Religion and Science “Peacemakers”? Stupid, stupid man…

I don’t know who Paul Wallace is, but I know the kind of person he is. He’s the kind of person that makes sure to shave (with a dull straight-razor) minutes before swimming in the shark tank. He’s the kind of person who makes sure to wear his best red cape before running with the bulls. He’s the kind of person who seeks shelter from a lightning storm by climbing the tallest cell phone tower he can find.

In other words, he’s a moron who invites calamity on himself.

What makes me say this? Because Paul Wallace is the kind of man who creates a top-10 list of religious/science “Peacemakers”… and then publishes it on the internet: [Read more…]

Just one more…

I’m not sure what it is about religious belief that robs you of any sense of irony, but that phenomenon is fairly well-documented. Religious people seem to lack the God-given ability to self-examine and see yourself as others see you, which is problematic because most of the rest of us see you as sanctimonious jerks (which is, I suppose, a charge commonly leveled at atheists, so maybe that’s not fair of me to say. SEE HOW IT’S DONE, RELIGIOUS PEOPLE?)

What really doesn’t make sense, however, is the complete loss of a sense of historical perspective that seems to be associated with fervent religious belief. For some reason, they keep falling in the same hole over and over again:

Christian groups have condemned a provocative Spanish play about Jesus called Golgota Picnic (Golgotha Picnic), due to premiere in France. Street protests are planned when the play is performed in the southern city of Toulouse, before moving on to the capital Paris. While urging restraint, Toulouse’s Catholic archbishop said the play “fouled the faith of many believers”.

I mean, haven’t we already done this? Didn’t we do this like… 3 months ago? And wait… didn’t we do the exact same story only 4 months before that? I mean, I could keep writing this stuff again and again, but after a while it kind of gets boring making the same points. Censorship of blasphemy doesn’t create less blasphemy. If anything it makes it more attractive and popular. There are things that are actually worth getting upset about in your own organization. Log in your own eye, speck in others’. Art is supposed to be subversive. Blah blah blah. C’mon guys, get hip to it! [Read more…]

The weirdness runneth over

More censorship weirdness. This time it’s all funny, I promise:

It is not good to accept the person of the wicked, to overthrow the righteous in judgment. A fool’s lips enter into contention, and his mouth calleth for strokes. Sam’s Wholesale Club, a division of Wal-Mart, is doing the Lord’s work by removing a blasphemous book from its shelves, and sadly many reactionary Christians are responding with foolish lips calling for a boycott, not of the book, but of Sam’s Club!

The atheist at the center of the controversy, Brendan Smith, must be laughing all the way to the bank for duping conservatives into opposing a decision by Sam’s to stop selling his book. Why did they fall for the trap? Because Smith called his book “The Brick Bible”. It is a collection of distorted “stories” illustrated with LEGO bricks and characters. Though the book itself openly mocks God and the Bible over and over again, many naïve Christians are so ignorant of the Bible they don’t even see it and are buying the book for their children.

It’s generally poor form to write a blog post about someone else’s blog post about a news item, so I’ll just encourage you to trip on over to Caffeinated Thoughts and read the rest. I wish I could make this shit up, but once again the truth is stranger (and hilarious-er) than fiction.

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When censorship goes weird

Long-time Cromrades will know, given my unabashed free speech stance, that I am decidedly not a fan of censorship. While I recognize that individuals have a right to privacy, I also know that large institutions (be they private or, especially, public) must be held accountable. This means that more transparency is good, and that censorship is bad.

Censorship is especially bad when it is done by large institutions against individual people. Provided that communication does not immediate place lives in danger, or that the speech in question is not slanderous or fraudulent, there is no justifiable reason to censor unpopular speech. In fact, if recent events have shown us anything, it’s that the more attention you draw to something you do not wish seen, the more people look at it out of sheer morbid curiosity.

Often, censorship is disturbing. Occasionally, it is overblown and counterproductive. But sometimes… well sometimes it’s just weird:

[Read more…]

Sometimes it’s a good day

If there’s anyone in the Canadian political system who’s reading this and wants to make me an extremely happy guy, it’s really not that difficult. I’m a simple man who enjoys the finer things in life – a nice meal, a pint of good beer, a productive day at work, time spent with close friends… it doesn’t take a lot. What puts me over the moon is when politicians legislate like liberals and act like grown-ups.

Liberal ideas – promoting equality and long-term progress through evidence-based policy – are ideas that I can support. For reasons that surpass understanding, it is rare to see someone get tough with liberal ideas. Not tough in a macho, bullying kind of way, but tough in a “I believe in this, and am willing to fight for it” sort of way. Too often, perfectly defensible liberal ideas get bulldozed by threats of political ramifications or hurt feelings. However, there are rare moments when the planets align and politicians get tough on things I agree with, and those days make me happy.

Today is a very good day. [Read more…]

Classic Crommunist: Why science is better than religion

Office Christmas party, Skeptics in the Pub, and ordinary December blahs have conspired to rob me of the energy necessary to turn the random thoughts/news items of the day into 1000 coherent words. While I recuperate, please enjoy this classic post, written at a time when 99% of you weren’t readers yet.

