Well Sarah Palin is fer sher comedy gold, right? (Provided nobody ever lets her get anywhere near real power ever ever again.) I’m sure I speak for many Americans when I say I couldn’t believe what I was hearing yesterday – Tina Fey and all the writers at SNL coked to the gills couldn’t have done it better. ‘I’m doing what’s best for Alaska’ by by stopping being its governor. Well that’s always been my view, certainly! And then all the dynamic thrusting energetic plucky metaphors and stories to say why she was dumping an elected office a year and a half before her term expires. Yes indeedy you betcha, you can’t get much more plucky and determined than that! … Read the rest

Udo and Russell did an interview about 50 Voices of Disbelief recently.

Part of the first question was why this book, and what Udo said certainly resonated:

I guess my main motive was some kind of frustration (that’s putting it mildly) about religious people’s published musings about how they “struggled to find God” only to eventually succumb to the delusions we all know too well. It seemed only fair game to me to let reality-based people explain why they did better.

Quite. For all the screeching about the dreaded ‘newatheism’ the default position is still that there’s something impressive about ‘struggling’ with ‘faith’ and then collapsing into the old nonsense again.

The candle on the cover and what it means:… Read the rest

Even funnier than Sarah Palin.

A Turkish game show is challenging atheists to reassess their views and win “the biggest prize ever”. Penitents Compete will bring together an Islamic imam, a Jewish rabbi, a Buddhist monk and a Greek Orthodox priest seeking to convert the atheists. The prize for any converted contestants is an expenses-paid pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen faith.

But that’s not a prize unless you do in fact convert, so it’s not going to function as a prize for the people who are supposed to convert because they won’t want the thing offered – it won’t appeal to them – in fact it will repel them. It’s like saying the prize is a … Read the rest

Chris Mooney (yes, it’s not over after all) disagrees with Jerry Coyne (and by extension me, and Austin Cline, and anyone else who has made the same point) about what the Pew report tells us about the putative compatibility of science and religion.

Let me say at the outset that I find it regrettable, just as Dr. Coyne does, that people are rejecting scientific findings due to their religion. That’s not cool. It’s not acceptable. And it is of course one of the key reasons we have an “unscientific America.”

But where Coyne sees sheer science-religion incompatibility, I see something else: An opportunity. For it seems to me that if we could only dislodge the idea that evolution is contradictory

Guess who’s back – why, it’s Madeleine Bunting. ‘What’s she up to now?’ you cry in pleased surprise. She’s going out of her way to show us how silly she can be, yet again.

There is a school of thought that the new atheists have so polarised the debate about the relationship between science and religion that it’s not a conversation worth having. The “Ditchkins” – as Terry Eagleton describes them in his recent book – have developed such a crude argument about religion based on their boasted ignorance of the thinking which underpins belief that it’s hard to know how a dialogue is possible.

‘School of thought’ – she means herself saying it, and Terry Eagleton saying it, … Read the rest