Religion & Law

Mythic Morality

Posted on September 02, 2009
A thought:Historically, moral and political policies have been based either upon mythologies of the supernatural or else mythologies involving nature. The belief in the special creation of species, in God's providential care for the world and everyone and everything in it, and in compensation for unjust suffering and retaliation for unpunished wickedness in the next life, are examples of moral supernaturalism that tend to promote ethical complacency and resignation where social inequality is concerned...

Blue Theology

Posted on September 02, 2009
Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a post up about Pastor Steven L. Anderson of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, who is praying for the death of President Barack Obama and one of whose parishioners showed up outside Obama's Phoenix event carrying an assault rifle and a handgun...

Intelligent Climate Change

Posted on August 31, 2009
Eoin O'Carroll of the Bright Green Blog at the The Christian Science Monitor makes an interesting connection between climate change denialism and evolution denialism (otherwise known as "creationism"). Discussing the US Chamber of Commerce's proposal that the Environmental Protection Agency hold a public hearing, in the nature of a new ?Scopes monkey trial? to defend its finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a threat to public health and welfare, O'Carroll notes:Both groups willfully ignore mountains of firmly established scientific evidence...

Carnival of the Elitist Bastards XVI

Posted on August 31, 2009
The Carnival has sailed again from Quiche Moraine with Stephanie at the helm.And this time it has a tale that, to me, explains the meaning of the Carnival in such a perfect way that it has to be noticed ... the man with a telescope.There are many lessons that can be drawn ...

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Devolution

Posted on August 30, 2009
.I don't think evolution should be associated with our school.- Sherry Melby, Sedalia Missouri School District teacherThe Smith-Cotton High School band had a theme. Like most such exercises, it didn't seem to make much sense ... "how brass instruments have evolved in music from the 1960s to modern day...

All Hands on Deck!

Posted on August 29, 2009
Ya gotta love creationists!If there is some way to twist facts so as to mislead, they'll find it. Today's example is from Bill Belew, a particularly dense example who blogs at Examiner.com. As seems to be frequently the case with Belew, he doesn't really blog but cuts and pastes, which is just as well, since the few examples of his own writing that I've seen tend to be incoherent in the extreme...

Uhhh ...

Posted on August 28, 2009
Jerry Coyne on the New Yorker piece by James Wood ? "God in the Quad":[Quoting Wood] What is most repellent about the new atheism is its intolerant certainty; it is always noon in Dawkins's world, and the sun of science and liberal positivism is shining brassily, casting no shadow...

It's a Mann's World

Posted on August 28, 2009
I have been having a spiritual Mannifestation.The signs are eerie. Words and concepts change meanings without rhyme or reason and without warning -- "science" becomes "secularism;" "secularism" transmutes into "worldview;" "methodological naturalism" morphs into "philosophical naturalism;" "supernatural causation" mutates into "scientific explanation;" and, most of all, "separation of church and state" transfigures into "allowing Christians a level playing field to teach their theology as science...

Ready ... Aim ... Comedy

Posted on August 27, 2009
Uh, oh! Now they've done it!Before long we'll have another of Casey Luskin's attempts on science (like an attempt on someone's life ... except where the attacker winds up hurting only himself).Wired Science is reporting on a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows that protein-transporting systems in eucaryotic cell are not irreducibly complex:"This analysis of protein transport provides a blueprint for the evolution of cellular machinery in general," write the researchers, led by molecular biologist Trevor Lithgow at Australia's Monash University...

School Learnin'

Posted on August 27, 2009
The Spencer (Iowa) School Board, as reported by The Des Moines Register, is apparently pulling its hand off the stove before it gets burnt too much. Only licking a couple of singed fingers, the board has abandoned a policy that almost undoubtedly would have resulted in a constitutional challenge and diverted scarce resources into a lawsuit that could have been better spent on their real job, education, rather than half-assed efforts at social engineering...

Out and About the Intertubes

Posted on August 26, 2009
Talking Tautology:Wilkins continues his series on the contention that the concept of Natural Selection is a tautology:The tautology problemtautology 1a: correctionsTautology 1b: ButlerTautology 2: The problem arisesTautology 3: The problem spreadsTautology 4: What is a tautology?Talking Science:Like any elusive prey, young minds may have to be snuck up on...

All Wet

Posted on August 25, 2009
Casey Luskin is a puddle.Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise...

Fooling With the Bible

Posted on August 24, 2009
Stultorum infinitus est numerus. (Ecc. 1:15)There is a Letter to the Editor in the Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser that is all but biblical in the proportion of foolishness it packs into a small space. It comes in response to an article by James Evans, pastor of Auburn First Baptist Church, recommending the Clergy Letter Project and not only contradicts the experts in science but those who have, presumably, some expertise in theology...

Ganders Need Not Apply

Posted on August 23, 2009
Jason Rosenhouse offers a defense of sorts of A.C. Grayling's ignorant portrayal of Jesuits. Jason doesn't put much effort in it -- seemingly limited to an exhaustive search of one Wikipedia article -- and it shows.Worse, Jason begins hauling Grayling's goalposts around, as ThonyC demonstrates...

