Thanks, as always, to Jesus and Mo for capturing in a few panels a point that it took me an entire extended blog post to make, about how religious people’s rationality only extends so far as it conforms to what their religious texts say.
I have never actually eaten at a Chick-fil-A restaurant but the head of the company Dan Cathy has been in the news recently proudly proclaiming that his company is run on ‘biblical principles’. He and the family-owned company also contribute to groups that oppose same sex marriage. [Read more…]
I have written before about Monsignor William Lynn who was convicted of covering up sex abuse by a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He has now been sentenced to three to six years in prison and becomes the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church to serve time for offenses associated with sexual abuse. [Read more…]
I have written before about Jonathan Morris, a Catholic priest who is a Fox News favorite and a member of the infamous Legion of Christ order. (See here and here for more about that odious group and its disgusting founder.)
In one call-in program titled Father Knows Best, someone asks Morris “How did Adam and Eve’s kids have kids?” Morris actually seems taken aback by this question, as if it had never occurred to him before. He flounders around, going off on tangents about other mysteries to which we have no answers such as whether Adam had a belly button and then riffs for a while on original sin. It is obvious to even his co-hosts that he is not able to answer the question. It is quite the spectacle. [Read more…]
In a new post that follows up the events that I wrote about before, science writer Carl Zimmer describes his back-and-forth with the intelligent design creationists. [Read more…]
Recently there emerged from Pakistan disturbing news of a renewed campaign against polio vaccination, in which a doctor involved in such a program was shot. Pakistan is one of the few remaining countries (along with Afghanistan and Nigeria) where polio has not been eradicated. [Read more…]
The main shtick of so-called motivational speakers is to persuade people that if only they think positively enough, they can achieve great things. One such speaker named Tony Robbins provides a practical demonstration of this principle by borrowing a practice that is fairly common in India and Sri Lanka during Hindu and Buddhist religious festivals, and that is ‘fire-walking’ which involves people walking across a bed of coal embers to show their devotion to their gods whom they believe will protect them from burns. [Read more…]
In my post Atheists who love religion, I spoke about my puzzlement with the views of self-proclaimed atheists like S. E. Cupp, Jesse Bering, and Jesse Powell. Powell has responded with a long essay in the comments explaining his views. [Read more…]
Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes but our closest cousins the chimpanzees have 24 pairs. This was at one time a puzzle because if, as the theory of evolution says, both species share a common ancestor, how could it be that in the relatively short time after the human and chimp lines separated about six million years ago, humans could have lost an entire chromosome, with all the genetic information it contained, and yet survived as a species? [Read more…]
At one time there was a flurry of articles and books around the theme of why some women seemed to be loyal to husbands and partners who abused them, with titles such as Women Who Love Psychopaths, Angry Men and the Women Who Love Them, and Women Who Love Too Much, all exploring the strange attraction that some people have for those who seem to hate them. [Read more…]