More Stedman and McLaren. Sorry. Fair warning, so that you can stop reading now if you’re fed up to the back teeth with them.

Stedman is annoyed that gnu atheists don’t take his and McLaren’s advice on what “will benefit the atheist movement” but instead dare to offer “disagreements and accusations that McLaren, Luna, I (and many who affiliate with us) don’t have the best interests of the atheist movement in mind.”

That’s an odd complaint. It seems like a tangent. I don’t really know what they have in mind, I know only what they do, and what they do is talk a lot of nasty smack about gnu atheists, most of which is exaggerated at best.

Then Chris … Read the rest

Oh the self-admiring moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church…

It’s doing a conference on AIDS this weekend. It’s as obstinate and evil as it’s been all along.

A Vatican cardinal opened an international conference on AIDS by strongly defending the church’s two-pronged strategy against the disease: education of consciences and mobilization of Catholic health resources for patients.

That is not a strategy. People can be infected by their partners, so educating consciences is not good enough. A woman can be entirely monogamous and still be infected by a non-monogamous partner – obviously, and as everyone knows – so prattle of conscience is just conceited obfuscation.

“Educating people to avoid high-risk behavior, when based on solid moral principles, fully demonstrates

I was re-reading a bit of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God this morning, and I encountered something odd. It’s in chapter 12, “Death of God”; she gives an account of Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA and how it works, and then says:

But the new atheists will have none of this, and in his somewhat immoderate way, Dawkins denounces Gould as a quisling.

There’s no reference. Well where did he say that? I wondered. I knew he’d used the word at one point, but I didn’t think it was about Gould. I read the bit about NOMA in The God Delusion, and it’s not there. When I got on the computer I googled it, and got nothing.

I don’t … Read the rest

The badminton people are still tussling about that “women have to wear skirts” rule that the genius marketing people came up with. There are some crazy-radical voices pointing out that this is sexist.

To create a more “attractive presentation,” the Badminton World Federation has decreed that women must wear skirts or dresses to play at the elite level, beginning Wednesday. Many now compete in shorts or tracksuit pants. The dress code would make female players appear more feminine and appealing to fans and corporate sponsors, officials said.

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Women wear more revealing outfits than men in a number of Olympic sports like gymnastics, track and field, volleyball and beach volleyball.

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Badminton’s world governing body now finds itself on