Andy Borowitz says that Cardinal Bonifacius Steuer of the Netherlands, who had dreamed about being pope from his childhood and expected to easily win the papacy, was bitter about his unexpected defeat and blamed the media for misrepresenting who he was. [Read more…]
So we now have a new pope. As expected, Francis has solidly reactionary views on same sex marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and contraception, and opposed the liberation theology of Latin America that was perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Catholic Church in the last half century. These features are hardly a surprise since all the cardinals who elected him were appointed by the two previous reactionary popes. [Read more…]
In a debate with religious people on the existence of god, atheists should win easily because all the evidence and arguments are on their side. After millennia of religious effort, what have religious people got to show in support of the existence of god other than vague appeals to the ineffable nature of his being? As Stephen Colbert said in an interview when his guest asserted the ineffability of god, claiming something is ineffable is great because you can say that you are right without having to explain it. [Read more…]
Brian Keith Dalton is a ‘Formon’ (former Mormon) and he shares with us the things he no longer believes, starting with the least crazy and moving up the scale of craziness. What is interesting is how even the least crazy sounds pretty crazy. (Via Machines Like Us.) [Read more…]
William Jessup University in Rocklin, CA is a Christian evangelical institution that has as its mission to “prepare Christians for leadership and service in church and society, through Christian higher education, spiritual formation, and directed experiences”, so you can see that it is a religious institution through and through. What surprised me is that up until now it did not teach any of the sciences at all, an astounding exclusion for a university these days. [Read more…]
I am pleased to pass along news from the Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB) and the Stiefel Freethought Foundation that their “Light The Night Walk Team raised $430,000 for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society last year, the largest amount ever raised by a first year non-corporate team and the 4th largest amount raised by any team in the nation in 2012, including corporate teams.” [Read more…]
In one episode of the BBC TV faux documentary comedy series Life’s Too Short, actor Warwick Davis decides he needs some spirituality in his life and decides to explore a couple of religions to see if one of them might suit him. [Read more…]
Thanks to reader Tim, I learned of this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that highlights research done in Finland that used skin conductance measurements that tell you how much you sweat and thus is believed to be a measure of emotional arousal, to compare the reactions of atheists and religious people to having to utter pairs of statements of the form “I wish my parents were paralyzed” and “I dare God to paralyze my parents.” [Read more…]
I have been railing about the menace of blasphemy laws and once again Pakistan’s infamous laws have revealed that, in addition to being an outrageous infringement of people’s rights of free speech and discriminatory against religious minorities, they also serve as a way for people to settle private grudges and advance their own agendas at the expense of others. The charges can carry the death penalty. [Read more…]
The president of New York University John Sexton has published a book on how baseball can be used to come to an understanding of god. This practice of seeing some everyday activity as a window to god seems to be expanding and one can expect more such books because the possibilities are endless: “Cooking as a road to god”, “Cleaning the basement as a road to god”, “Cutting the grass as a road to god”, etc. The hackneyed idea behind this is that if you look deeply enough into anything, there you will find god. [Read more…]