godlessness
pharyngula | June 6, 2010
At the youtube page for this video, it's recommended that you buy his DVD. I agree! I want it! But, unfortunately, I only found one Minchin DVD at Amazon, and it won't play in the US. Any suggestions? Anyone? When I see Tim Minchin in London in the fall, do I have to beat him up, steal his computer, bootleg everything he has encoded on it, and get rich selling the stolen data on the internet? No, that wouldn't be nice at all, especially since he'd probably beat me up and then write a satirical song about me that would mean I could never leave my house ever again.
Where's the Minchin HBO…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010Just for something completely different, here's an email I just got that isn't threatening me with death or causing me to choke while laughing because of its absurdity.
Dr. Myers,
Over the last several years I have been "converting" from a once very strong evangelical faith to atheism. It was a long road and involved many different facets, one of which was a steady tide of atheist reason and thought I received online. And my main source, well none other then you, Dr. Myers. My first movement towards rationality came when I started researching evolution and what do you know, it was true…
pharyngula | June 2, 2010I'm really confused by this psychology study — the problem is that I'm getting it second-hand, and the source is a poster at a meeting. It's interesting, but I want to know more.
Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the "Bering in Mind" blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American MIND), she asked them to speculate about why these important…
pharyngula | May 31, 2010Nicholas Kristof seems like a decent enough fellow, with a concern for humanitarian causes. He's also something of a simpering apologist for religion — anything with a whiff of godlessness seems to put him on edge and start him whining about intolerant, obnoxious atheists.
He is definitely not the right person to have review Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book. He might be able to sympathize with the human rights issues she confronts, but at the same time he's got a kind of willful blindness to the contributions religion makes to human misery, and is guaranteed to belittle the problem of Islam.
If you…
pharyngula | May 31, 2010I know, unbelievable, isn't it? They're gathering to congratulate Paul Gill on completing his traverse of Ireland to protest the blasphemy law. It sounds like it's been a successful consciousness-raising effort.
People all along the west coast have been incredibly supportive. Many people have refused to take payment for meals and staying at campsites, and comedian Tommy Tiernan met Paul to express his support. And you can give him a boost by joining him today, either on the final leg of the walk or later in Sandino's bar, or else by texting him a message of congratulations to +35386 7325365…
pharyngula | May 30, 2010A strange thing has happened in this country: somehow, the United States of America has become a biblical entity. I know, the country didn't even exist for over a thousand years after the Bible was composed and assembled, and there isn't one word about the USA in the text, but you couldn't tell from the way some people have confused patriotism and piety.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called "It Can't Happen Here," about an America taken over by a populist dictator. His hero explained how that could happen:
Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more…
pharyngula | May 25, 2010Maybe I should have spent more time there on my trips to Rochester and Syracuse — it seems that region was also a hotbed of freethought. And look there's an Ingersoll Museum in Dresden!
pharyngula | May 25, 2010The Paul Kurtz I remember was the serious, scholarly fellow at the forefront of the atheist movement, who wasn't shy about saying it the way it was. The New Kurtz is a more timid observer, who wants to criticize religion mildly without giving offense, and is more concerned about policing his fellow humanists and atheists than actually working to overcome the folly of religious belief.
In the latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine, Kurtz has an editorial that is all about tone rather than content; it de-emphasizes what we say and wants to make how we say it the most important criterion. It's…
pharyngula | May 24, 2010These conventions are popping up all over the place. Every time I mention one, I know there'll be a bunch of people complaining that it is too far or too expensive, but the hope is that one will be in your region and in your price range. This one is in Montreal on 1-3 October.
One huge relief: the Richard Dawkins award this year is going to Susan Jacoby, a wonderful choice. There will be no controversy at all this time, and it's well-deserved: if you haven't read Freethinkers yet, you should.
Although…they couldn't resist. It's like a red cape to a bull. They just had to put a poll on their…
pharyngula | May 21, 2010Draw Mohammed Day is over now, and we're getting the reactions now. Some people didn't get it, including
Greg Epstein.
There is a difference between making fun of religious or other ideas on a TV show that you can turn off, and doing it out in a public square where those likely to take offense simply can't avoid it. These chalk drawings are not a seminar on free speech; they are the atheist equivalent of the campus sidewalk preachers who used to irk me back in college. This is not even "Piss Christ," Andres Serrano's controversial 1987 photograph of a crucifix in urine. It is more like…
pharyngula | May 19, 2010Karl Giberson, who I've bashed once or twice, has a fresh new pile of nonsense on the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne has already tackled it, but it pushes a few of my buttons, so I've got to say my piece, too.
