The Grim Paradolia
I presume that this “image” was “captured” just moments before Jesus is supposed to have said what Jesus was supposed to have said just before he kicked the bucket bought the farm handed in his chips had his card punched 404ed himself went on a date with Princess Di put on a red shirt and beamed down to the planet gave up the ghost.
Can you spot the mystery guest?
Jesus vs Death
Feynman for all!
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bill Gates, but his philanthropic gestures aren’t generally among them (this is, of course, an obvious exception).
Gates has apparently recently purchased the rights to a collection of lectures by physicist, author, skirt-chaser and bongo player Richard Feynman, and will be making them freely available to the public.
From Symmetry Breaking magazine:
Bill Gates recently bought the rights to a series of lectures by legendary Caltech physicist Richard Feynman. The former Microsoft head’s purchase shows that the cultural and scientific legacy of Feynman remains strong even 21 years after his death.
The lectures, given in 1964 as part of Cornell University’s Messenger Lecture Series, were filmed by the BBC, who had retained the rights since. Gates purchased the lectures for an undisclosed amount.
But what would the former Microsoft head want with the copyright to lectures by the revered physicist? In a recent interview with the CERN Bulletin, Gates said that his only plan is to make the footage freely available to the public.
The videos themselves don’t yet appear to be online, but I’m sure that’s one of the places they’ll first appear.
/hattip Atheist Media
Britaine’s Firste “Newe Atheiste”?
Thanks to a contributor to today’s NSS Newsline, I’ve been made aware of this awesome record of civil proceedings from sometime in the early 17th century.
6 DECEMBER, i CHARLES I. Memorandum of the presentment for recusancy and of the insolence of one Richard Beake of Kentish-towne who (on being duly and lawfully summoned by John Corey, one of the bailiffs of the Sheriff of Middlesex, to appeare at this session at Hickes Hall) answered to the same John Corey “that he cared not a f for the Justices, and that he had not been at church for tenn yeares, nor wold goe to churche for all the Justices could doe, adding further, Lett the Justices kisse his A” S. P. Reg.
Richard Beake of Kentish-towne is now a hero of mine.
I’ve also learned a new word: recusancy. It means “fuck you, churchy”.
Oh, FFS, here we go again…
Yes, it’s that time of the month where someone decides to have a go at the “New Atheists”. I’ll simply link to it for your interest, but it was this comment from (yet another ignorant and “oh woe is me!” christian) that somewhat piqued my relatively low-key ire.
They wrote:
This study convinces me even more that New Atheism has all the qualifications of a being its own religion. It seems to be becoming more organized and the tenets of its “faith” more scripted or set in place, with even four? main “bishops”; ie. Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.
Reading Dawkin’s quote and your description of his love for and faith in the great Cosmos, I’m struck with how “worshipful” his devotion is to the Universe.
You wrote, “He approaches science poetically, demonstrating that it can enrich our lives and aid us in a search for meaning and purpose. “The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear,” Dawkins explains.
It is this belief in the power of science to open our eyes to the awe-inspiring splendor and mystery of the Cosmos and its contents that drives Dawkins’ passion for evolutionary biology and his criticism of religion.”To me this is just one religion criticizing the others. “Nothing is new under the sun.”
In my opinion, the intolerance of the new atheist is only a result of his/her commitment to their own set of beliefs and their worship of what is seen rather than what is unseen. The resentment to Christianity, in particular, definitely stems from the spiritual side of things, even from those who deny its existence. Have you ever met a religion which doesn’t resent Christianity?
I felt a need to respond, so I wrote:
Whatever “New Atheism” is (and it’s patently obvious that this isn’t a label that atheists apply to themselves except in the context of rebuttals to arguments like this), a “religion” it certainly isn’t.
Organised? If by that you mean that there are discussion fora, community web sites, (arguably) sceptical conferences, then yes. If you mean that we all gather in a bunch of rooms every so-often and pat ourselves on the back, you’re onto a wrong ‘un.
Tenets? What on earth is a tenet of atheism (or “New Atheism”, whatever)? Even the most elastic definition I could find (dictionary.com) defines a ‘tenet’ as “any opinion, principle, doctrine, dogma, etc., esp. one held as true by members of a profession, group, or movement.”
The closest tenet of so-called “New Atheism” then could be the collective position (as per the original definition of “atheism”, rather than the populist strawman definition) that we don’t believe in gods. Any gods. All gods. Not just the christian gods.
