Atheism
gregladen | December 21, 2007The Catholic Church has repressed positive reviews of the movie The Golden Compass, and has encouraged people to not see the movie. Representatives of Catholic groups have spoken out forcefully, on the verge of Holy War Level Talk, against the movie and the book. Now we year news of an event that started to play out a few weeks ago and that is now coming to a head: One school district has banned the book. The Halton Catholic District board has removed the His Dark Materials trilogy from the library shelves in that district.
The trio of books was removed from library shelves last November…
gregladen | December 18, 2007Statistically, atheists have a higher intelligence than people with a strong religious faith. The difference is 5.8 points, according to a new study by the Danish professor of developmental psychology, Helmuth Nyborg.
Read all about it here.
gregladen | December 15, 2007I am amazed at the giddiness amongst Christian Fundamentalists that has fomented from the mere utterance of a holiday greeting by Richard Dawkins. The counter-insurgents in the War on Christmas ... the Red White and Blue, squeaky-faced smirking shits that call themselves commentators or preachers are creaming in their jeans. But they are also stepping over the line, and I'm calling them on it.
I do not really know or care what Richard Dawkins thinks, or said, about Christmas. I do know what I think and how my multi-canonical family celebrates the holidays, and I certainly know a…
gregladen | December 14, 2007
Or maybe even PCP...
If religion was merely an opiate, that would be cool. There would be a lot of stoned people waking around. But it could be argued that religion is a harder drug, one that makes people do harder, more unsavory things than just sitting around bleary eyed and happy. Like killing people.
A new book addressing the horrors of religion is in press. This is Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian.
Avakian takes an explicitly Marxist approach to examine the question of what harm can come from believing in god (any god).…
gregladen | December 10, 2007Chistians, especially Catholics, continue "tizzy" regarding The Golden Compass, based on books by atheist Philip Pullman. I heard a woman from the Catholic League, spitting and furming on MSNBC about how this movie was really really bad because it would ...
Lead to children to reading the books..
Read the books? Hey, read the books! Next thing you know, the children will be cannibalizing each other when we are not looking....
From a column in the Times Record New, Wichita:
C'mon, people. "The Golden Compass" is a fantasy film - a fantasy film - which generally means it's not real.
You can…
gregladen | December 9, 2007... but fun on so many levels...
The scene: At a gathering of semi related people, with my daughter, sitting next to two conservative born again Christians (one being a "perfected" Jew). All very nice people in their own way, just don't bring up religion.
Then M comes along very interested in discussing The Golden Compass ... could she take Julia to the movie, has she seen it yet, etc?
I'm thinking, great, good idea, and I'm thinking how smart I am for deciding to get The Golden Compass books for Julia for Solstice. That's when Julia pipes up and says "Yea, I love those books I've read…
gregladen | December 7, 2007Praise Nothin' We're in the Age o' Reason, Brother!
Foot worship?
[hat tip: Spanish Inquisitor]
purepedantry | December 4, 2007This is just lame. Atheist parents in Palo Alto have set up an atheist Sunday school:
The Palo Alto Sunday family program uses music, art and discussion to encourage personal expression, intellectual curiosity and collaboration. One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I'm Unique and Unrepeatable, set to the tune of Ten Little Indians, instead of traditional Sunday-school songs like Jesus Loves Me. Rather than listen to a Bible story, the class read Stone Soup, a secular parable of a…
gregladen | December 3, 2007There is a fight going on regarding the Internet Infidels Discussion Board. Details can be found here, at A Load of Bright. I'm not privy to any details, and I don't think I want to be. Those folks just need to learn to get along.
From Daylight Atheism:
Here's my conclusion, and if you read nothing else of this post, read this:
So long as the current management persists, I will no longer be supporting the Internet Infidels organization (www.infidels.org). I will also no longer participate in or support the Internet Infidels discussion board (www.iidb.org). I strongly recommend that all my…
gregladen | December 2, 2007Here we have another example of the link between Christian religion, Creationism, and Dishonesty. This time, it is in the post-game analysis of John West's talk at the University of Minnesota, posted on the Discovery Institutes's Web Site.