Making Gaines

Posted on August 23, 2009
Jim Gaines gets mail.His column in the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News excoriating Ken Ham's Monument to Ignorance drew predictable ire from the "Bronze Age science is good enough for me" crowd. Happily, Jim now reports that most of the reaction was positive...

Heartless

Posted on August 22, 2009
There is a new culinary creation being test marketed in the American midwest that contains a secret sauce between slices of Pepperjack Cheese and Swiss Cheese topped by two slices of bacon and with two filets of fried chicken that serve as the "buns" of the "burger...

Get Plucked

Posted on August 22, 2009
Ouch!A.C. Grayling, one of the "New Atheists," in the course of an otherwise well-deserved bashing of William Dembski's bogus requirements for his classes at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, takes off after Jesuits:In the aftermath of the Reformation in the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuit Order as an army of defence against the attack on the One True Church...

Checking Reality

Posted on August 22, 2009
Randal Rauser, associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, has finally gotten around to following up on his article of a couple of months ago concerning how the admittedly execrable Expelled misrepresented Intelligent Design. He has two complaints so far:Ben Stein considers Francis Crick's attempt to explain the apparent design of DNA...

Welcome to Salem

Posted on August 21, 2009
Jim Gaines of the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News wrote a column about an embarrassment in his back yard. Here is a nice representative sample:[Ken Ham's Creation "Museum"] devotes a huge amount of its 70,000 square feet to justifying a literal worldwide flood, and to explaining away the extensive geologic evidence of a 4...

Out and About the Intertubes

Posted on August 20, 2009
Fit PhilosophyOne of the creationists favorite arguments is that Natural Selection is a tautology ... that organisms that are fit survive and "fitness" is defined as that which enables organisms to survive. Perhaps more than most creationist arguments, this one raises some interesting philosophical problems and John Wilkins is tackling them, starting off with a history of the tautology claim...

Incoming!

Posted on August 20, 2009
Now here is a useful new usage.For all those occasions when Casey Luskin or Michael Egnor or Joseph Farah deliver a hypocrisy, deception or plain cluelessness so massive that the usual terms seem to pale into insignificance against the brightly burning stupid, Ed Brayton has come up with a term that won't, at least, be lost in the glare...

Natural Rights

Posted on August 19, 2009
Bruce Ledewitz, Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law, is in The Huffington Post dicussing a panel debate at the Netroots Nation Convention entitled: "A New Progressive Vision for Church and State: How I Learned to Accept "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and Stop Losing Elections...

Clueless Googolplex

Posted on August 19, 2009
What more can you do except point and laugh/weep?Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of WingNutDaily has got a little list:Obama seeks to use his power to impose policies that have, like it or not, a striking resemblance to those Hitler promoted in the 1930s...

Stoned

Posted on August 18, 2009
Casey Luskin is engaged in another of his endless multipart screeds rehashing one of his previous endless screeds in which he tries to make a convoluted case that Ken Miller misconstrued Michael Behe as making a claim that the entire blood clotting cascade (BCC) was irreducibly complex, when Behe supposedly only claimed that a part of it was...

Fire Break

Posted on August 17, 2009
Ow! Ow! Ow!How do you treat third-degree irony burns?The Discovery Institute's highly skilled meat cutter, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back and committing neuron arson at an alarming pace. Just consider this opening paragraph: Much of the debate about evolution turns on language, and there is much misrepresentation, mostly on one side of the debate...

Of Bulls and Arguments

Posted on August 16, 2009
Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas and the National Center for Science Education has a take-no-prisoners article up on "bullshit" in public discourse that includes William Dembski, "birthers," "truthers," and "death squaders." However, a major focus of the post is the ugly conflict between the "New Atheists," particularly Jerry Coyne, and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum...

Friendly Advice

Posted on August 15, 2009
How to do Intelligent Design research:1. Accuse the entire scientific community of being wrong ...2. Design poor-quality experiments that are almost guaranteed to show your hypothesis is true whether it really is or not. ...3. Keep using arguments that have been thoroughly discredited...

What Do These Posts Share In Common?

Posted on August 14, 2009
"Francis Collins' Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil Approach to Persecution of ID Proponents" by Casey Luskin"Michael Ruse's WhingeFest: atheists very, very bad for evolution" by Jerry Coyne.....

Of Scientists and Evidence

Posted on August 14, 2009
Jerry Coyne (endorsed by PZ) has repeated his claim that, empirically, accommodationism has failed because "American?s attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years." Actually, it is considerably longer than that the numbers on this issue have been stable...

It Came From ...

Posted on August 13, 2009
... University of California Press. I am now a proud owner of a Wilkins First Edition and I'm counting on all the rest of you to make him a famous author in hopes that someday my copy, carefully guarded, will be worth a bundle.But even if that does not eventuate, there is much to gain:This is an essay in the history of ideas (although I prefer the term conceptual history), and in particular of the ideas that came before and might be demonstrated or fairly thought to have contributed to the ideas in play in biological thought about species and classification...

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