Bishops? Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Grayling? Really? They hold services every now and then and tell us exactly what to think based on their pontifications of our holy books? Oops, we don’t have any.
Faith? What faith? Atheism is a respondent position, not an accusatory one. It’s a position based on the question “do you believe in the existence of any gods?” and if the answer is anything other than “yes”, then one is, by definition, an atheist.
Worship? An appreciation of the fact that we’re alive in the here and now and can look at the universe with a sense of wonder and try to figure it how it works? Please.
You’ve also completely ignored to tell us what the rest of our supposed religion’s trappings are. So, please tell us what our “holy book” is, what our “rituals” and “traditions” are, where our “churches” are, what our “dogmas” are, who our “popes” and “saints” are, how we “pray” and what we “pray” for.
I’m surprised you didn’t go the whole hog and call us “militant” while you’re at it. By ‘militant’ you would of course means “doesn’t shut up when told to”, rather than the usual definition of militant meaning going out with a gun and shooting someone, or carrying a belt of plastique into a crowded market place. You know, the usual use of the word ‘militant’, it’s even one you can find on Fox News! But then conflation and equivocation is a traditional refuge of the unreasonable mind.
It’s typical of people like you to call atheism a “religion” and then deride it. Just in case you don’t get it, this fails for at least two reasons:
1) it’s a strawman argument and anyone with even an ounce of common sense can see through it; and
2) by calling it a religion and then decrying it as such lends absolutely no credibility to any religion, especially that of the arguer.There are other reasons, but I’m not entirely convinced that you’d understand why your accusation fails for the two reasons above, and frankly it’d be a waste of time.
“New Atheism” is nothing if not responding to the unjustified demand of “you can’t criticise religion (especially mine!)” with the flat answer of “yes, I can, why can’t I?”.
Atheists, “New” or otherwise, can hold any number of positions including an appreciation, an indifference or a hostility to classic organised religions, including (but certainly not exclusively) christianity.
[Comment broken here due to length.]
To claim that we resent christianity en masse is to a) completely fail to understand the basic position of an atheist (see above fro hints); b) play the “persecution” card (don’t worry, we know it’s in the christian scripture, so we expect it) and c) demonstrate that you appear to think that everyone who is an atheist used to be a christian (but obviously not a True Christian™) which is not only untrue but absurd and only serves to show a startlingly narrow experience and mindset.
Your basic argument (and pay attention because there’s a big point here, but I’ll write slowly so that you can keep up) seems to come down to “New Atheism has all the qualifications of a being its own religion … [because] [h]ave you ever met a religion which doesn’t resent Christianity”.
Completely risible.
And I laugh at you (no, not because you’re a christian before you decide to replay the same persecution card) but because you can’t seem to reason your way out of a wet paper sack, even with the aid of a chain-saw and an angry claustrophobic ferret.
I can’t help feeling that it’s like smacking a 4 year old for something it doesn’t understand it’s done wrong.
Gay marriage debate chart
Gay marriage debate chart
/hattip: The Good Atheist & @almightygod.
Dear Annabel Croft
Dear Annabel Croft,
Just FYI:
/hattip: @bengoldacre
The Telegraph: BBC supports Islam and attacks Christianity, says whinging git
Yeah, it’s from The Torygraph.
The BBC supports Islam and attacks Christianity, according to Don Maclean, the former Radio 2 religious programme presenter.
Maclean, who hosted Good Morning Sunday for 16 years, claimed that the corporation is biased against Christianity and had embarked on a movement to “secularise the country”.
Translation:
Bwaaaah boo hoo boo hoo! Nobody loves Jesus’n'Mary’n'Mo — oops, not Mo — anymore but me! Waaaah boo hoo hoo! Sob sob! etc.
If you can be arsed, the rest of it’s over there, but I wouldn’t bother if I were you.
Actually, I shouldn’t have bothered with this post. Pah, too late now—might as well press “publish”.
P.S. Why was “git” not in my computer’s dictionary? Had to remedy that pronto! Oh, look, there was a good outcome of posting this tosh.
Creationists admit lying for Jesus
From the William Crawley’s blog over at the BBC:
On today’s Sunday Sequence, the CEO of Creation Ministries UK responded to claims by one of the world’s leading authorities on evolution that he was duped into appearing in an anti-Darwinian film.
