In an interview given to Rolling Stone magazine, Bill Gates reveals himself susceptible to that fatuous argument from incredulity, that just because he doesn’t understand how the complexity of the world came about, it must imply that there is a god, which is basically the intelligent design argument.
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As the days go by without any news of what happened to Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, theories about what may happened have grown increasingly wilder, with even suggestions of aliens and supernatural agents thrown into the mix. (See here for more wild theories.)
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It looks like there has been some kind of putsch at the Westboro Baptist Church with some kind of junta composed of all male members of the church taking leadership of the organization as founder Fred Phelps goes into decline.
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The issue of Ukraine and Crimea and Russia has dominated the news in the last week, with much of the US media portrayal consisting of repeating US government assertions that this is an example of Russia throwing its weight around and interfering in the internal affairs of another nations, as if the US never does such things. The reality is that the US is constantly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries either overtly by sending in troops or covertly by supporting destabilizing efforts against governments it does not like.
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So Bill Maher stirred up a hornet’s nest with his riff against religion, focusing on the whole story of Noah that has suddenly come to the fore because of the upcoming film, and correctly saying that it shows god in such a terrible light as a baby killer that no one in their right mind should worship him.
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I had never before heard of L’Wren Scott until her suicide was reported yesterday. This is not surprising because although she was apparently a highly gifted fashion designer whose work was sought after by many celebrities, she is not a household name for those who do not follow the world of fashion, unlike Dior and Vanderbilt and others who also serve a mass market and advertise widely.
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Those of us who love films also tend to be avid watchers of film trailers. Many of us will immediately recognize the throaty, urgent voice of the narrator in many of the trailers, even though we never knew who he was. Well, his name was Hal Douglas and he died last week at the age of 89.
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Abby Huntsman, daughter of failed Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. has like many children of well-known politicians, parlayed her family connections and fame into a career as some sort of media personality. And as is the case with media personalities, they feel free to make assertions on policy matters with little attention to facts.
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Ashutosh Maharaj was the leader of a religious commune in a small town in Punjab, India, one of the many gurus who infest that part of the world and concoct mystical theories about life and the universe. In January of this year the guru, who was supposedly in his seventies, experienced chest pains and was declared by doctors to be clinically dead.
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Giordano Bruno was a 16th century philosopher, theologian, and monk who was an early supporter of Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the universe. He was also burned at the stake by the Catholic church in 1600 at the age of 42 after being found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition. That combination of circumstances has sometimes led to him being portrayed as the first martyr for modern science at the hands of religion. The somewhat ominous-looking image of the bronze statue of the brooding Bruno that is sited at the location of his execution in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome has become iconic.
The opening episode of Cosmos hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson (that I did not see) apparently had an extended tribute to Bruno. Corey S. Powell summarizes what Tyson supposedly said about him.
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