To summarize the Giberson nonsense briefly, he claims that Intelligent Design creationism is not dead, but is thriving, and in order to defeat it, we need to shut the atheists up who are making people choose between gods and science. I disagree with every bit of it.
ID is not only dead, it was stillborn. No one believes in it; it is a sterile abstraction with no evidence that was cobbled…
pharyngula | May 18, 2010I encourage young people to organize and promote freethought — it's the way we'll grow and become more influential. But there's no denying that sometimes it is hard, with even friendly, innocuous groups receiving public opposition. People resent the fact that other people don't need their god.
Here's a great example: Rising Sun High School in Maryland has the standard default take-it-for-granted attitude that Christianity is just fine — there's the usual well-funded and usually teacher-promoted evangelical groups, like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — and when one student tried to form…
pharyngula | May 16, 2010A very nice statement by Dawkins: the virtue of the New Atheist is clarity, not shrillness, not certainty, not militancy, and the problem is our opponents all have to be obscurantists to make excuses for folly.
pharyngula | May 16, 2010Half the people in the world commit this sin against god: they are born women.
It's an astounding thing that any women at all accept Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; these are profoundly misogynistic faiths. Throughout the Christian Bible, women are treated as chattel to be abused and misused, and uppity women are regarded as the worst of the lot, fit only to be slaughtered. There are parts of the Bible that read like snuff porn — but it's all OK, because it's the Bible, God's holy word, and if God is gonna have to choke a bitch, who are we to question it?
We can trace the attitude right back…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2010tags: Richard Feynman Talks About Doubt, Uncertainty and Religion, science, imagination, religion, god, doubt, uncertainty, beliefs, Richard Feynman, streaming video
Physicist Richard Feynman talks about the improbability of the existence of a god, and his thoughts about the mythologies that form the basis of religion.
pharyngula | May 14, 2010Yesterday, I mentioned this silly fellow Damon Linker, who complains that the New Atheists aren't sad enough about their godlessness. This seems to be the new gripe du jour; you can't be a serious atheist unless you're all broken up about the absence of god, and unless you tell all the believers how much you appreciate what their superstition brings to the world, and how now you're going to go home and cry because you have a god-shaped hole in your heart. It's deeply dishonest and stupid. If anybody tried to pull that nonsense on me in person they'd get a rude response that would reveal that…
pharyngula | May 7, 2010Paul Gill is protesting the Irish blasphemy law by walking across Ireland. It sounds like a wonderfully pleasant way to protest — there will be regular youtube videos, so everyone can get a look at the Irish countryside…and I hope citizens will step out to join him in short stretches of the long hike.
pharyngula | May 6, 2010
All the kerfuffle about people drawing Mohammed in recent years has been seriously misplaced: there is a very entertaining archive of Mohammed images, everything from serious medieval renditions to obscene contemporary scrawls. Cat's out of the bag, Muslims—pictures of Mohammed are everywhere, and they've been around for centuries.
In related news, the UW Madison Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics did their own consciousness raising excercise, chalking stick figure Mohammed's all over campus. Some of the reactions were amusing: I think it's clever that some of the opposition came along with…
pharyngula | May 5, 2010A deal has been struck to import Gudeløs into the US. This is good stuff; I've had one bottle of it, and was looking forward to tapping the source in Denmark, and now it looks like I may be able to get it more regularly.
Devil's Brew and the Danish Atheist Society have entered into an unholy alliance, and the result is 'Godless' - an ale brewed entirely without superstition. [Godless] is an imperial stout with burnt and sweetish impressions, together with notes of licorice. To exercise social responsibility, Devil's Brew donates one Danish Crown to the Danish Atheist Society for each bottle…
pharyngula | May 4, 2010The discussion is interesting. Sam Harris recently and infamously proposed that, contra Hume, you can derive an 'ought' from an 'is', and that science can therefore provide reasonable guidance towards a moral life. Sean Carroll disagrees at length.
I'm afraid that so far I'm in the Carroll camp. I think Harris is following a provocative and potentially useful track, but I'm not convinced. I think he's right in some of the examples he gives: science can trivially tell you that psychopaths and violent criminals and the pathologies produced by failed states in political and economic collapse are…