Professor Peter Bowler, the author of a biography of Charles Darwin and many other books on the history of evolution, said he was interviewed for the The Voyage That Shook The World without realising that the film was being made by a Creationist [sic] group.
Professor Bowler, who has spent most of his academic career at Queen’s University, Belfast, researching Darwinism, says he is unhappy to be appearing in what he regards as an “anti-Darwinian” film which offers an historically distorted portrait of Darwin. He claims that the film’s narrative implies that Darwin’s theory led him towards racism, whereas recent historical work by James Moore and Adrian Desmond shows that Darwin’s scientific work was partly motivated by the naturalist’s passionate opposition to racism.
Professor Bowler says he, along with his colleagues Sandra Herbert and Janet Browne, only discovered that they had inadvertently contributed to a Creationist [sic] film a month before the film’s release. Peter Bowler also raised concerns about how the editing of his own interview could leave viewers with a false impression of his own perspective on Darwin.
Phil Bell, CEO of Creation Ministries UK, acknoweged that his organisation established a “front company” called Fathom Media, because they were concerned that experts such as Peter Bowler would not agree to take part in the film if they realised it was an “overtly Creationist [sic]” production. “At the end of the day,” he said, “[when] people see ‘Creationist’ [sic], instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to.”
My emphasis.
One of the commentators, korotiotio, makes this point:
The producers intention for this documentary was to create a film that would be attractive to secular broadcasters and NOT an “anti-Darwin creationist polemic”, thus the production company Fathom Media was set-up to produce and market the film. Which by the way, is standard practice in television land.
While this is true, the admission from the producers as to their reasons for setting up a “front” is in spite of the fact that it’s standard practice, not germane to it.
Crawley filed this under “religion” and “ethics”. Obviously he’s using the “ethics” category as a shorthand for “gross violations of ethics”.
Read the full text of Crawley’s post over at the BBC: “Creationists defend Darwin film”
/hattip: RD.net
Confessions of a Lapsed [Person Who Doesn't Believe In Gods]
Jenn Q Public (”one part reason, two parts awesome” – LOL!) is apparently a lapsed atheist. Sorry, I meant Atheist
. The capitalisation is important, you see, because that means that Atheists are Dogmatic, Militant, Intolerant, and all of those other extra-bad qualities that only atheists (sorry, Atheists) exhibit and is never, ever, ever found in religious people.
NEVER!
So she wrote it up.
I didn’t follow her point (if there was one) mainly because she was describing herself as an Atheist
who followed the quasi-religious doctrine
of Atheism
, whatever that is. Is this where the “New” comes in in “New Atheists”? I’m still to understand what that means too.
So, in order to understand what she was saying, I translated it into words I could understand, seeing if it would make more sense to me and if I would see myself and other atheists/secularists reflected in the mirror of her concern:
Confessions of a Lapsed [Person Who Doesn't Believe In Gods]
Do you believe in God? Really? And you’re willing to admit it in public?
Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant [Lack Of Belief In Gods] of my youth.
Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God.
When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow, but was more or less a bit player who didn’t have much to say.
After my grandfather died when I was seven, his Baptist minister lifted me up in his arms and told me, “It’s all right, Grandpa’s with God now.” At that moment, I could feel my dress was hiked up in the back and all I could think about was pulling it back down. But later, I asked around and discovered that God was our Heavenly father, whatever that was supposed to mean.
I figured, who better to ask about my Heavenly father than my earthly father, but when I did he laughed.
He wasn’t amused in a “kids say the darnedest things” kind of way. He was laughing derisively at the idea that my mother’s family believed in God. And thus began my introduction to [A Lack Of Belief In Gods].
There are people who call themselves [a person who doesn't believe in gods] who are simply nonbelievers, and then there are the big “A” [People Who Don't Believe In Gods] for whom [Lack Of Belief In Gods] is almost a religion. This quasi-religious doctrine isn’t neutral on the existence of other religions; rather, [A Lack Of Belief In Gods] is a virulently anti-theistic creed characterized by sneering contempt for religion and a profoundly dogmatic bigotry toward people of faith.
Want to know how [People Who Don't Believe In Gods] see the rest of us?
