religion
grrlscientist | June 1, 2008tags: The Good Person Test, religious wingnuts, zealots, kooks, right-wing, religion
Thanks to my very naughty colleague and friend, PZ, I took the Good Person Test and learned that I am a liar, a thief, an adulterer, a murderer, and a blasphemer, and can look forward to spending all eternity in the Lake of Fire. Does anyone know if the Lake of Fire is close to New Guinea where some of my research birds live?
I am glad to know that the religious wingnuts are providing travel advice for all eternity. Thanks to this test, I, for example, should pack lightly and bring a stick along with lots of…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2008tags: atheism, godlessness, religion, philosophy, Epicurus, The Epicurean Paradox
The Epicurean Paradox
Is God willing to prevent evil, but unable?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
The he is malevolent.
Is he both able, and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God.
~Epicurus (Greek philosopher, BC 341-270)
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2008From Michael Ruse's review of The God Delusion in Isis:
More seriously, Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer - with the possible exception of some English clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief.
From Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books:
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For…
kcontreary | May 31, 2008A cat hit by a motorcycle in Port Harcourt, Nigeria allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman. Good thing there were lots of people around to kill a second cat-person and beat the accident survivor into a confession of witchcraft.
What could be described as a fairy tale turned real on Wednesday in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, as a cat allegedly turned into a middle-aged woman after being hit by a commercial motorcycle (Okada) on Aba/Port Harcourt Expressway.
Nigerian Tribune learnt that three cats were crossing the busy road when the okada ran over one of them which immediately turned into a…
grrlscientist | May 30, 2008A reader of mine, knowing I am going through a rough time right now, sent me this to cheer me up. Of course, I had to share it with all of you, too!
Top Ten Saying Of Biblical Mothers
Samson! Get your hand out of that lion. You don't know where it's been! (Judges 14:5-8).
David! I told you not to play in the house with that sling! Go practice your harp. We pay good money for those lessons!
Abraham! Stop wandering around the countryside and get home for supper!
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego! I told you never to play with fire!
Cain! Get off your brother! You're going to kill him…
gregladen | May 29, 2008 Adam and Eve with a couple of pterosaurs in the Garden of Eden before The Fall The whole issue of LOL Pterosaurs came up (here and here), so of course, I went looking for them. In the process I found something even funnier. This is a web site at Objective Ministries on pterosaurs in the bible. The picture here shows how pterosaurs were used to cover up Adam and Eve's private parts. And of course there is the baby pterosaur wresting on Eve's outstretched arm as she hides her apple behind her in the other hand. Adam is obviously using the grapes to distract the large goofy looking…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2008There is something about Richard Dawkins that seems to drive otherwise intelligent people completely out of their minds. Dawkins writes a book called The Selfish Gene, and some scholarly critics actually go after him on the grounds that genes can not be selfish. Then he wrote The God Delusion, a badly needed bit of pushback against the seemingly endless flood of religious ignorance, bigotry and violence, and some critics thought the really important thing to note was Dawkins' lack of respect for the ontological argument, or the fact that he did not discuss the views of Wittgenstein.
Now…
gregladen | May 28, 2008In Boy Scouts, a person must agree to sign a 'Declaration of Religious Belief,' in which he must agree that "only a person who acknowledges his duty to God can be the best kind of citizen".
Freecamp thought is an alternative where you don't have to sell your soul ... which is good, because you don't have a soul...
Camp Quest is crossing the Atlantic to Great Britain next summer.
The residential summer camp for the children of freethinkers, skeptics and humanists, is planning on opening a site in the U.K. in July of 2009. ...
Camp Quest was created in 1996 by the Free Inquiry Group, Inc. (…
pharyngula | May 28, 2008My brief summary of the position of apologists for religion, The Courtier's Reply, continues to rankle the believers, and they continue to make responses that only make me laugh at their cluelessness. The standard rebuttal is to claim that I was making an argument in favor of ignorance in the face of theological scholarship, followed by a laundry list of esteemed theologians … but never, and I mean absolutely never, even the slightest attempt to address the core of my criticism — not once have they presented a solid, confirmable reason to believe in a deity.
Here's the latest example, and it…
jrosenhouse | May 27, 2008This essay by Peter Bebergal is getting some bloggy attention. Chad Orzel liked it. John Wilkins calls it “lovely, lyrical and wistful.” P.Z. is less impressed.
I'm with P.Z. Surprise!
