godlessness
pharyngula | October 4, 2006By popular request, I've uploaded the slides I used in my talk at NDSU. I fear they won't be very useful; you can see the structure of the talk, but what I was saying was the meat. For instance, there's a slide that says "Francis Collins" and the title of his book, and what I did there was read an excerpt from his work, which isn't anywhere in that document. Mac users, you can download the Keynote file, which has all the nice builds and transitions; everyone else will have to make do with a bareboneshtml version (there are a couple of slides where I dissolve in some photos that overlay the…
pharyngula | October 3, 2006If it's quiet on Pharyngula today, it's because I'm off at NDSU giving a talk to the Science, Religion and Lunch seminar, in the Meadow Lark Room in the NDSU Memorial Union (any Fargo residents out there?). The title of the talk is "Accommodation isn't enough: why scientists need to speak out against religion", and yes, I'm expecting to stimulate people to argue with me.
My central argument is that religion and science are incompatible ways of knowing: that important decisions should be made on the basis of reason and evidence, and religion fosters the abandonment of those principles. You…
pharyngula | October 1, 2006Before you read further, browse the Carnival of the Godless. It'll salve the pain when you read about the new conservative perfidy.
Our Republican overlords have taken one more step on the road to theocracy with the approval of H.R. 2679, the Public Expression of Religion Act. You can read the full text of the bill, but here's the gist:
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a court shall not award reasonable fees and expenses of attorneys to the prevailing party on a claim of injury consisting of the violation of a prohibition in the Constitution against the establishment of religion…
pharyngula | September 30, 2006Here's another review of Dawkins' The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It's unbelievable, as if the critic hadn't actually read the book. Here's the hed/dek:
Dawkins needs to show some doubt
Scientists work in a field full of uncertainties. So how can some be so sure God doesn't exist? asks Stephen Unwin
Uh, what? Two things immediately come to mind: certainty isn't a claim Dawkins makes anywhere, and…Stephen Unwin???!? Unwin is a remarkably silly man, as anyone who has read his book, The Probability of God will know. Unwin goes on with some very strange inferences.
It is clear that on…
pharyngula | September 28, 2006Hey, this is a pretty good interview of Richard Dawkins by Jeremy Paxman. I don't know much about this Paxman fellow, but he asks hard, sharp questions, yet still gives Dawkins plenty of time to answer them. That's good interviewing technique, I think.
I'm not too impressed with the spartan set, putting them both in plain uncomfortable-looking chairs set all alone in an empty, echoing room…but it does put the focus on the words. They should have saved a few more pennies and just done audio.
(via Father Dan)
pharyngula | September 27, 2006My review of Dawkins' The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (currently at #4 on Amazon's bestseller list!) is in the latest issue of Seed, which showed up at my door while I was flying out East. They changed my suggested title, which I've at least used on this article, in favor of the simpler "Bad Religion". You could always buy the magazine to read it, but I'll give you a little taste of what I thought.
Oh, yeah…Seed does that nice plus of having an artist render a portrait of the author, so there's also a picture, artfully ruggedized and made much more attractive than I am in reality. Not…
pharyngula | September 24, 2006I'm going to be a bit distracted for a while, with some upcoming travel and various other bits of busy work, but I was listening to this lecture by Ken Miller (in which Carl Zimmer was in attendance, too) as I was puttering away on a lecture of my own . It's pretty much the same talk he gave in Kansas, sans talk of shooting at new targets and other obnoxious language, but I still find myself disagreeing with his conclusions. I had to take just a minute to bring up my objections.
He wants to argue that evolution is compatible with, even strengthens his faith, but his god is remarkably aloof…
pharyngula | September 23, 2006Do not be shocked and dismayed. I'm going to criticize adecision by NBC to strip "god" references from a kid's show.
Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber always had a moral message in their long-running "VeggieTales" series, a collection of animated home videos for children that encourage moral behavior based on Christian principles. But now that the vegetable stars have hit network television, they cannot speak as freely as they once did, and that has got the Parents Television Council steamed.
The conservative media-watchdog group issued a statement Wednesday blasting NBC, which airs "…
pharyngula | September 23, 2006The British seem to have good taste. Look who is at the top of the UK bestseller list:
I know what you are thinking: Where can I get my hands on a copy of Wintersmith? Aside from that, though, it's impressive that The God Delusion has shot to the top so quickly. When I looked at the list of American best sellers, I saw that it wasn't as depressing as I feared:
Chomsky and
Frank Rich on top,
Sam Harris is at #5, and
Dawkins is at #12 and climbing fast. Maybe there's some hope for us after all—at least the literate segment of our population is pondering interesting views.
