Use the formatting tools at the top of the comment box, willya! Half of you are typing in html, after Josh went to all the trouble of giving us tools, and you’re doing the wrong ones so they’re showing up and it looks stupid and bad. Whatsa matta wichoo?
I don’t mean it; you know I love you; but pull yourselves together.
(No I know, it’s not really half. It’s just a few. But we don’t want to embarrass The Few, so let’s say it’s half.)… Read the rest
New atheism, pooh pooh, new atheists, yawn, new atheism, sheer banality, new atheists, will go away soon, new atheism, we all hates it.… Read the rest
“New” atheism is often accused of proselytizing, but I don’t think that’s right.
It’s not really proselytizing. We don’t have the explicit goal of turning everyone atheist. We don’t even really have the implicit goal of doing that. We know it’s vanishingly unlikely, and not necessarily desirable (most of us know that – maybe all of us do – it probably depends on exactly what is meant). Our goals are short of that – speaking broadly.
The most basic is probably to humble the claims somewhat – to chip away at the public assumption that there is nothing dubious about theism – that it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about God as one would talk about Gordon Brown or Sarah Palin. … Read the rest
Why try to turn these disagreements into proof that the New (read: Bad) Atheists are screwing everything up?… Read the rest
A really nice touch – it’s not just that Bishop Walter Mixa has now admitted that he used to beat the children in a Bavarian orphanage –
Accusations have also surfaced of financial irregularities at the orphanage’s foundation.
A lawyer hired by the foundation has raised questions about thousands of dollars spent on wine, art, jewelry and even a tanning bed while Bishop Mixa was chairman of the foundation’s board, from 1975 to 1996, while he was a priest in the town of Schrobenhausen.
Isn’t that just typical. The Irish Catholic church sent a lot of the money the government gave it for the care of children in its prisons to Rome while the children slept in the cold and … Read the rest
If you walk at random in a Muslim district in the West, especially in Western Europe, you will certainly find somewhere, at least in one corner, an Islamic butcher’s shop with the word “halal” written on its shop-window. For the products of meat, the word “halal” is a badge of Islamic quality.
Muslims believe that since blood is not ritually a pure substance, slaughter is necessary to promote the thorough draining of all of the animal’s blood. Furthermore, the verse “Bismillah al Rahman Al Rahim”, in the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful, is necessary to render the meat halal or lawful to eat.
The word halal refers, here, to meat killed and prepared in line with Islamic dietary … Read the rest
Raping or beating children, spending orphanage money on wine and jewelry, refusing to admit – it all adds up.… Read the rest
Walter Mixa, bishop for Augsburg and the German armed forces, offered to resign after admitting he used to hit children.… Read the rest
Bishop James Moriarty did not challenge Dublin Archdiocese’s concealment of child-abuse complaints from police.… Read the rest
McGrath repeatedly claims that “faith entails no departure whatsoever from the rational high ground.”… Read the rest
You know how people like Massimo Pigliucci and others like to say that science has nothing to say about the supernatural? And therefore scientists who dispute religion are trespassing on other people’s territory and crossing their own borders without a passport and generally misbehaving? I’ve been thinking about that.
I googled the two words just now, and found a nice helpful item by Victor Stenger. He quotes the National Academy of Sciences:
Science is a way of knowing about the natural
world. It is limited to explaining the natural
world through natural causes. Science can say
nothing about the supernatural. Whether God
exists or not is a question about which science
is neutral.
That’s good, because it says exactly … Read the rest
Since so much of our knowledge supports and is supported by other knowledge, there are networks of dependencies that stretch across nearly all of what we believe about the world.… Read the rest
We now have a situation in which a religious body representing a tiny number of people is able to cause a serious and expensive inconvenience by invoking their outraged religious sensibilities.… Read the rest
A new study conducted by the Washington based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says that Africans are among the most religious people on earth. The study titled Tension and Tolerance: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa was based on more than 25,000 interviews conducted in more than 60 languages in 19 countries. According to the study at least half of all Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa believe Jesus will return in their lifetime. One in three Muslims in the region expect to see the re-establishment of the caliphate – the Islamic golden age – before they die. At least three out of ten people across much of Africa said they have experienced divine healing, seen the devil being driven … Read the rest
Two Belfast girls, age 12 and 14, were going to be sent to Pakistan by their parents, for “education.” A judge issued a forced marriage protection order to prevent this little jaunt.
He said: “I find as a fact that there is a present real and substantial risk that G and D will be forced by their parents to marry against their wishes.”…He found the real reason G and D were to be sent to Pakistan in 2007 was “so that they could learn ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty which I hold in the context of this family means obedience overriding their full and free choice.”
Ah yes, ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty, meaning people never have lives … Read the rest
‘For example, imagine a young man of 13 or 14 years of age who wants to have sex.’ He has rights too you know!… Read the rest
The judge imposed a forced marriage protection order for the girls aged 12 and 14.… Read the rest
He suggested that women and men should be allowed to mix socially. Blasphemy!… Read the rest
One of the places we’ve seen this claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs lately is in the article about Francisco Ayala in the Times after he won the Templeton Prize.
Professor Ayala…won the prize for his contribution to the question “Does scientific knowledge contradict religious belief?”…[Ayala] says science and religion cannot be in contradiction because they address different questions. It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins, that a contradiction arises, he said.
That’s a recipe for epistemic chaos. We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of “addressing” questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have … Read the rest
A line from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (p 128):
…we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.
This is why NOMA, in addition to being wrong as a description, is no use. It’s also why the much-repeated claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs is flawed. If religious beliefs are immune to any kind of rational, this-world inquiry or dispute, then we are abandoned to a world in which unreasonable, protected beliefs get to tell us what to … Read the rest
