In response to my request for any data on whether scientists get less religious with age, reader ‘wonderer’ sent me a link to a study that shows [Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
When Sgt. Justin Griffith’s efforts to gain formal recognition of atheists and organize the Rock Beyond Belief event reached the ears of Fox News, they naturally didn’t like it. They interviewed him and did their usual [Read more…]
It is always interesting to see religious people trying to find ways to reconcile modern science with their religious texts. For people who have a literal interpretation of the Bible, the task is much harder, with the Genesis story being a nightmare. This is not because the Genesis story is particularly crazier than the other miraculous stories in the Bible but because it is the most familiar and you cannot easily finesse it away. Everyone knows the general outlines of it, even if they are [Read more…]
Sgt. Justin Griffith is trying to get the US Army to provide to atheists the same kinds of support and services that they provide to religious groups. He is organizing on March 31, 2012 Rock Beyond Belief, that is advertised as “a day-long event on the military base Fort Bragg, North Carolina, complete with children’s activities, rock concerts and [Read more…]
Religious people like to claim that belief in god makes people happier and that this alone makes religion a good thing, worth preserving. There are many ways to respond to this, one of which is to echo George Bernard Shaw when he said “The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.”
But is it in fact true that believers are happier than unbelievers? Via Greta Christina, I read this report of a study that [Read more…]
I hear via Pharyngula that those provocateurs at American Atheists are going to fly an airplane banner over the stadium where the Super Bowl in being played on Sunday. It will fly from 9:30-11:30 am local time and will say “Football beats church anytime – atheists.org.”
What were they thinking? Don’t they realize that children may be among the tailgaters and see that message and be irredeemably harmed? Oh, these godless people can be so cruel.
I wonder if any of the interminable pre-game shows will broadcast the banner. If they do, you can cue the outrage from Fox News.
In a comment to the earlier post on Einstein’s view of god, reader M. Nieuweboer pointed out that as Einstein got older, he seemed to dissociate himself more and more from religion and the idea of a god, and became more explicit in rejecting attempts to make him seem religious.
This comment piqued my interest and I began to wonder if there was a correlation between the age of scientists and their levels of disbelief. As a personal aside, I myself [Read more…]
I made the mistake of reading Ayn Rand’s book The Fountainhead before her more celebrated work Atlas Shrugged that supposedly provides the clearest articulation of her philosophy of objectivism. After a promising start, The Fountainhead degenerated into a dreary polemic, with two-dimensional stereotypical characters behaving in utterly predictable ways, the whole thing written in melodramatic style. Although I completed it, it was such a bad novel that I simply could not bear the thought of reading another 1000 pages by the same writer and so never read Atlas Shrugged.
It is not that I am averse [Read more…]
Many of you would have heard about the uproar generated by the Susan G. Komen abruptly terminating its funding for Planned Parenthood. Suspicions are that they did it as part of right-wing attack on that organization. Because of the massive backlash, they have none gone into serious damage control mode.
Tbogg takes down the Komen organization [Read more…]
Scientists sometimes use god as a metaphor, Albert Einstein being one of the more notorious practitioners of this habit. This can cause religious people to think that the scientist believes in god and get all excited, since any scientist who is also religious is seen as evidence for [Read more…]