The post by Bruce Chapman, who was not at the talk, is based on "two calls" Bruce got about the talk. It is full of lies and misinformation, which are pretty much obliterated in this post by PZ Myers, which appeared on the Internet only moments ago.
What I find most amazing is this: West was asked explicitly if he was making a link between the early…
gregladen | December 1, 2007The pope, Benedict XVI, released an encyclical on Friday stating that atheism was responsibile for great cruelties and violations of justice. In fact, for some of the worst such wrongs in all of history.
He offered, as an alternative to athesims, well, actually, catholicism. I call "Bias!"
Italy's Union of Atheists, Agnostics and Rationalists (UAAR) said by taking such stands the Pope would push more people away from the Church.
"The existence of a billion non-believers in the world should be enough to make the Pope understand that man can live very well without God, but with reason," a…
gregladen | November 30, 2007Headline: Poll finds more Americans believe in devil than Darwin
DALLAS (Reuters Life!) - More Americans believe in a literal hell and the devil than Darwin's theory of evolution, according to a new Harris poll released on Thursday.
It is the latest survey to highlight America's deep level of religiosity, a cultural trait that sets it apart from much of the developed world.
It also helps explain many of its political battles which Europeans find bewildering, such as efforts to have "Intelligent Design" theory -- which holds life is too complex to have evolved by chance -- taught in schools…
gregladen | November 16, 2007Hot off the presses:
When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion....
The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design…
laelaps | November 6, 2007Back when I was a blogging greenhorn, right about this time last year, an evangelical YEC thought he had come up with an intellectual coup de grâce to make me see "the light"; "Antony Flew believes in a god, so there." (Ok, so I'm paraphrasing just a bit) Chalk it up to ignorance, but I had never even heard of Antony Flew, and saying that he believed in a deity had about as much effect on me as saying "Charlie Parker thought the sky was purple" (and given his problems with drug addiction, maybe he sometimes did). Still, over and over again Christian apologists have invoked Flew's name and I…
purepedantry | October 29, 2007Writing in the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple criticizes the equivalence of religion with the immoral and atheism with the moral:
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens's drumbeat in God Is Not Great: "Religion spoils everything."
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these…
purepedantry | September 17, 2007Last week, I posted a long argument for why I believe pairing science and atheism is a poor strategic choice for scientists. The response to that article has I think been largely positive, but I do want to address the criticisms of it now that I have had a chance to read all the comments and posts about it.
Let me state clearly, though, that I think all of the counter-arguments are legitimate. The world is a complicated place, and I have no special insight into its workings.
Further, if any people find my arguments pejorative, I apologize. It was my intent that this discussion be conducted…
purepedantry | September 12, 2007
In 1922, John Dewey, pragmatist philosopher and champion of Progressive education, wrote an article in The New Republic entitled "The American Intellectual Frontier." The subject was William Jennings Bryan's attack on evolution that would later culminate in the Scopes trial. The argument that Dewey made was not what you would think, however. Though he was most definitely part of the the Northeastern liberal establishment at the time, he did not dismiss Bryan's attacks as indicative of rural ignorance.
Instead, he made the argument that while he disagreed with Bryan, liberals had to take…
clock | July 12, 2007Richard Dawkins is doing a reading/signing at Kepler's bookstore this Saturday. Any Bay Area bloggers wanna go?
purepedantry | June 29, 2007Matt Nisbet at Framing Science cites an article by DJ Grothe and Austin Dacey arguing the negative:
Women, people of color, and GLBTs have consistently faced discrimination that substantially diminishes their basic life prospects-access to housing, health care, education, political participation, employment, and family benefits. Additionally, they have suffered violence and intimidation. For minorities defined by race, sex, and sexual orientation, civil rights movements were necessary to correct such grievous ill-treatment.
But do unbelievers really suffer comparable harm? Atheists are not…