Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Jerry Coyne on Giberson on science and religion

    The disparity in “ways of knowing” is the true incompatibility between science and faith.

  • Are science and religion compatible?

    Karl Giberson says yes, but finds his position precarious as both sides shoot at him.

  • Polanski walks

    Swiss authorities decided not to extradite him to LA to face sentencing for “having sex” with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

  • al Shabab kills 74 football-watching infidels

    “We will carry out attacks against our enemy wherever they are,” said a moron. “No one will deter us from performing our Islamic duty.”

  • Stoning is off – for the time being

    “Whenever the judiciary chief deems it expedient, the verdict will be carried out regardless of western media propaganda.”

  • Chimp pant-grunts show social awareness

    “What we found was a surprisingly high awareness of the potential social consequences of calling.”

  • What and faith in dialogue?

    Back when the new round of Toxic Sock-revelations set the felid among the passerines, I was having a quiet good time looking at the strange goings on at BioLogos, home of “science and faith in dialogue.” Now that the passerines are getting bored with Toxic Sock, let’s go back there. Let’s consider Albert Mohler’s sermon. It’s about Why Does the Universe Look So Old? 

    He says it’s an important question.

    I want to invite you to turn with me to Genesis chapter one. We dare not seek to answer this question without first looking to the Word of God. [Reads Genesis 1, 2:1-3].

    Right. This is BioLogos. This is science and faith in dialogue. Remember? That’s what it says. So…what science? Where’s the science part? If we dare not seek to answer this question without first looking to the word of god, how can BioLogos claim to have anything to do with science at all?

    I don’t know, and I don’t think it can. BioLogos seems to be going through some kind of crisis. I plan to keep watching.

    Update: Darrel Falk, president of BioLogos tells us (see comment 28):

    Let me be clear about the reason we at BioLogos posted Dr. Mohler’s talk. We disagree with it! We totally disagree with it. We have three posts showing how strongly we disagree with it and how harmful it is. We transcribed his speech even though he criticized us vehemently, because we wanted our readers to be able to read what he said, so they wouldn’t have to go back and watch the whole speech. Given our three posts and the extremely negative statements he made about us in the post, it never occurred to us that anyone would think we agreed with what his speech.

    Not so much agreed with, as considered part of the dialogue, was what I thought; at any rate the clarification is welcome.

  • Jesus and Mo channel BioLogos

    The universe is way younger than it looks. It looks so old because we give it a pain.

  • “Draw Mo day” cartoonist on al-Awlaki’s hit list

    Anwar al-Awlaki has identified Molly Norris as a prime target, saying “her proper abode is Hellfire.”

  • Lawyer wants pope’s testimony in abuse case

     The Vatican, he said, should be treated “like any other corporation that is subject to the power of the American court system.”

  • Charles Windsor snubs Joseph Ratzinger

    Declines to meet pope in London, pope declines to meet in Edinburgh.

  • Hitchens reviews Pullman

    Atheist though he is, Pullman turns out to be a Protestant atheist.

  • Cats have Theory of Mind

    The margay imitates the sounds of baby monkeys  to lure its prey within reach.

  • Stop Stoning and Sharia Laws!

    11 July is the International Day against Stoning – a day we would do well to mark especially given that Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani faces imminent death by stoning for adultery.
     
    Appealing on her behalf, her two children have said: “Today we reach out to the people of the world. It is now five years that we have lived in fear and in horror, deprived of motherly love. Is the world so cruel that it can watch this catastrophe and do nothing?”
     
    Don’t stand by and watch. Let’s end this once and for all.
     
    To show your condemnation against stoning and support for Sakine, during the week of 5-11 July, take stones to your city centres, universities, media outlets, workplaces… and put them in a public place, with a message in support of Sakine and against stoning and executions (http://iransolidarity.blogspot.com/2010/07/on-11-july-place-stones-in-public.html). Send letters of protest and sign a petition opposing stoning: http://iransolidarity.blogspot.com/2010/06/please-help-our-mother-return-home-stop.html.
     
    With daily reports of such brutality, some will still not stop asserting that Sharia law is misunderstood and wrongly associated with medieval punishments – yet this is what Sharia’s penal code demands. The image of Sharia law is draconian because the reality is such.
     
    But what of its civil code – that which is being widely implemented in Britain? A new report Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights reveals the shocking effects of Sharia law on women and children in particular. To read Spokesperson Maryam Namazie’s piece on the new report in the Guardian’s law website, click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/jul/05/sharia-law-religious-courts. You can also read the report here: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/New-Report-Sharia-Law-in-Britain.pdf.
     
    One Law for All will be sending the report to MPs, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others but needs your support to do this, particularly since media coverage on the report has been appalling. If you can, please purchase a copy or more of the new report so we can send it on to the Government and others free of charge. To purchase the report at £5.00 plus £2.00 Shipping and Handling each or to donate to the work of One Law for All, you may either send a cheque to our address below or pay via Paypal by visiting: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/donate/.
     