We still always get…
pharyngula | September 22, 2006Check it out: The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is an Anglo-American secular charitable organization that is in the process of being set up. They have a long list of causes they will support—science and education on the top of the list, but also many other traditional charitable goals—and all with an overt secular mission. It is a brilliant idea I can get behind, and I think it has the potential to give a visible focus to the good efforts of godless people everywhere.
pharyngula | September 19, 2006Hrm. Well. Since so many people are emailing me about this (I guess the book is officially out now, since so many are reading it), I'll come clean: I am mentioned briefly but flatteringly in Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I'll spare you all the mystery, and quote it here, blushingly. It's on page 69, in a section titled "The Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists" (no, I'm not one of the members, I'm a critic; but as you can tell from the title, it's a strong criticism of a school of thought that says we must appease the fence-straddlers who fear the…
pharyngula | September 17, 2006(click for whole cartoon)
What a shocking realization: Opus and I have a lot in common. Same purpose, the fondness for squid and cold weather…I don't think I'm a penguin, though.
It is a most excellent godless sermon.
pharyngula | September 13, 2006Frank the Financially Savvy Atheist has put out a call for deconversion stories. I already posted mine a while back—send him a link if you've got one!
pharyngula | September 7, 2006The Secular Coalition for America has put together a Secular Scorecard for our representatives in both houses of congress, evaluating them for how they voted on issues of importance (separation of church and state, science, funding religious organizations, that sort of thing) in the past year. It's interesting in a sad way in how it's split along party lines: the lesson is that the godless should never, ever vote Republican, but that Democrats are only mostly safe. There are a few screwballs like Salazar and Nelson of Nebraska that throw off the general rule that you can divide them neatly by…
pharyngula | September 3, 2006There are plenty of outspoken atheists in the United States—read the latest Carnival of the Godless #48 for a small sampling—but you can still find many mainstream journalists writing about them as if they were peculiar aliens living under a log with other unsavory and oddly constructed organisms. Today, it's Newsweek that exclaims in surprise that there are godless people among us.
It's not a very deep or thoughtful article, and what I found most noticeable about it is the obliviousness of the author. Here's how it starts:
Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly,…
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Two can play this game—Chad Orzel, who sometimes likes to blame his insufficient popularity on his off-puttingly deep wisdom and excessive sense of moderation and fair play, notes approvingly that "All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists," and that "certainty only comes from dogma," both rather interesting statements coming from a scientist. My certainty that I shouldn't step out of my second-story window, or that I shouldn't eat a large cake of rat poison, don't come from personal experience, but they aren't dogmatic, either—although I'm awfully darn certain that…
pharyngula | August 25, 2006I've been prodded by Marcus to mention a recent article by Brian Leiter, Could Mencken Write for a Newspaper Today? I think I just assumed everyone was already reading the Leiter Reports regularly.
Anyway, where are our modern Menckens—the acerbic, secular critics of the culture of the mindless? It's amazing what he could write in the early years of the last century; I'll also point out that Ingersoll got away with scathing criticisms of religion in the 19th century. Nowadays, though, people are actually shocked that anyone would question religious belief.
pharyngula | August 23, 2006Don't let the first paragraph stop you—it's awful. Once the reporter gets out of the way and lets Shermer get going, though, it's a good interview.
Here's the bad part of the opening:
Some of Shermer's ivory towerish science pals, like Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, told him not to bother with the I.D. boosters, that acknowledging them meant going along for their political ride, where the integrity of science was being run into the ground.
Gould and Dawkins have both said we shouldn't debate creationists—we shouldn't elevate them to the same status that science holds. But…
pharyngula | August 21, 2006Newsweek has a short article on military atheists and the discrimination they face.
"There are no atheists in foxholes," the old saw goes. The line, attributed to a WWII chaplain, has since been uttered countless times by grunts, chaplains and news anchors. But an increasingly vocal group of activists and soldiers--atheist soldiers--disagrees. "It's a denial of our contributions," says Master Sgt. Kathleen Johnson, who founded the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and who will be deployed to Iraq this fall. "A lot of people manage to serve without having to call on a higher…