There is a little girl dying of cancer in Seattle (there are, of course, little girls dying of cancer everywhere). There’s a positive aspect to the story, of a community pulling together and providing support for her family, but there is also a poisonous taint to it all—most of the support isn’t actually for a suffering young girl, but for a communal fantasy.
This is amusing in so many ways to an atheist. Christian activists tried to disrupt a Hindu prayer in the Senate.
It’s absurd but so typical of Christian extremists that they would freak out at the imposition of a prayer that does not reflect their beliefs — welcome to my world, guys. We learn from an early age that the appropriate response is just to wait it out and not participate … and that any protests have to be made at an appropriate opportunity.
I’ll also point out that while everyone is pissed at the crazy Christians, the Hindu prayer is a rather vapid bit of meaningless nonsense, too…something about a transcendental glory living in the soul of the heavens, bla bla bla. The only part I liked was the request to lead us from the unreal to the real, which is exactly what I say all the time. Only I don’t address it to an unreal superman living in hearts.
Anyway, the only fair response to all this is simply to stop the magic incantations to any deity in our government. Let the senators who feel a need say a quiet prayer on their own, without dragging everyone into their personal superstition. And let’s chide any senators who complain about that for the weakness of their faith, that they can’t even pray without someone at the front of the room to help them out.
Isn’t this a lovely map? It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed. Oh, it’s labeled as the frequency of religious adherents, but it’s the same thing.
You can see where I live — it’s in the dark splotch marring the western and southern corner of the state of Minnesota. It says that more than 75% of the people who live here are bible-wallopers — I believe it. On the bright side, I can hope that somewhere around a quarter of the people living here are sensible and unafflicted.
Hey, look — Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia are paler than Minnesota!
The consensus is that this is NOT such a nice map after all. The methodology involved querying a subset of the religious organizations in the country about their membership, which has the dual problem of inflated self-reporting and the omission of religious groups that aren’t part of major national organizations. The general feeling, I think, is that the overall frequency of religious adherents is grossly underreported in major parts of the country.
So it’s not only inaccurate, it hides the magnitude of religious indoctrination.
All the Baptists and Methodists and Mormons and Lutherans and so forth have been unchurched by fiat — the pope has declared their buildings non-churches and that they aren’t true followers of Jesus. This is good news! Now we can tell all the protestants, “Nyaa, nyaa, you’re going to Hell with us atheists!” I’m also going to relish telling the Jehovah’s Witnesses that knock on my door and invite me to church that the only church in town is a couple of blocks down 3rd Avenue, and Father Caskey runs the show.
The bad news, though, is that we’re going to have to resume the Thirty Years’ War. Those Germans will tremble in fear when the Vatican Guard marches northward, swinging those halberds.
Honestly, it’s unusual for biologists to be the target of hate — except when they work on cute furry animals — so the news that religious kooks are slipping threatening notes into evolutionary biology labs isn’t too specifically worrying.
University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.
The messages included the name of a religious-themed group and addressed the debate between evolution and creationism, CU police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said. Wiesley would not identify the group named because police are still investigating.
“There were no overt threats to anybody specifically by name,” Wiesley said. “It basically said anybody who doesn’t believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of.”
The first threat was e-mailed to the labs – part of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department housed in the Ramaley Biology building – on Friday. Wiesley said Monday that morning staff members found envelopes with the threatening documents slipped under the lab doors.
There’s no cause for panic, for sure, and it’s just something to keep an eye on. It’s probably just a deranged individual, but if it’s the start of a more actively hostile trend, that’s something else.
Now their insane denial of the legitimacy of modern psychiatry leads to an insane woman butchering her family. It’s appalling: the parents were scientologists who refused to give anti-psychotic drugs to their daughter, and the end result is that they and another daughter are slaughtered.
This is where delusional, irrational, wishful thinking leads you — to a rejection of reality that has the potential to crash in on you in lethal ways.
A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!
At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.
It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.
I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.
(via the Friendly Atheist)
I guess y’all are having a drought, and your farmers are worried. I sympathize, and I do hope you get some good healthy summer storms soon. But, well, your governor is a dufus.
With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for rain, beginning Saturday.
Riley encouraged Alabamians to pray “individually and in their houses of worship.”
“Throughout our history, Alabamians have turned in prayer to God to humbly ask for his blessings and to hold us steady during times of difficulty,” Riley said. “This drought is without question a time of great difficulty.”
Shhh. I’m going to tell you two secrets.
One: prayer doesn’t work. Never does. Besides, if it’s Georgia putting a curse on you, they outvote you in God’s eyes.
Two: when I lived in Eugene, we used to make trips to Bend, Oregon to vacation — they always advertise about how they only get like 8 days of rain a year. It always rained when we visited. Therefore, if you really want it to rain, you ought to fly me in and parade me around the state. I have big rain ju-ju.
I’m sure we can come up with lots of incantations and rituals that various cultures have invented to conjure rain. You should try them all. It can’t hurt, after all.
What an attractively symmetrical graph:
People who don’t go to church mostly disagree with GW Bush; people who do go to church regularly mostly agree with GW Bush. Unfortunately, these results are from a poll taken in 2005, so it may have lost some of that symmetry since—I certainly hope it has, and that all of the bars in “agree for the most part” category have since gotten smaller.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He’s afraid we’re going to put a human brain in a rodent’s head. No, really — it’s not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals “before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.” Now, seriously, his worry isn’t that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.
The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.
They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!
