I presume everyone has already had their lunch here in the Americas, so it’s safe to mention this: a delectable collection of 10 tasty snacks. Go ahead — you know you want to click on that link.
This is absolutely brilliant. MnCSE has taken advantage of Google’s ability to set up custom search filters to create special purpose search engines.
MnCSE Real Science Search Engine: This one explicitly excludes over 300 creationist sites from its results—if you want to search for a general topic of evolutionary interest while cutting out the worst of the crap, this is the one for you.
MnCSE Snow White Search Engine: Quite a bit narrower in scope, this one only returns .edu and .gov sites.
MnCSE "Eat the Apple Dearie" Search Engine: Want a laugh? Searches here return only stuff from the 300+ sites excluded in the first search.
Belated blogiversary greetings to Norwegianity!
I am deeply amused. I’m no fan of “faith & religion” sections of newspapers—axe them and expand the funny pages, I say—but here’s one editor with smarts who gets the thumbs up from me. He gets lots of complaints that those dang non-Christians are being over-represented on the religion page; some of them are typical bigotry of the dominant delusion:
A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these “false” beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having “that Islam religion … shoved in my face.”
Now here’s what I like: the editor decided to apply some common sense and science to the complaint. He looks at the demographics of the region his paper serves. He tallies up the content of the articles published in his section of the paper. He compares them. He comes to a conclusion.
Although Faith & Values isn’t ignoring Christians, my tally does suggest that we are giving nonreligious people less attention than they deserve. We’re already taking steps to correct that.
Whoa. Now there’s a demonstration of commendable Values (I note, though, that it wasn’t driven by Faith, but by evidence and social consciousness). I’m already impressed, but the guy goes a step further and does even better.
Some might argue that the religion section is meant for religious people, just as the Sports section is intended for sports fans. (Because I myself have little interest in sports, I don’t expect that section to cater to me.)
But this analogy is faulty. Nonreligious people have their own codes of ethics and explanations for the meaning of life. Many pursue independent spiritual paths; others are happily secular.
I think these people deserve more coverage in F&V. What do you think?
He’s asking for input. Go ahead, say nice things to Mark Fisher ([email protected]) of the Columbus Dispatch about his sensible and fair attitude. I guess I won’t lobby to have his pages replaced with double-sized copies of Cathy, Garfield, Marmaduke, and Family Circus.
I have mixed feelings about EO Wilson’s book, The Creation(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s wonderfully well written, it’s on a subject I care about and that Wilson is clearly passionate about, and it’s trying to straighten out religious people on an important matter, but it’s also written directly to an audience of which I am not a part. I found myself alienated by the style, and despite my appreciation of his effort, simply wasn’t able to finish the book. I’m going to have to try and wade through those last few chapters sometime, though, when I’m feeling charitable enough to be able to cope with being addressed as a Baptist minister.
Still, though, I agree that Wilson deserves to be awarded a Green Book Award for The Creation—we can’t afford to wait for all the Baptists to commit apostasy before we draft them to support biodiversity. Let’s hope he wins many more, and especially let’s hope more religious organizations start acknowledging his ideas!
Those are two subjects that leave me queasily nauseated, so this time I’ll let John Lynch have the honor of poking about in the puke.
I’m going to have to visit the American Museum of Natural History and see the
new permanent exhibit on human origins. It sounds very good; they’ve done something I try to do in some of my talks on evolution, splitting it between the more easily comprehended, sexy stuff of fossils and reconstructions and the more abstract and more recent material on molecular biology and genetics. There’s an oft-told myth among the creationists that evolution is dying, but it’s precisely that explosion of new information we’re gaining from molecular approaches that has been revitalizing the research for some time now.
The do throw one sop to the culture wars:
One issue cannot be entirely sidestepped in any public presentation of human evolution: that many people in this country doubt and vocally oppose the very concept. In a corner of the hall, several scientists are shown in video interviews professing the compatibility of their evolution research with their religious beliefs.
This is a new permanent exhibit, but I vaguely recall seeing a video presentation like this at a museum somewhere; was it on display at the AMNH before? It’s not a big deal, as what I remember of it was being faintly embarrassed at these scientists professing to be proud of their archaic bone-in-the-nose magic rituals. That part will be skippable—I look forward to seeing the real evidence, that wonderful piece of the universe that is untainted by the delusions of tradition.
The big, important news is, of course, the death of a gold-digging addlepated model (I’m sorry that she’s dead, but really…it’s not something worth flogging over and over on the news), so the feature on atheism that CNN was going to show has been bumped to Friday.
Unless somebody in programming gets a yen for accordion music, I think.
They invariably get it wrong. This time they’ve noticed it’s cold outside, and they see an news report about colder temperatures in the Antarctic, so they leap to the conclusion that global warming is bunk. Or rather, they always held that conclusion (on faith, no doubt), and are overjoyed to see any scrap of out-of-context evidence that they can play up to bolster their confidence.