There is a very stupid argument out there in the world of arguments. It goes something like this:

You have to believe in science, just like you have to believe in religion. Therefore, science is just another kind of religion.

On the surface, that appears to be a logical premise. It even managed to find its way into an episode of one of my favourite shows. However, that’s due to an unfortunate accident in the English language whereby “believe” has two meanings. I’m not going to go through the entire argument here, except to give a specific example. The statement “I believe in myself” means that you have confidence that you will be able to perform a task based on self-knowledge. It does not (or at least not usually) mean “I have faith that I exist as an entity” although Descartes would probably have a few things to say about that. At any rate, the word “believe” when it comes to reliance on facts and observation is quite distinct from “believe” when it comes to large, unfathomable concepts. I’ll let PZ Myers and xkcd talk about that for now, and perhaps come back to it later.

However, it doesn’t matter. Let’s, for the sake of argument, allow this line of reasoning. Let’s suspend logic in this particular case and grant that you have to believe in science in the same way you have to believe in religion (or God, or faeries, or gremlins, or whatever you believe in). Even if we make this concession, science is still far better than religion for one very important reason: [Read more…]

Blowing away the smokescreen

Apologists for religion, when confronted with the ugliness that has been justified by adherence to scripture, will often retreat into a stance that goes something like “people will always do harmful things, regardless of their religion.” The argument, I suppose, is that human beings will find ways to commit atrocious acts, and that criticizing religion is therefore a red herring argument. “After all,” they’ll say “the kind of people who would do evil in the name of religion will still do evil even if you atheists do away with faith altogether!”

First of all, anyone who has ever made this statement has just admitted to losing the argument. Religion is chock full of morality claims, and by admitting that people who follow religion are not more moral than those who do not, you’ve admitted that your particular religious philosophy is entirely orthogonal to being a good person. It would be just as valid for me to say “don’t do bad things” and call that a moral system. Considering the number of people who use the argument from morality as what they think is a “slam dunk” proof of a deity, this kind of “well people will be bad regardless of religion” statement should be particularly troubling.

Some atheists are willing, however, to cede this point. In a world without religion, they say, people would probably do bad things at roughly the same rate. Some people are just opportunistic, or unthinking, or cruel, and will find some other way of justifying their actions even in the absence of a god to blame it on. This argument has bothered me for a while, and I have finally figured out why.

[Read more…]

Vox populi, pox dei

Which, in my pidgin Latin, translates into “the voice of the people is the pox of god”.

One of the weird, seemingly counterintuitive things about Canada is that despite having no official segregation of church and state in our Charter, religion is more or less absent from the larger issues our government deals with. We don’t have national fights about crosses at memorials or references to God in our national anthem. References to a deity are more or less absent from our various Throne Speeches (commonwealth readers will understand this phrase – Yankees should think of the State of the Union), and doesn’t play a major role in our elections except in the most bizarre ways.

Which is why when a high-ranking federal minister appears in an article about the Vatican, it’s always an interesting story: [Read more…]

Movie Friday: Eddie Izzard – Religion, Science and Atheism

Comedy is a marvelous thing. It has the unique ability to rob things of their power, particularly when that power is based on fear. By pointing out the bizarre aspects of things that frighten us, they are reduced to the level of mundane and even silly. There is perhaps nobody with a greater talent for finding the absurd in the commonplace than Eddie Izzard:

Sometimes ridicule can be used as a weapon. It can be used to disarm and expose the inconsistencies or irrational elements in an opponent’s argument. Other times, like in the above clip, it can be used simply as a tool to explain, in a way that appears tremendously effective. It’s hard to watch that and come away with any conclusion other than “there’s a lot of really stupid stuff in that religion.” I’d imagine the reaction would be similar even if that religion was yours.

We spend a lot of time learning to speak rationally. Maybe we should work instead on learning to be funny.

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Counting down from infinity

I had an… interesting visit from what I assume was a creationist about a week ago. I like it when theists show up here. It gives me a chance to practice diplomacy as opposed to my usual unrestrained polemic, which I like to alternate with dismissive mockery when the occasion requires. At first he showed up in the comments of a post that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, so I redirected him to a more appropriate post.

When I was offered the chance to “go first” (a really really bad idea) as to why I thought there were no gods, I expressed my conclusion that, given the available evidence, I could not see anything in the universe that looked like design only explainable through an intelligent agent. Since any theistic belief is predicated on supernatural intervention, I can’t accept any of the downstream conclusions of theism.

I also asked him to agree to abide by some simple rules: don’t skip off when your arguments are refuted, don’t expect me to accept scripture as a reliable source of information, and finally don’t use articles of faith in place of reasoned argument. He agreed to abide by those rules (and I have the folks at The Atheist Experience to thank for that list), which was probably another tactical mistake for him, but he does get kudos from me for being plucky. [Read more…]