Posts Tagged ‘ Can’t we all get along? ’

Being constructive

May 20th, 2011 12:23 pm | By

Chris Stedman is patting himself on the back again for being more “constructive” and bridge-building and worried about marginalized communities than everyone else. He patted himself on the back on Facebook this morning for a blog post about Draw Mo Day.

In my work for the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) I’ve labored alongside Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. My biggest takeaway has been the notion that people of different religious and philosophical identities have a lot more in common than we instinctually imagine. Sure, my Muslim collaborators think Muhammad was the prophet of a God that I don’t even think exists. But, I don’t care much about that difference between us. Our deeper convictions—that all people have

… Read the rest

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Oh if only we could learn to doubt

Oct 8th, 2010 10:55 am | By

More dopy mindless generalization about “New Atheism” at Comment is Free Belief, this batch courtesy of Ed Halliwell.

Almost two weeks on from the After New Atheism event at the RSA and the trail seems to have gone cold. It sounded so promising – the setup from a humanist writer professing his boredom with the stagnancy of debate…And yet it didn’t quite happen. As Mark Vernon reported, the evening itself was a bit of a damp squib, and normal service has been resumed on comment threads, with Caspar Melville – the aforementioned humanist – understandably crying foul at the pummelling he received for daring to call for more listening and less braying.

Yes, but as we know, Caspar Melville … Read the rest

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Lawrence Krauss on the familiar taboo

Aug 4th, 2010 5:47 pm | By

Lawrence Krauss notes that the NSF does a survey on US science literacy, and always finds that adults in the US tend to say “No! I won’t believe that!” when asked about evolution and the big bang. Until this year, when the NSF fiddled the survey.

the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.

A 2009 Pew survey found that “the most devout are on average least willing to … Read the rest

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A schism between the nice people and the demons

Jun 13th, 2010 12:26 pm | By

Another columnist does a bang-up job of describing explicit atheists in such a way that everyone will take care to hate them.

the split also underscores a serious and widening schism in the broader community of non-believers, between those who want civil engagement with people of faith, and even cooperation where possible, and atheist “fundamentalists” (as Kurtz and the old guard call them) — true believers in godlessness who belittle religion and religious people at every turn, and yet by doing so can wind up sounding like the very enemy they are trying to defeat.

That’s wrong. It’s false. It’s inaccurate. We are not “fundamentalists” in any meaningful sense, we do not belittle religion and religious people at every … Read the rest

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Timeless twoofs

May 23rd, 2010 12:53 pm | By

Jerry Coyne points out this here Clergy Letter Project. It’s a thing where a bunch of clergy sign a letter saying science and religion can be compatible. Very useful in its way, no doubt, but it says some dubious things on the way there.

Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation.

Oh really? What “timeless truths” does the beloved story about Noah and the ark convey? That there is a god watching human antics as if we were … Read the rest

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