I never wear it to class, though. Maybe students would fear and respect me more if I did.
Say…I have a suit just like that
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I never wear it to class, though. Maybe students would fear and respect me more if I did.
Bob Henderson, the creator of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, gets interviewed. He must not be a True Prophet, however, since he apparently isn’t getting rich or acquiring obscene amounts of power.
Not this nonsense again: it’s the argument that it’s only natural to believe in gods.
Atheism really may be fighting against nature: humans have been hardwired by evolution to believe in God, scientists have suggested.
The idea has emerged from studies of the way children’s brains develop and of the workings of the brain during religious experiences. They suggest that during evolution groups of humans with religious tendencies began to benefit from their beliefs, perhaps because they tended to work together better and so stood a greater chance of survival.
The findings challenge campaigners against organised religion, such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. He has long argued that religious beliefs result from poor education and childhood “indoctrination”.
Oh, piss off, you tiresome apologists for superstition. Dawkins did not make any such simple-minded argument; The God Delusion really is becoming one of those books beloved by those who haven’t read it for their ability to misrepresent it. There may very well be natural biases that incline people to see agency everywhere around them, and to accept the dogmas of the tribe. So what?
I am an atheist, and it feels good. I am not a mutant freak who is struggling against either my instincts, radio waves broadcast from CIA satellites, or the sub-etheric pleas of downy-winged angels. I have hardwired bits in my brain, I am sure, and I also have the forces of history and culture shaping the way I think, but that does not mean anything as shallow and simplistic as that I should surrender to my church for the good of my biological impulses.
I was also born with a brain that found object permanence extremely surprising. My parents could play peek-a-boo with me, and it took me a year or so to realize that it was not a massively beneficent act of nature that my mother’s face could still exist! Behind her hands! When I wasn’t looking! Hooray! Ha ha! This does not imply that thinking, conscious, educated adult human beings should continue to collapse in peals of childish laughter every time they open a door and find that their family doesn’t vanish when they aren’t in sight.
The weakly formed predispositions of babies are not obstacles to rational thought. Except, maybe, to adults with the brains of babies. The rest of us can grow out of that nonsense.
A clarification: I actually do think there are inborn biases that tend to make religious belief a path of least resistance for many people. To escape that trap is not ‘fighting against nature’, nor is it an obstacle to godlessness.
The Times article was a very poor mish-mash of Bruce Hood’s ideas. Hood has his own commentary on the press — once again, some journalists make themselves the enemy of clarity of expression and accuracy.
The White House has released the text of Obama’s speech to school chidren. It’s nothing deep, just a bit of rah-rah, study hard, you can do great things, yadda yadda yadda. It certainly shouldn’t have freaked out all those schools that were reluctant to expose their kids to the words of our Socialist Foreign President.
There’s nothing specific in it, as you might expect, and science gets a cursory mention.
You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.Â
Mostly harmless. Maybe a few students will be inspired.
Unfortunately, he chose to end with the standard political platitude. You know, the one that leaves the freethinking students in the cold.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
Would it have killed you to simply end with the first two words of that sentence, Obama? Please? You don’t have to be anti-religious, you just have to leave the superstition out of public pronouncements.
Wonder no more: this video explains it all.
You have to read between the lines to get it, but short answer: god is Australian!
Well. You know, I mentioned that my contributions here were going to be greatly reduced for a while, while I was busy plugging away at this damnable book. I had a very busy and productive day, pounding away at the keyboard, and didn’t even look at the site until this evening…and then what do I discover? Traffic is up!
I get the message. You don’t need me at all. Instead, all it takes is a wacky creationist or two yammering away on a random thread to trigger SIWOTI syndrome and get you all refreshing over and over.
Just for that, I’m going to put my head down again tomorrow and hammer out more words that won’t go in the internet. I expect a zillion page views, OK?
This is not good for bloggingheads: that makes the third high profile science blogger to announce their rejection of bloggingheads, after Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer. Phil would be #4, except I realize I was rather ambiguous about it when I mentioned it before.
So, just to clarify, NO, I won’t be conversing on bloggingheads in the future…which I regret, since I think the site had some real potential.
Several of the commenters on Phil’s site do not think it is a good idea, because lunacy like creationism ought to be confronted whenever we can do so. I agree! The problem with bloggingheads wasn’t simply that creationists were given a venue — it was that creationists were given a venue without voices opposing their ideas. It was setting up crackpots with softball interviews that made them look reasonable, because their peculiar ideas were never confronted. That’s what has to be rejected, not the idea of arguing with bad ideas (although Sean Carroll makes a good case that some ideas are so bad they don’t even deserve debate), but a site that promised discussion yet became open mic night for loons.
Hey, those other people get their Jesus in a pita, their Hebrew blessings from croaking fish, and Allah in their sliced fruit, so it’s about time we got something. How about a fifteen foot tall A in a geological anomaly?
Sean Murphy sent me this; you can find it in Boulder Canyon up Sugarloaf Road, in Colorado. I don’t expect to hear in the news that the Colorado atheists are all lined up there with candles and anointing oil, OK, or I’ll be very disappointed in you. It’s just a rock.
