Religion
drorzel | September 13, 2008A while back, at dinner, I made my usual complaint that Slacktivist doesn't get enough attention. Kate expressed some doubts, because he certainly seems to have a large number of readers and commenters.
The problem is, it's not read by the people who really need to be reading it, and today provides an excellent example. Steve Benen at the new and prolific Washington Monthly is mystified by Sarah Palin:
Let's not play games. Yes, there have been a variety of foreign policy maxims dubbed the "Bush Doctrine" over the years. If Sarah Palin heard the question and said, "Which one?" I would have…
drorzel | September 2, 2008Comedy Central is re-playing Friday's episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert's interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It's interesting to see that she doesn't really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he's had on in his various interview segments, in more or less the same way:
I doubt there's really any way to not look somewhat silly, given his whack-job act and good video editing, but it's always a little surprising just how unprepared a lot of his interview subjects are. You'd think they'd have some…
drorzel | July 25, 2008I was just saying at dinner that I didn't think there was anything interesting to say in response to the whole "cracker" kerfuffle. Then I got home, and saw Daniel Davies's post, which is too good not to link. My hat's off to him.
No, I'm not going to quote what he said-- it's short, you can go over there and read it yourself.
drorzel | July 16, 2008Just before we turn the corner, a woman goes jogging past with a Golden Retriever. As we continue on our way, I can hear the Doberman three houses up barking at them as they go past. The windows muffle the sound, but I can make out a bit of it. "Get offa my lawn! Gonna bite you! My lawn!"
When we reach the end of their driveway, Emmy immediately squats. The Doberman goes nuts. "My lawn! Kill you! Go away! My lawn! Kill you!" Emmy hackles all over, all the way down to her tail, and makes little distressed noises.
When we get clear of the Doberman's yard, and the barking subsides, she stops and…
drorzel | May 27, 2008I did a few of these a while back, and then, as usual, sort of stopped posting on the subject. There are a limited number of articles on science, religion, and culture wars that actually catch and hold my interest, so it's hard to populate a regular links dump.
Of course, I could always just mirror the RSS feed from Slacktivist, which is, week after week, month after month, year after year the best writing on the Internet about religion and politics. I'd particularly like to note his recent post on an antidote to the Left Behind books, in which he celebrates nearing the end of volume one by…
drorzel | May 21, 2008Fred Clark of Slacktivist points to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and specifically their Banners Across America project:
NRCAT is making June the month for Banners Across America! We are asking congregations of all sizes, from every state, and all faiths, to join in a public witness against torture by displaying a banner outside their place of worship during Torture Awareness Month (June 2008).
Our goal is to have banners displayed by NRCAT member congregations in all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico.
(Update: Note that the map is deceptive-- they have a list of 200-ish…
drorzel | May 19, 2008Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson and picked up by Ross Douthat), and offers an alternate theory for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe:
This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So…
drorzel | May 2, 2008Here is a statement:
The Red Sox are the greatest single franchise in any sport in history.
Is this a scientific statement? Should it be?
How can you tell whether it's scientific or not?
(The statement in question was uttered by a classmate of mine at Williams in 1991 or so, and we spent an entire dinner arguing about it. I still think it's one of the dumbest assertions I've ever heard.)
drorzel | April 30, 2008The Mad Biologist, like 80% of ScienceBlogs, is mad at Chris Mooney:
Here's the problem: you keep coming to evolutionary biologists with a problem (the perception of evolutionary biology), and you don't have a solution. Do you think there's a single evolutionary biologist who is happy with public opinion regarding evolution and creationism? But you're not giving us concrete solutions.
Between teaching and research, along with all of service obligations expected of us (including public outreach), we have too much to do. When we are then told that we need to somehow organize a pro-…
drorzel | April 29, 2008Via the Zeitgeist, the Templeton Foundation has asked a bunch of famous smart people "Does science make belief in God obsolete?" I wouldn't ordinarily note this, but if you scroll down a little, you'll find my thesis advisor, Bill Phillips, who offers an "Absolutely Not!":
[A] scientist can believe in God because such belief is not a scientific matter. Scientific statements must be "falsifiable." That is, there must be some outcome that at least in principle could show that the statement is false. I might say, "Einstein's theory of relativity correctly describes the behavior of visible…
drorzel | April 27, 2008The big science-and-religion issue of the week has been Expelled, which The AV Club gave an F, writing:
Perhaps what Bruce Chapman of ID advocacy group The Discovery Institute says about Darwinists applies best to Expelled: "People who don't have an argument are reduced to throwing sand in your eyes." If only this movie could be washed away as easily.
