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…]
The conclave to select the new pope begins next week, perhaps as early as Monday. Apparently the pre-conclave meetings currently in progress are where the real politicking goes on, where informal chats take place and information and gossip is exchanged regarding the various possible candidates for the job, with subtle lobbying being part of the process. [Read more…]
… a letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer yesterday complained about the disrespect shown to Catholics by the Non Sequitur cartoon strip by Wiley that had appeared the previous Wednesday. The letter began:
I thought the mass media were in agreement that insults based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed have no place in civil discourse. Apparently, the creator of the comic strip “Non Sequitur” believes the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics don’t deserve such consideration.
An imposter dressed as a bishop tried to get into the meetings being held at the Vatican prior to the papal conclave. Using easily obtainable clothing such as a fedora hat and a purple winter scarf, he managed to look enough like a bishop to fool at least some people.
