Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The bible is useful for our day-to-day challenges

    Lord Mackay of Clashfern is a funny guy. He’s a We Wee Free, and he thinks Scots courts should use the bible to help them out with the law stuff.

    Mackay, who is also the current Lord Clerk Register, the oldest surviving “Great Office of State” in Scotland, now acts as honorary president of the Scottish Bible Society (SBS), and has invited sheriffs and judges to refamiliarise themselves with biblical principles and act accordingly when presiding over court cases…

    “I believe the teaching of the Bible is vitally important for guidance in daily living for all of us.“The…modern version is especially useful in dealing with our day-to-day challenges.

    “If we use it in this way we will soon learn that what it says about human beings is as true today as it was when it was originally written all these years ago.”

    Yeah? Like what? Deuteronomy 13, perhaps?

    1If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, 2And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them;

     3Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams…

     5And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death…

    So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee. 6If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers…

    8Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 9But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.

     10And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die…

    As true today as it was when it was originally written all these years ago?

    Or how about Numbers 25?

     1And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab.

     2And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods…

    4And the LORD said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel. 5And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor.

    Useful for judges, is it?

  • Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

    PZ explains why it’s much, much more complicated than Kurzweil thinks.

  • How settling with the Taliban puts women at risk

    If we’re going to be realistic, let’s at least face what the sacrifices would be.

  • Bad Science: AstraZeneca exec admits “burying” data

    Doctors and academics know there are only informal and ad hoc systems to deal with buried data, and these systems have clearly failed.

  • NHS Tayside sacks 500, seeks homeopath

    At £68,000 a year. Everybody should apply.

  • Russian tycoon to employees: join church or lose jobs

    Says the drought and fires are “punishment for the Russian people’s sins.” Doesn’t say how he knows.

  • Pink Triangle outraged at the attack on Leo Igwe’s parents

    PTT secretary George Broadhead said: “Mr Igwe has demonstrated his staunch support for LGBT rights.”

  • BioLogos at Huffington Post

    You can blame Jerry Coyne for pointing out Pete Enns. The damage is done, at any rate.

    He’s a condescending bugger, I must say.

    To say that God’s existence is detectable with certainty through reason, logic, and evidence is a belief because it makes some crucial assumptions. For one thing, it assumes that our intellectual faculties are the best, or only, ways of accessing God. This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.

    See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.

    It is an old argument but a good one: any god worthy of the name is the source of all being, and therefore not one more being alongside all others subject to rational control. Any god like that isn’t God at all.

    That’s a good argument? Saying that any god worthy of the name is the source of all being? Which amounts to saying that humans thought of this special word that is supposed to mean “the source of all being” plus it exists plus it’s not like anything else so ha – that’s a good argument? It’s not an argument at all. It’s a circle. God means the source of all being so it’s different from everything else so everything else can’t look at it or test it or say it isn’t there so it is there because being there makes it worthy of the name.

    Why do people accept the principle of uniformity? Because it can be used to construct coherent scientific explanations of the universe, and that is a good reason to accept it. But this is not too far from what religious people say about their faith. Religious beliefs can be used to construct coherent explanations for things like why there is something rather than nothing.

    No no! No no no! Sleight of hand alert. Scientific explanations of the universe are not just coherent, they are also based on evidence. Religious beliefs are not based on evidence. Makes a difference!

  • Reserve’s last rhino butchered for her horn

    Rhino horn has been used for centuries in “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” though it has no magic properties and is like a fingernail.

  • See here, chaps, what Afghan chaps do is their own affair

    Is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, patriarchal society that has survived for 3,000 years should now instantly stop cutting women’s noses off?

  • Surprise: jobless women don’t need babies

    The need for abortion goes up in a recession because pregnancy doesn’t magically make women financially secure.

  • Scots peer campaigns for biblical law

    “The Bible is a unique resource as the foundational source book for Scotland’s legal system.”

  • Taliban stones a couple in a crowded bazaar

    “The Taliban warned villagers if anyone does anything un-Islamic, this will be their fate.”

  • Clerical rape survivor “shattered” by pope’s decision

    “If those two had stood up, children would have been stopped from being abused. The fact that the Pope doesn’t see that is the final straw for me.”

  • Pope rejects resignations of Dublin bishops

    Deirdre Kenny of the One in Four group, which supports survivors of clerical rape, called it an “extraordinary decision by the Vatican.”

  • This is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind

    More from Paul Cliteur’s The Secular Outlook. The first chapter is an extended analysis of atheism, agnosticism and theism. At the end of his discussion of Pascal’s Wager PC says Pascal did have one strong point, which is that we cannot suspend judgment on the transcendental realm – italics his. Quite right. If there is a god and it does want us to act in certain ways and it has given us reliable and unmistakable knowledge on the subject, that does make a difference. We may well think the god is evil and that we’re not going to act in the ways it wants us to, but it would be feckless not to think about it one way or another. If there is no such god, or at least no reliable and unmistakable knowledge about it, that too makes a difference. It’s not something we can just shrug about, not if we have any sense.

    The agnostic says [she] suspends judgment while in every act [she] chooses in favor of or against God…So the agnostic can be adequately defined as the [person] “who does not know,” but [her] lack of knowledge is not some superior position that goes back to the docta ignorantia of Socrates or Montaigne, but the ignorance of someone who is unable or unwilling to take intellectual responsibility for a philosophical outlook that [she] honors in [her] deeds. There surely is some ignorance here. But this is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind, as the agnostic [her]self considers it to be. This is the ignorance of the unexamined life.

    I like that. I like it partly because I’m so tired of all the superior sneering from jaded non-gnu atheists who wonder why we won’t just shut up about it already. I don’t think it’s as boring as they seem to. I think the many manifestations of zealous, hostile, vituperative hatred of atheism and atheists are 1. surprising 2. interesting 3. alarming. The manifestations themselves make it clear that we can’t just shrug and say “I dunno” and keep quiet.

  • Four horsemen video

    It’s non-believers who are the most indignant and outraged; what is that about?

  • Whooping cough epidemic and anti-vaxers

    At three schools in California, 80% of parents have signed a “personal belief exemption” to keep their children from being vaccinated.

  • Nick Cohen notes: David Cameron is not middle class

    For a half a century, the British elite has pretended that it does not exist.

  • Hitchens is still doing words

    Talking, writing and perpetuating the belief he has upheld throughout his life: in “free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”