Religion & Law

One Order of Gander Sauce, Please!

Posted on September 22, 2009
Here is PZ Myers discussing the new report on that 15% of Americans who responded "No Religion" to the American Religious Identification Survey that shows that only 10% of the "nones" identify as atheists:Those "Nones" don't believe in a Bearded Ape of Cosmic Proportions, they aren't propping up the local priestly den of ignorance with donations, and Pat Robertson is still confident that every one of them will burn in hell...

The Long Goodbye

Posted on September 21, 2009
PZ Megahertz already had this but I just thought I'd say goodbye to all my friends and readers who are going to be raptured today ... assuming I have any that qualify..

May the Farce Be With You

Posted on September 21, 2009
Not much comment necessary:Daniel Jones, founder of the religion inspired by the Star Wars films, says he was humiliated and victimised for his beliefs following [an] incident at a Tesco store in Bangor [Wales].The 23-year-old, who founded the International Church of Jediism, which has 500,000 followers worldwide, was told the hood flouted store rules...

I Have a Theory

Posted on September 20, 2009
A thought:In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"?part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory...

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I Knew That!

Posted on September 19, 2009
And so it continues.There is a lot of rational discussion being had about Josh Rosenau's piece on different "ways of knowing" and Jerry Coyne, as usual, is adding nothing to that discussion. His latest is a pep rally for Jason Rosenhouse's post on the subject...

When Pigs Fly

Posted on September 19, 2009
. Miss Porky Pig flies through the air during the Pig Racing and Diving show at Melbourne Showgrounds, September 18, in Melbourne, Australia. The Show has been taking place in Melbourne since 1848 and is Victoria's largest and longest running annual public entertainment event, expected to attract around half a million visitors in 2009...

Bonus Shot!

Posted on September 19, 2009
Abbie at ERV has pointed out the announcement that the powers that be at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History have listened to the science-friendly blogosphere (or, just maybe, being highly intelligent people themselves, were working on it all along)...

Arcane Discovery

Posted on September 18, 2009
In no surprise at all, the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Misinformation is claiming that it is being subjected to "Suppression and Censorship" because the science-respecting part of the blogosphere is upset about the screening of the DI's propaganda film, Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History...

Code Blue

Posted on September 17, 2009
I've long known about Cornell University biologist Allen MacNeill's blog, The Evolution List, but have not, for some reason, followed it. It hasn't been updated in a while (which I hope is related to the summer break) but it's well worth reading back through it...

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Posted on September 17, 2009
..

Vote For the Nut!

Posted on September 16, 2009
.In the category of campaign ads that might need to be rethought:.

Not Bad

Posted on September 16, 2009
The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History has issued a statement on its website about the Discovery Institute's screening of the propaganda film, Darwin's Dilemma, at the museum's Kerr Auditorium:Although the museum does not support unscientific views masquerading as science, such as those espoused by the Discovery Institute, the museum does respect the religious beliefs of all people...

Equivalences

Posted on September 16, 2009
Jerry Coyne is once again displaying for all to see the entire depth of philosophical reasoning and discourse he is capable of.Naturally, that involves name-calling and passing the buck to others to do the heavy lifting, in this case, Ophelia Benson (not necessarily the best choice) and her commentariat...

W. T. F. ?

Posted on September 15, 2009
According to Reuters:Darwin's Dilemma will be screened at Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr...

Too Crazed for CPAC?

Posted on September 15, 2009
In a development that promises that pigs will soon sprout wings:[O]rganizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference ? the country's biggest annual meeting of activists on the right ? said last week that they had rejected a request to schedule a panel on whether Obama was a native-born U...

A Journey Only Begins With One Step

Posted on September 15, 2009
In response to yesterday's post about the debut of the propaganda film by Intelligent Design creationists, Darwin's Dilemma, at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, a comment was left by Linda Coldwell, of the SNOMNH:You are correct that the Sam Noble Museum is not endorsing this film or this school of thought...

To Everything There Is a Season

Posted on September 13, 2009
Randal Rauser, and his Food for the Soul blog at The Christian Post, is back at the ol' ID stand peddling nonsense, as he has done before. The interesting part is that, much as he did in criticizing Expelled, he is doing it under cover of reasonableness:What I find most interesting, and disturbing, about the current health care debate is the way that advocates of a public option in health care are marginalized with the accusation that they harbor a "socialist" or even "communist" agenda...

