon church or Catholic bishops say, than the ideas of Peter Lucas Moses, who has his own special interpretation of God's holy word.
A religious leader in North Carolina shot to death his four-âyear old step son because he thought the boy, Jadon Higganbothan…
oracknows | July 8, 2011One of the recurrent themes of this blog is to point out, analyze, and discuss the creeping infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. In particular, it irks me that so many physicians, who really should know better, so easily fall for the siren song of quackery for whatever reason, be it a misguided desire to be nonjudgmental, to give the patients what they want, or through an inadequate understanding and appreciation of the scientific method. Indeed, there are whole specialties dedicated to "integrating" woo with science-based medicine to the detriment of science-based medicine.
Still,…
oracknows | June 30, 2011
Regular readers know that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of pareidolia, so much so that I even have a category devoted to it. For those not familiar with the concept, pareidolia is nothing more than seeing patterns in things. One of the most famous examples is seeing faces, animals, or other objects in clouds. Among the religious, a particularly common strain of pareidolia is to see Jesus or Mary in patterns on anything from pancakes, to sheet metal, to windows, to trees, to doors, to MRIs. Even Ikea isn't immune. I've even seen a story of Satan appearing on a bathroom tile and wondered if it…