Atheism
purepedantry | May 21, 2007Daniel Lazare, writing in the Nation, has an interesting article about differences of opinion even among atheists:
This is the problem, more or less, confronting today's reinvigorated atheist movement. For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian…
clock | May 1, 2007Out in the real world, especially in the Red States and the Bible Belt, atheists tend to go on with their lives without actively tooting their horns every day everywhere. But online, the Internets are teeming with atheists suggesting that there may be more of us in the general population than what the various censuses show, even if one controls for such things as self-selection, i.e., repressed atheists tending to vent their atheism online if prohibited from doing so offline. The Carnival of the Godless has been going on for some time now and it has grown really big, to the point of…
clock | April 24, 2007Barry Saunders is a local columnist for Raleigh News & Observer who I never thought was very funny (there is a mysoginist streak in his writing) so I rarely read him these days. But the other day I could not help but notice that he started his column with the old "no atheists in foxholes" stupidity - in context of the VT massacre, of course.
I was far too busy these last couple of days to do anything about it myself, feeling confident that he was gonna hear about it from many others. And, sure he did. Just like Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer and John Burnett (the latter two…
clock | April 15, 2007Carnival of the Godless #64, brilliantly hosted and edited by TNG is up on Neural Gourmet. Enjoy.
clock | April 11, 2007As you know, the last several days saw quite a flurry of blog posts about framing science. I posted my thoughts here and I keep updating my post with links to all the new posts as they show up (except the expected drivel by William Dembski, some minor creaitonists and Lubos Motl). Some of the other bloggers ignored my post, many linked to it without comment, and many linked to it with positive commentary - with two exceptions.
One was Larry Moran (who probably skimmed it quickly, found what he did not like in it with his own frame of mind at the time, and used it as a starting point to…
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
clock | April 5, 2007Neural Gourmet and Blue Gal are organizing a massive blogospheric Blog Against Theocracy weekend:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism,…
clock | March 25, 2007Ed Cone's today's column addresses the changes in the way we talk about religion, particularly in the sphere of politics: from James Dobson to Pete Stark, from Mitt Romney to Amanda Marcotte - The last taboos in politics:
But there seems to be something bigger afoot, a willingness to challenge the traditional eggshell-walking practiced around the beliefs of others, and a self-confidence about frank claims of disbelief in the broader culture...
Yes, we talk more about it, due to the vocal atheists and their books, and the debate that started with the focus on the authors has now shifted to…
clock | March 24, 2007When a newspaper publishes a column about religion (in their Religion section) that takes into account only the Christian point of view, someone is bound to object.
When the newspaper rectifies the error by publishing an article by an atheist, then, of course, some Christianists are going to object as well.
Discussion follows - kinda basic, embryonic and naive compared to informed and sophisticated discussions we often have on atheists blogs - but a discussion nonetheless, involving local (Greensboro NC) readers of the paper.
Hat-tip: Ed Cone
clock | February 15, 2007I have read "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and "Breaking The Spell" by Daniel Dennett a couple of months ago, could not bear to slog all the way through "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, and am still waiting to get my copies of "God: the Failed Hypothesis" by Victor Stenger and "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion" by Barbara J. King. I was going to write a big meta-review of all of them together, perhaps adding in "Darwin's Cathedral" by David Sloan Wilson as an anti-toxin to the Dawkins/Dennet naive understanding of evolution (and just plain old nastiness…
clock | February 8, 2007Ah, why do I have to be so busy on a news-filled day (no, not Anna Nicole Smith)? I barely saw the computer today. I'd get home, have about 5 minutes before I have to go out again and so on. NPR did not mention Edwards until 4pm or so (that I heard in the car), so when I first got home I only had time to open e-mail, scan about 50 new messages, home in to the one that had the news, open it, get the links and quickly post without more than a quick skim of the statements by Edwards and others, let alone any time to add commentary (except for what the title implied I felt at the time). And…
clock | February 7, 2007Revere, PZ, Larry and Ed all agree with each other, which means they must all be correct on this story as this does not happen so often. But the extraordinarily stupid and hateful anti-atheist show CNN had the other day is so obviously wrong at every level and from every angle. CNN should suffer for this and made to crawl and apologize and fire a few people involved and cry and plead and promise they'll never do something like this again and made an example for all the other cable and network news shows.
clock | January 30, 2007[Pushed to the top of the page due to interesting updates...]
Ah, the perils of growing traffic! I get e-mail. Usually those are nice questions about sleep disorders, or requests for link exchanges. But today I got a christianist. Oy vey!
I hope I never get PZ's traffic - I guess he gets dozens of those a day! And I don't even bash religion on my blog every day like he does.
Below the fold is the exchange so far:
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to me:
Sir, you say that you are atheist? Meaning you KNOW God doesn't exist. This would imply that you have absolute knowledge right? You…
clock | January 24, 2007Mormon Missionaries knocked on a wrong door earlier today. I think their heads are still spinning...
clock | December 16, 2006Yesterday I listened to a segment on All Things Considered called Atheist Brigade Takes Arguments to the Tolerant (podcast) with some trepidation. But, when it all ended, I thought it was not bad at all. Apart from a couple of intolerant sentences in the beginning by someone named Wolf (if I remember correctly) and a stupid quote of Pat Robertson, most of the time was given to Sam Harris who also had the last word. The phrase "no atheists in foxholes" was debunked and an NPR correspondent (John Burnett) who used it in the past came on the show to apologize. It is telling that he had no…
clock | December 12, 2006Of Religion and Morality (December 02, 2005)
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From I Am An Atheist, via Pratie Place, come these "commandments":
As an atheist you have a number of rights and responsibilities. These include (but are not limited to):
1. Have no gods.
2. Don't worship stuff.
3. Be polite.
4. Take a day off once in a while.
5. Be nice to folks.
6. Don't kill people.
7. Don't fool around on your significant other.
8. Don't steal stuff.
9. Don't lie about stuff.
10. Don't be greedy.
Remember, theists will condemn you for living by this code because you are doing…
clock | November 29, 2006While all this was going on I was wondering where Jason Rosenhouse would stand on all of this. He is back from a break and has two posts on the issue here and here.
Update: Chris Rowan wrote an intriguing analysis and a huge thread on the topic is still ongoing on Panda's Thumb
clock | November 23, 2006In the past we had to make sure to remember to tell the kids not to make fun of their cousins (and adults) for saying a prayer before the Thanksgivings dinner. We tried to give a personal example by holding hands with other family members, bowing our heads and supressing laughter for the duration.
This year, for the first time, we had a Thanksgivings dinner at home, just the four of us. When the dinner was served and we sat around the table we looked at each other with a question mark on our faces - what to do? My wife saved the day:"Thank God we do not have to say a prayer tonight!"
Amen…