I grew up learning from my father that [A Lack Of Belief In Gods] is rational, and therefore, religious belief is irrational; [A Lack Of Belief In Gods] is defined by logic, religious faith by fantasy; and science is real while religion is make believe. Faith, I was taught, requires a willful stifling of reason.
The Torah, the Gospels, the Qur’an? All woefully inaccurate, laughably inconsistent fictions used to encourage belief in an illusion for the purpose of social control.
My curiosity in religion surfaced again in seventh grade when several of my friends were planning Bat Mitzvahs. Surely my friends weren’t ignorant enough to actually believe in God, were they? The answer was no. For most of these reform Jews, this celebration marked the official end to the tedium of Hebrew school. Most of their families were Ethical Culturists with a recreational interest in preserving their Jewish cultural identity. In other words, they too were [People Who Don't Believe In Gods].
By the time I reached high school, having had little contact with religion, I was convinced that people of faith were credulous and unenlightened. They gravitated toward soothing tales of God and afterlife to help them deal with their own mortality. At best, I considered belief in God an anachronism, a quaint vestige of days gone by, on par with superstitions about wicked thoughts causing birth defects.
At my extremely liberal college, I was exposed to even more militant [Lack Of Belief In Gods]. It was there that I learned the mere whiff of religiosity is worthy of denigration. Many of the people I met approached religion with something between disdain and loathing, and considered all religious belief a form of fanaticism. Christians in particular were characterized as knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing fundies (and that was in polite company.)
Fortunately my mother taught me enough manners that I kept my bias to myself.
In this new environment, my [Lack Of Belief In Gods] was more than evidence of good reasoning, it was a socially desirable badge of intellectual superiority. Make no mistake: [People Who Don't Believe In Gods] think they’re smarter than you. [A Lack Of Belief In Gods] isn’t simple skepticism. It is a certainty that believers are wrong, and by extension, intellectually inferior. Religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion, is nothing more than a crutch for dupes.
But [People Who Don't Believe In Gods] aren’t content to leave religion as a mere object of ridicule. They want it cleansed from public life. And enlightened as they are, they’ve come up with quite the pretense for justifying the righteousness of their bigotry: they are defending the vision of our founding fathers from a dominionist conspiracy to establish Christianity as the state religion.
You see, for liberal [People Who Don't Believe In Gods], the only thing worse than religion is the Religious Right, a term they use to encompass all Christian conservatives. And what better way to siphon fuel from the Religious Right than to convince Americans that the government is perpetually on the verge of becoming a theocracy?
And so, they accuse local governments of trampling the Constitution in the name of God and they find subliminal Christian iconography in political ads. They wring new meanings from Thomas Jefferson’s notion of separation between church and state, and condemn our country’s motto and the status of Christmas as a national holiday. But above all, [People Who Don't Believe In Gods] stoke fear among religious and nonreligious alike that conservatives view government as a tool to force religion down your throat.
Pope-slandering buffoon Bill Maher, something of a patron saint among [People Who Don't Believe In Gods], has called religion “the ultimate hustle.” Last fall, Maher’s fellow liberal Chris Matthews, a self-described Catholic, roundly criticized Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for talking about prayer in a “secular environment” and complained that she made the Republican Party look more like a church tent than a big tent. In March, Matthews complained, “Why does everything sound like the ‘700 Club’ with this Party now?” Such examples of anti-religious bias can be found every day on cable news, network television, and in the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As my politics strayed right of center after college, I realized I wanted no part of that Maher/Matthews worldview based in elitism and the ridicule of others. I made the transition from [A Person Who Doesn't Believe In Gods] to [a person who doesn't believe in gods] to agnostic, and have since discovered why it is often said that religion is experiential.
There was a time when I would have preferred any manner of torture to admitting the possibility of a higher power. These days, I’m proud to say I lost my faith in the [Person Who Doesn't Believe In Gods] creed.
Nope, still not getting it. Perhaps if I translated “secular” and “liberal” and “elitism” and “thinking” and “having a fucking clue” from their right-wing “meanings” I might have had more success.
Perhaps next time.
/hattip to The Barefoot Bum.
£75 of awesome sceptical activist WIN!
Now here’s an example of great sceptical activism, all centred around the ongoing BCA vs Simon Singh libel claim and recent ASA adjudication on chiropractic advertising.
