religion
jrosenhouse | May 16, 2011Update, May 17, 2:35 pm: Many thanks to Jerry Coyne for clearing up the question of Richard Dawkins's views on human inevitability in evolution. As I thought, Dawkins does not hold the view Ruse attributed to him. Coyne has Dawkins's response to Ruse's piece, so follow the link and go have a look.
It's been all book, all the time around here. The first draft of the BECB (that's the big evolution/creation book) has benefited mightily from the heroic efforts of a number of proofreaders, but this has meant a certain amount of rewriting to produce the second draft. I'm putting the finishing…
pharyngula | May 16, 2011Since there is so much noise about the predicted Rapture, everyone seems to be planning to riff on it this weekend. Wichita State University is have a Rapture Day, just for the shenanigans.
Ah, another opportunity to laugh at religion. As if there's a shortage of such opportunities.
pharyngula | May 13, 2011I knew it would come to this. There's been long-running contention over the government-sponsored chaplaincy programs in Australia — those crazy mad independent godless Aussies actually pay good money to have these goofy Christian wankers sit in their public schools and provide…heck, I don't know what. But now it has suddenly and justifiable led to public outrage because the chief executive for one of the cults that provides chaplains has openly stated that Christians from other countries envy the access their proselytizers have to public school kids, and has bragged about converting kids.
In…
pharyngula | May 10, 2011Salon has a tidy summary of the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping.
On May 21, "starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth," he says. The true Christian believers -- he hopes he's one of them -- will be "raptured": They'll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?
"It's just the horror of horror stories," he says, "and on top of all that, there's no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and…
gregladen | May 10, 2011You've all seen the photograph. Here's a closeup:
On the right is a bunch of people in the Sitch Room at the White House watching in-house coverage of the Navy Seals taking out O-b-L. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counter Intel Adviser Audrey Tomason are, notably, the only women in the room. There are not a lot of women in the highest echelon of power in the US, it would seem. The photograph on the left is the same shot published in the 'newspaper' Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn Hasidic publication. Here, the two women who actually were in the room have been deleted for religious reasons…
pharyngula | May 9, 2011This past weekend, I was feebly confronted by a Canadian creationist, David Buckna, with a list of his objections to evolution. I spent a fair amount of time trying to hammer him with the answers, and the most remarkable thing was that every time we'd start digging into a topic, he'd suddenly change subjects to another item on his list, and then, later, he'd switch back to the original topic at the very beginning of his harangue, as if I'd never said anything. And now he's pestering me in email, sending me more quotes (that's all he's got — no thoughts, just quotes) and rehashing pointlessly…
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2011Except for the part about getting up early on a Saturday, I've always kind of liked graduation. Quite a few of our graduating majors have had several courses with me, so it was nice to be able to congratulate them and meet their families. And since our stadium here is currently under construction, we have temporarily dispensed with the big, everyone-in-one-place ceremony in favor of a series of smaller productions, one for each college within the university. That gets the whole thing down to just under an hour, which seems like a good length.
And since I'm up at this hour anyway I might…
gregladen | May 4, 2011I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a "New Atheist" is how we argued, and not what we think.
When I say "always thought" I mean for the last four years max, and when I say "naively and probably incorrectly" I might be only kidding.
The "new" part of "New Atheism" to me has always been this: You are willing to get up into some dude's face to make your argument because religion, with its centuries of experience in being on the scene for…
pharyngula | May 3, 2011They never seem to understand why priests get singled out. If I claimed to have special privileges and attention from a super-being, shouldn't I also accept some greater responsibilities? Unless I were just lying about being best friends with Superman, that is.
pharyngula | April 30, 2011It's always interesting when some god-walloper honestly follows through on the logical implications of his beliefs — he basically is compelled to admit that if you worship a tyrannical monster, you have to end up rationalizing monstrous tyrannies. The latest to enlighten us with excuses for bronze age barbarisms and brutalities is William Lane Craig, who thinks that tales from the Bible of God's Chosen People slaughtering babies is A-OK:
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God's grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually…
jrosenhouse | April 29, 2011Today is the last day of classes around here, meaning that I am just too darn happy to work up the righteous indignation needed for a proper blog post. So your homework is to go read this excellent essay from Russell Blackford. It is mostly directed at the recent chest-thumping of Michael Ruse, but also addresses some other issues as well. I especially appreciated this part:
For Ruse, the whole point seems to be that a bright line must be drawn between religion and science, but this is not merely simplistic, misleading and wrong - though it is all of those. It is impossible.
Whatever we…
oracknows | April 29, 2011With the utter ridiculousness of the arguments laid down by Dr. Oz when Steve Novella appeared on his show and the even more ridiculous silliness of J.B. Handley thinking that Matt Carey, a.k.a. Sullivan, is really Bonnie Offit, I had originally thought that I should find some peer-reviewed scientific article today to do a sober, serious analysis of some cool bit of science. Hey, it sounded like a good idea. Then I finished my day, which was my clinic day, and I was simply too tired to summon up the effort it would take to go through a paper, analyze it, and write up that analysis for the…
pharyngula | April 25, 2011I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There's just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it's a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he's arguing that Hell must exist.
As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn't have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round…
pharyngula | April 24, 2011Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:
Dear comrades:
Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America--indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There's little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of…
jrosenhouse | April 22, 2011Update: Saturday, 2:48 am. The original version of this post contained an unkind remark directed towards Josh Rosenau. My intention was facetious hyperbole, but upon further reflection I've decided that my remark is too easily misunderstood as personally acrimonious. For that reason I have revised that sentence, while leaving unchanged the substantive points I was making.
That's the title of a new study (PDF format) by psychologist Wll Gervais, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Here's the abstract:
Although prejudice is typically positively related to…
oracknows | April 21, 2011Several of you have been sending me this; so I would be remiss not to note that there is a rather lengthy profile of Generation Rescue's favorite "martyred" anti-vaccine hero, disgraced and discredited British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, in this weekend's New York Times Magazine entitled The Crash and Burn of an Autism Guru. By and large, it's not bad, but what caught my attention wasn't so much the story of Andrew Wakefield, with which I have, sadly, become intimately familiar, or the usual self-pitying, self-serving excuses and denials of Wakefield himself. Rather, it's what the…
oracknows | April 20, 2011Over the years, I've learned that a lot of surgeons are very religious. Actually, a lot of doctors are quite religious. Indeed, long ago in the history of this blog, back when I used to write about evolution a lot more than I do these days, I've pointed out that at least as many physicians as the general public accept "intelligent design" creationism as a valid description of the origin of life. Indeed, 15% of physicians believe that states should be required to teach ID and 50% believe that states should be permitted to teach it. In other words, approximately 65% of physicians are in favor…
jrosenhouse | April 19, 2011Given all the semi-coherent venom coming from people like Michael Ruse and Jacques Berlinerblau lately, I'd say the Chronicle of Higher Education is lucky to have David Barash in its stable of bloggers. This recent post is a most welcome affirmation:
Two decades ago, I wrote a book proposal for a volume to be titled “The Atheist's Bible.” It was embraced by a major publishing house but not by my wife, who worried that such a book, appearing in the Age of Endarkenment then known as the Reagan Administration might well subject our children to ostracism, verbal abuse and even possible physical…
pharyngula | April 19, 2011The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano's Piss Christ.
On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery…
jrosenhouse | April 18, 2011Prior to my journey to the University of Maryland last week, I mentioned to my classes that I would be seeing Richard Dawkins speak. On a whim, I asked how many of them had heard of Dawkins. I have about sixty students in three courses this term. The number who raised their hands? Six.
Submitted for what it's worth.