A New Place to Hang Out

Posted on September 13, 2009
The Axis of Evo is a new blog.Michael Barton of The Dispersal of Darwin informs us that the blog belongs to Colin Purrington of Swarthmore College, a biologist and creator of the Charles Darwin Has a Posse movement.Give it a look..

Primeval Philosophical Simplicity

Posted on September 12, 2009
The Wall Street Journal has dueling essays from Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins.PZ Myers has looked upon what Dawkins hath wrought and saw that it was good. PZ actually adds something to the debate but Jerry Coyne, predictably, acts like the toady to the schoolyard bully, proclaiming his "victory" even after his hero tripped over his own feet while trying to catch his latest victim...

Damn It, Toto, Who Wants to Be in Kansas?!?

Posted on September 11, 2009
Hopefully, most of the residents of Alameda, California don't:I'M BEGINNING TO feel like Dorothy when she and Toto landed in Oz. I don't think I'm in Alameda any more.No, it feels more like Kansas"... or Texas, or any of the other states where the religious right tried to take over school boards in the 1990s...

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Posted on September 11, 2009
Ed Brayton already has it but there's no way this isn't going to be in my blog:"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love...

The YEC Cure

Posted on September 09, 2009
Well, we're in for another round of "Darwin fathered Hitler" crap from the Discovery Institute droids. Richard Weikart's new book, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Process has been published (Amazon wants $53.96 US for it, so it may have limited impact among non-Discoveryoids)...

Burned By Chestnuts

Posted on September 08, 2009
I do wish Jerry Coyne would stick to biology, at which he is great, and leave philosophy, at which he is, to say the least, not great, alone. At a minimum, he could refrain from sneering at that which he does not understand.Coyne's latest stab (in all senses of the word) at philosophy is in response to an article at The Daily Dish by Jim Manzi entitled "In Defense of Robert Wright against Jerry Coyne...

Word Play

Posted on September 07, 2009
Hah!The things you run into when poking around in your own blog!In preparing a post on Jerry Coyne's latest mugging of philosophy (which I may or may not complete, given the size it threatens to expand to) I stumbled on a usage of "faitheism" well before Coyne ran his contest to find a new pejorative for atheists who are insufficiently militant in Coyne's eyes (Dawkins' "Neville Chamberlain 'appeasement' school" apparently not being "snappy" enough)...

WTF?

Posted on September 07, 2009
Most of my select readership will have heard about the furor over Bloggingheads, which recently featured, first, young-Earth creationist and Discoveryless Institute drone, Paul Nelson, and, then, equally discoveryless Michael Behe. Nelson's appearance (with the otherwise excellent historian of creationism, Ronald Numbers) was particularly egregious, since it was a "Science Saturday" episode and Numbers was not interested in debunking creationism and its doppelganger, Intelligent Design...

Ignorance as Moral Authority

Posted on September 06, 2009
"Canada Has Religious Nutbars, Just Like America" ... or so says LiveLeak of this story from the National Post:Christian parents who objected to their children being taught about other religions in a mandatory new Quebec school course have suffered a serious setback with a ruling this week that the teachings do not infringe their religious freedoms...

Dance With Dissonance

Posted on September 05, 2009
Massimo Pigliucci has an interesting post at his blog, Rationally Speaking, about the differences between "skepticism," "cynicism," "gullibility" and (although Professor Pigliucci doesn't mention the term) "personal incredulity" of the sort so often appealed to by creationists...

When In Doubt, Punt

Posted on September 04, 2009
Ohhh!Can I get my official Dr. Strange Junior Seer badge now?I predicted that Casey Luskin study would soon be attempting -- at interminable length -- to refute the recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that protein-transporting systems in eucaryotic cell are not irreducibly complex...

Mutant Creationist Arguments

Posted on September 04, 2009
Dr. Steven Novella of Neurologica Blog has a nice post that connects a new study (nicely explained by Larry Moran), using the latest genetic sequencing techniques to give a more accurate estimate of the mutation rate in humans, and creationist claims that the majority of mutations are harmful and, therefore, evolution could not occur by natural selection for lack of sufficient viable variants to select from:Creationists, as they often do, habitually misunderstand the nature of "mutations...

Show and Tell

Posted on September 03, 2009
Texas is famous for cows and yellow roses.... Oh, and crazed politics.Governor Rick (the South will rise again) Perry doesn't think the President of the United States can be trusted to give a speech to the state's kids. About President Obama's plan to speak directly to school children across the nation over the web on the importance of education, Perry had this to say:While President Obama talking directly to school children could be a memorable moment in their young lives, I am troubled that local school boards and superintendents were not involved in the process...

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