Joe Puckett, Jr, a minister at the Hartville Church of Christ that is about an hour’s drive from where I live, has invited me to a debate. The topic we have agreed upon is God Does Not Exist that I will affirm and he will deny. I know the proposition is a counter-intuitive one but I have reasons for choosing it.
[Read more…]
Religious people are upset that their views on creation are not being given sufficient deference in the TV series Cosmos and that the shows promote (oh, the horror!) evolution. The website Funny or Die has got hold of an alternative show that gives their side of the story. As you can see, the Biblical version of creation is pretty succinct.
[Read more…]
Readers may recall the long and tortured saga of the huge cross erected on land near San Diego as part of a veterans’ memorial for which I gave the timeline. In a ruling on December 15, 201e, a US District Court judge reluctantly said that although he disagreed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in such a way that he saw no alternative other than the cross must come down by March 15, 2014 unless there was a further appeal.
[Read more…]
Steve Green, the president of the company Hobby Lobby that has a case pending in the US Supreme Court where they argued that they did not have to comply with the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act because of the religious objections of the owners, has even greater ambitions for the role of religion in public life. He has financed a new curriculum that he wants public schools to adopt that consists of a “four-year public school elective on the narrative, history and impact” of the Bible. One school district in Oklahoma has already adopted it.
[Read more…]
Many of us have heard of the ‘blue moon’. This is when a full moon appears twice in one calendar month. This is a perfectly predictable astronomical phenomenon that occurs once every two or three years, infrequent enough to serve as a metaphor for rarity, as in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’.
[Read more…]
In an interesting and amusing turn of events, Pastafarianism has been allowed to apply to be an official religion in Poland.
[Read more…]
I have been saying for some time that the internet is a real danger to religion. A new paper by Allen B. Downey of the Olin School of Engineering argues that what I had merely guessed at might be generally true. By controlling for other variables such as religious upbringing and education, the author finds that “Internet use decreases the chance of religious affiliation. Increases in Internet use since 1990, from 0 to nearly 80% of the general population, account for about 20% of the observed decrease in affiliation.” (p. 10)
[Read more…]
Although Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favorite films, I had not really thought about where the idea of the Holy Grail originated or what it represented. To me it was just another bit of medieval folklore whose origins were lost in the mists of time. In this clip, he explains some things about it.
[Read more…]