I'm amazed at the number of otherwise sensible people who have paid to see this cinematic turd. Not only does it sound about as appealing as oral surgery, but I'm not willing to see one nickel of my beer money go to the dishonest swine who made…
drorzel | April 19, 2008There's just no getting away from science-and-religion. Yesterday's (snail) mail brought a flier from the Williams College Society of Alumni, giving the schedule of events for my upcoming 15th (!!) college reunion. The very first item on Thursday's list of faculty lectures:
1 p.m. "Celebrating Evolution from a Religious Perspective" featuring Stuart Crampton '58, Barclay Jermain Prof. of Natural Philosophy, Emeritus and Richard Spalding, Chaplain to the College
That would actually probably be pretty interesting-- Prof. Crampton was co-advisor for my senior thesis, and he's a really smart…
drorzel | April 19, 2008The whole framing/ "screechy monkeys" fracas led to a number of people asking for more frequent postings emphasizing a more moderate view of the great science and religion flamewars. As I said at the time, I'm a little hesitant about this, because there just isn't that much there that crosses the posting threshold for me-- I just don't care enough about most of the incidents that generate noise here to deal with the hassles that come with posting.
In an effort to do a little good by speaking out more, I'll try to compromise by posting occasional collections of science-and-religion related…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm not sure whether he's making some kind of obscure point, or just trolling, but John Scalzi gave a recent installment of his "Big Idea" series over to the witterings of "Vox Day," talking about his book The Irrational Atheist. Curse you, Scalzi, for getting me to even look at that.
And it's not just me-- John undoubtedly has readers who had never encountered Mr. "Day" before. Don't you know that exposing innocent people to "Vox Day" has been classified as a war crime, and earnes you ten thousand years in Purgatory?
Anyway, having spent a bunch of time recently complaining about a lack of…
drorzel | April 7, 2008I had planned to let the current round of screechy-monkey-bashing die, but I woke up this morning to an accusation from commenter Andrew that I don't want to leave unanswered:
As for the blog - I'm not sure you are actually moderate really, it sounds more like vaguely apathetic. Or more accurately (and without the negative connotations), perhaps "unconcerned" would suffice. As you don't seem to be pushing for any moderate position as much as you are pushing for the (as you see them) fringe views to kindly quieten the hell down so you can get on with stuff you do find interesting/concerning…
drorzel | April 6, 2008Stealing a post-generating method from Brad DeLong, Bill Tozier posted and interesting comment that I wanted to highlight:
I've often wondered why people place me (a moderate in a lot of polarized
debates) "in the middle".
I think I'm orthogonal, not "in the middle". I'm concerned about
plenty of things; they're just not what's being discussed, and in some
cases they can't even be framed in the terms used in the core debate. My
suspicions grow that fundamentalism should not be defined as being extreme,
or merely holding extreme opinions, but rather as framing every discussion
including those…
drorzel | April 5, 2008It's probably a little foolish to continue this on a Saturday, but I'd like to wrap up the giant framing/ religion/ screechy monkeys mess and get back to more pleasant topics, at least for a while. Putting it off until Monday would make this more visible, but it would also drag things out, so I'm just going to get it out of the way now.
In the wake of my two recent posts about the "framing" controversy, I've gotten a number of comments and emails on the general topic of speaking out. These come in two basic forms, which I would paraphrase as:
It's very important for people with more moderate…
drorzel | April 4, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about framing, Damian offers a long comment that doesn't actually contradict anything I said, but re-frames it in terms more complimentary to the Dawkins/ Myers side of things. I may deal with some of what he says over there (probably not today, though, as I have a class to teach), but I wanted to single out one particular part of his comment for response:
Nisbet has claimed repeatedly, and without much evidence I might add, that PZ and Dawkins are poor advocates for science. For a start, neither PZ or Dawkins has ever claimed to be an advocate (at least,…
drorzel | March 21, 2008There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick's Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some students from one of the local fraternities. Inevitably, one of them asked me what I really think about frats.
This is a hot topic on campus, because fraternities have historically been huge at Union, but there are a number of people on the faculty who make no secret of their opinion that…
drorzel | March 18, 2008Adrienne asks:
Why, when you apparently are an agnostic or atheist, did you get married in a church? And are you going to baptize your baby? Raise him/her in a religious framework?
Now, here's a nice volatile question...
Why did we get married in a church? Because religion is more than just superstition and mythology. I've written about this before, and will no doubt write about it again.
My family is Catholic, and I was raised Catholic. I got out of school for an hour or so on Wednesday afternoon for religious education classes in middle school, and in junior high, I went to confirmation…