    Thank you for your support.
     
    For further information contact:
    Maryam Namazie
    Spokesperson
    One Law for All
    BM Box 2387
    London WC1N 3XX, UK
    Tel: +44 (0) 7719166731

  • The Secret of New Age Thinking

    Are we still living in a New Age? To judge by the stream of popular texts and movements that mix together self-help and spirituality, we are. But what is it about? And what is the secret of its popularity? Such are the questions this book tries to answer through a survey of recent mystical fads and plenty of references to the hallowed traditions of TV, movie, and comic-book fantasy. Read ‘Karma Chameleon’, the chapter on Deepak Chopra, or ‘A Course in Malarkey’, on Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles, and you’ll long for the days when all we needed to save us from evil was Superman.

    Alas, today’s make-believe issues not from heaven, but from personal commitment. Besides money for books, DVDs, candles, and lessons, it requires devotees to grow their own magic powers. In the spirit of contemporary society, it is both commercial and fiercely individualistic. It is faith in the self at a time when the self has to sell its soul and haggle for the best bargain. And it is the mind-over-matter, name-it-and-claim-it illusion that goes with rampant consumerism. You want pizza. You visualize the pizza. You dial the number. You whisper ‘pepperoni’ … and it materializes on your doorstep. The hard labor of workers on farms and in kitchens does not come into the experience.

    Naturally, such superstition is shameless. As long as it has a payback, why should it make any further sense? Let Rhonda Byrne assert in her best-selling book The Secret that ‘Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency … they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency’, as quoted in Chapter 1.  Let Eckhart Tolle say that ‘You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now’, as quoted in Chapter 4. And let James Redfield argue, in The Celestine Prophecy, that ‘We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that somehow pertains to our questions’, as quoted in Chapter 8. Like Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel, dissected in the final chapter, it all works because it offers believers, at an unbeatable price, a reason to believe in themselves.

    The author, a theologian and former Baptist minister, is sometimes too generous about the value of New Age thinking. And while he traces its links to older religious traditions, he does not delve into its contemporary social roots. But he does know it is just a mystification of everyday psychology, blame-the-victim attitudes, and medicine-show fraud. With a foreword by atheist comedian Julia Sweeney, and appendixes discussing what is a cult, why people join them, and the reasons some of them erupt in violence, his book makes a worthwhile introduction to today’s dime-a-dozen spiritualities.

    Robert M. Price, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today’s Pop Mysticisms. New York: Prometheus Books, 2008.

    About the Author

    Paula Cerni is an independent writer. For a list of publications please visit http://paulacerni.wordpress.com/.

  • Baying for blood? Moi?

    Are the few people who commented on JK’s post on the Toxic Sock affair really (though metaphorically) “participants in [a] witch-hunt” and “the 21st century, virtual-world, equivalent of a medieval mob baying for the blood their latest victim”?

    No.

    I can see why they (we – I was one) look like a crowd, because there are quite a few comments and they are critical and sometimes hostile. On the other hand, there are only (if I counted correctly) 23 people total, not counting Jean, and a few of them are friendly; there’s a total of 63 comments. So a rush of mostly-critical comments, yes; a mob baying for blood, no.

    But more to the point: are we the Bad People? Are we the bashers, the demonizers, the bayers for blood, the pitchfork-wielders, in contrast to the kindly peaceable loving villagers who want only to be left alone to raise their raspberries and kiwis?

    No.

    No; I seriously don’t think so. I think the issue here is that we “new atheists” think we are allowed to be openly critical of religion, and that we think haters of “new atheists” are wrong and illiberal to keep throwing merde at us for doing so. We think that when it’s Ron Rosenbaum throwing, and we think it when it’s “William/Tom Johnson” and we think it when it’s Chris Mooney.

    So we tend to push back when people throw merde at us for doing something that is not and should not be seen as wrong. We pushed back at Mooney and Kirshenbaum when they threw merde at us in their book, and the result was that they banned some of us from their blog while allowing their pets to call us liars. That’s the backstory in a nutshell. M&K have chosen to spend a lot of time demonizing a minority that in the US is already thoroughly despised. That would be reasonable if the minority in question were Child-torturers United; but we’re not, so it isn’t.

    So no. We’re not the witch-hunters here.

    Mark Jones finds the whole idea quite ironic.

  • Russell review on East Anglia climate scientists

    Review rejected all claims of serious scientific misconduct, but identifies failures, evasions, misleading actions.

  • Johann Hari on copycat murder sprees

    Saturation media coverage of mass murder triggers copycat murders.

  • Ben Goldacre on the bullshit box

    “Trusting nobody, and as a very boring man, I decided to read some adjudications.”

  • Yeah well you can prove anything with science

    What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often, ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel, or reason it away.