Simon over at Adventures in nonsense has been busying himself recently:
For some time, chiropractic has managed to get away with being the acceptable face of alternative medicine. With some evidence to show that it helps with lower back pain, and many chiropractors only using the therapy for this purpose, it was seen by many as a legitimate therapy and largely escaped criticism from sceptics.
That all changed when the BCA decided to sue Simon Singh for libel. In a fine example of the Streisand effect, all the energy usually reserved for criticising homeopaths and reiki healers was redirected straight at those chiropractors making wild and outlandish claims to treat colic, asthma and a host of other problems unrelated to the spine.
With the BCA attempting to stifle debate over the bogus claims pointed out by Simon Singh, I was determined to do something.
Golly gosh, what did he do? What did he do?
[Don't you just love cliff-hangers?]
I don’t want to give the game away here, so pop on over and read what Simon and his chums have been up to from the man himself.
Petition: Withdraw support for creationist zoo in schools
Over at RD.net today, someone has posted a petition:
Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm (NAZF) is a zoo just outside Bristol that markets itself to schools and is heavily focused on child education.
However, instead of teaching well-established science, it promotes creationism.
The literature displayed at the zoo is hostile to Darwin and his theories and attempts to debunk techniques such as radio carbon dating and interpretation of the fossil record.
Much of this literature – which is presented as fact – contradicts science on the national curriculum, thereby actively damaging a child’s education. This can be evidenced on their website; however, this is much diluted compared the ardent creationist material on display at the zoo.
NAZF also uses the VisitBritian logo to market the zoo.
The stated aim of VisitBritain (Britain’s national tourism agency) is to market Britain worldwide and to develop England’s visitor economy.
By promoting the NAZF, with its creationist agenda and harmful educational materials, VisitBritian is damaging the reputation of the United Kingdom.
I’m a little of two minds over this. On one hand, I feel people should be able to believe any bat-shit insane proposition they like. On the other, the fact that the wingnuts behind this zoo are making inroads into schools (what the fuck does RE [religious "education" - a [s]tatutory subject with non-statutory programme of study
] have to do with biology?) is not on for precisely the reasons that creationism isn’t already taught in science lessons: it’s not science.
As these two concerns are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the only reason that I’m signing this petition is for the second reason, and not the first.
I just wanted to make that clear.
I also think that the fourth paragraph (the one starting The literature displayed at the zoo…
) is both superfluous and frames the petition badly. I do understand and appreciate why it’s there, although I wish it weren’t and think the petition would be better off for it.
Note: The petition is scheduled to close on the 26th June 2009 (six days [ha!] from the date of this post) so please sign it, and repost as far and wide as you can.
The Holy Gospel of the Easter Bunny
‘Tis a very sad but obviously true tale. I also now know why dogs can’t have chocolate.
/hattip: Atheist Movies
Know scientology, know it’s a con
The “church” of scientology is launching a new media blitz, with the strapline of “know yourself, know life”.
Here’s the first one, entitled “Search”:
The other two are equally as vapid, and tell you absolutely nothing whatsoever. Except that you’re special, but you’d be more special if you only licked Tom Cruise’s arse joined their cult “religion”.
As usual, they don’t mention anywhere in the adverts how much acquiring this “knowledge” of yourself or your life will cost you, but we already know a ballpark figure. Hint: it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars/pounds/euros (or a comparable sum in your local currency), paid directly into their corporate coffers through your nose.
Ouch. Sounds painful, doesn’t it?
They also allow neither ratings nor comments on the YouTube hosted videos. And I already know that you’re not at all surprised by this.
The advert spots are worth watching if only to see what a multi-million dollar campaign will get you.
In a word, fuck-all.
Of course, any post related to scientology wouldn’t be complete without links to Operation Clambake and What’s The Harm? I would have included one to Why Are They Dead? but the site appears to be a defunct spam magnet.
Genesis Revisited
/hattip: The Atheist Mind
Understanding christian sectarianism
One of the things that has always confused me is the actual differences between the major sub-flavours of christianity. Sure, I was aware of the various labels and that they had some kind of meaning, but could never quite understand the (ahem) nuances of each sect’s special (and obviously perfect) interpretation of their magic book (or version of it, if they differ in that too).
Thankfully, using the metaphor of Kissing Hank’s Ass, some enterprising soul has kindly distilled the differences down so that people like me, who really don’t give a flying fuck what colour armband these people wear, can see them for what they are.
I feel should have read this a long time ago…
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