The essay starts off strong with a condemnation of the Creation Museum. Hard to object to that!
Sadly, the essay quickly veers off into an all-too-familiar defense of the allegedly good sort of religion, as opposed to the simplistic kind represented by the fundamentalists. His message can be summed up as follows: “Sure, if you take religious claims seriously then of course you will think religion is…
pharyngula | May 27, 2008Do you think a class focusing on the Bible should be taught in public school? This is from a Virginia school that is trying to implement a Bible studies class — and if you've got some idea that maybe it's an intellectual course which discusses the social and literary contributions of an important book in Western culture, it's plugged as "the first step to get God back in your public school".
mikethemadbiologist | May 27, 2008Recently, I ripped into Kathleen "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" Parker for mainstreaming white power garbage. But Gregory Rodriguez makes a good point about the "formal re-articulation of whiteness as a social category and a racial interest group" (italics mine):
To be white in America meant that you were a member of the default category that just isn't discussed. In 2000, journalists didn't incessantly mention that George W. Bush was seeking to become the 43rd white male president of the United States. No one even thinks in those terms. It's implied. It's one of the perks of dominance.…
pharyngula | May 27, 2008John urges all to read a "lovely, lyrical and wistful piece" on religion. So I did.
Sorry, John, it's the same old noise.
The essay by Peter Bebergal has some good points: it's premise is to deplore biblical literalism because it's bad theology that is trying to ape science, and it cripples the imagination. That part I can agree with entirely. Biblical literalism is a slavishly stupid way to enshrine an absolutist authority — a false authority — as a source of information beyond question. So I am sympathetic to about half of its message.
However, the other half is the usual nonsense: ‘my…
grrlscientist | May 27, 2008tags: doctor seuss bible, comedy, humor, creationists, streaming video
This streaming video is an amusing but nonsensical reading of Doctor Seuss's Bible -- hey, it's kinda like the real Bible, isn't it? [2:29].
gregladen | May 26, 2008Well, I hope it was to church, because Ford is the new Motor Car of the Religious Right.
Pharynugla covers this latest example of a right wing yahoo retailer pandering to his god fearing bible humping audience by denigrating atheists. See also this piece at the Underground Believer.
Oh, by the way, do you know what "Ford" stands for?
Found on road, dead.
razib | May 25, 2008Update II: Many links into this entry are labeling this a "study." It wasn't a study, I literally took 10 minutes before I went to sleep to collect the data and produce the chart. The data on literal interpretation of the Bible is from a book which you can read via Google. The IQ scores are from the General Social Survey as reported by The Inductivist. I already knew that this sort of correlation existed, it's pretty unsurprising as I noted. The same pattern shows up if you use post-graduate eduation as the dependent variable. And I spot checked SAT scores by denomination, and again…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2008
Peter Bebergal has a lovely, lyrical and wistful piece on Nextbook, on how scriptural literalism and creationism destroys what is best in religious imagination. Go read it.
oracknows | May 23, 2008I like my Folder of Woo.
Besides providing me endless fodder for this little weekly feature, my Folder of Woo also provides me nearly endless amusement. Sometimes, I'll just peruse it, looking at woo old and new, woo that's been featured in this little weekly exercise in diving into the belly of the beast, woo that has yet to be featured, and woo that will probably never be featured. Unless people suddenly discovery rationality and science, my Folder of Woo is likely to continue to exist. I suppose that could happen, but it's pretty unlikely, which means my Folder of Woo is likely to continue…
pharyngula | May 22, 2008Coral Ridge Ministries surveyed their membership, asking them to rank the greatest dangers to America's spiritual health. Top of the list is the ACLU; second are the homosexuals; third is abortion. Evolution doesn't show up until #7, and atheists are #9. This is a very disappointing showing, people! You're all going to have to get more militant, starting right now.
Still, when you look at the actual numbers, it's not all that bad. 82% of the deluded followers of D. James Kennedy's wacky ministry think atheists are "very dangerous". I think there was a general trend of getting twitterpated…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2008I'm about halfway through Reza Aslan's book No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, published in 2005. I've read enough to recommend the book whole-heartedly. Aslan is an excellent writer who presents some very dry material with a lot of verve. At times the book is hard to put down.
On the other hand, I don't entirely buy Aslan's view of things.
As Aslan tells it, Muhammad was a social reformer of stunning moral insight, far ahead of his time on the subject of social, especially gender, equality. The notion of jihad, far from being a license to go out and kill…