I have speculated before that a lot of clergy may be closet atheists and that over time more and more will emerge. This article says that, “A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist.”
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So today is Texas governor and putative Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s big day of prayer and fasting where he and a motley collection of evangelical religious bigots get together to pray for Jesus to save the nation. One of his key allies in this event is IHOP (no, not that one, this is the International House of Prayer) whose theology is based on the Book of Revelation, the nuttiest book of the Bible which is highly popular with the rapturites.
The signs so far are that the response has been less that overwhelming with only about 8,000 reservations (as of Thursday) for a stadium that can accommodate 71,000. What is worse for Perry, he invited all his fellow governors to attend and it looks like none will, since even the most bigoted politician has enough sense to not want to be associated with what promises to be a hate-fest.
In addition to the evangelicals’ open hatred of homosexuality, one of the interesting features is what lurks beneath the surface, a dislike of everyone who is not ‘born again’. And that includes Catholics and Jews. For example, the church that Michele Bachmann attended was vehemently anti-Catholic. She formally left it this summer and says that she has not attended for two years though it is not clear what church she has been going to, since she refuses to answer.
It is odd how society decides that some things are offensive. For example, raising your index finger is fine. Athletes often point to the heavens after a good play to thank their god for taking time out from his busy schedule to help them out. But the third finger pointing to the heavens is considered such a dire insult that it can result in murderous fury.
We know that certain words are not allowed on broadcast television. But when I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they bleep out these words too, even though those shows are on cable and I watch them online.
But what surprised me is that when the people on these shows raise the third finger, it is pixelated. Despite the fact that many of the comedic segments on the show involve gestures that have obvious similarities to sexual acts and are not pixelated, ‘giving the finger’ is seen as so toxic that it gets special treatment.
I am sure that everyone is curious as to how The Undefeated is doing. On its third weekend, the number of theaters showing the film dropped from 14 to 4, resulting in gross receipts of $5,080, which I estimate works out to about an average 13 people showing up for each screening.
The total gross for the film so far is $112,078 which means that the producers are taking a financial bath but I fully expect them to recoup their investments (and more) when they release the film globally. I hear that Palin is really big in Kazakhstan because they can also see Russia from their houses.
I love it when regular people do this kind of unexpected stuff, bringing some fun into the daily routine.
Primatologist Frans de Waal’s latest book The Age of Empathy (2009) argues against the idea that we humans have some special quality that separates us from all the other animals. Some people, especially those who are religious, seem to be very reluctant to accept that idea that other animal species share pretty much all the same basic physical and emotional characteristics that we humans have.
There is an interesting passage in the book (p. 206-208) where he says that this wrong idea in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam originated because the part of the world in which those religions originated were those that did not contain our closest non-human relatives.
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One sign of a smoothly functioning oligarchy is when everyone is so in agreement with what needs to be done that they don’t even have to discuss things.
David Corn writes about how this manifested itself in the debt ceiling vote. Despite all her public talk about how she disliked the deal, Nancy Pelosi came through for the oligarchy.
(For other posts in this series, see here.)
In the previous post, I discussed Karl Popper’s idea of using falsification as a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from non-science. The basic idea is that for a theory to be considered scientific, it has to make risky predictions that have the potential that a negative result would require us to abandon the theory. i.e., declare it to be false. If you cannot specify a test with the potential that a negative result would be fatal to your theory, then according to Popper’s criterion, that theory is not scientific.
Of course, I showed that falsification cannot be used to identify true theories by eliminating all false alternatives, because there is no limit to the theories can be invented to explain any set of phenomena. But steadily eliminating more and more false theories surely has to be a good thing in its own right. This is why falsificationism is highly popular among working scientists because it enables them to claim that science progresses by closing down blind alleys.
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