Religion & Law

Carnival of Elitist Bastards, VI

Posted on October 25, 2008
.Don't sing me, poet, of the topless towers of Ilium.I, Odysseus, stood by while unwashed Agamemnonand his drunken brigand Greeks toppled the lastof the rude mud bricks that made up Troy.Tall tales are fit for songs like yours,and to send the children off to bed,but I was there and the reality'senough to make the singing cloy...

Whither the Religious?

Posted on October 24, 2008
John Wilkins, clinging, as always, to the Fatal Shore, has a good post up about religion and the hope-triumphing-over-experience expectations of some that religion will wither away:A]lthough, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out...

It's the Economy, Stupid!

Posted on October 23, 2008
Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, has an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle worth reading if you are a Texan or anyone else concerned with good science education and its effect on America's economic future:Texas has earned a reputation as an innovation powerhouse in fields ranging from agriculture and life sciences to high technology and space exploration...

Weakening Teaching

Posted on October 23, 2008
Unsurprisingly, Robert Crowther is over at the Discovery Institute's Ministry of Information, mangling the message of Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science, that I linked to earlier today...

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Brain Drain

Posted on October 22, 2008
. Uh oh, here we go again:"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about...

Babu Babble

Posted on October 21, 2008
Oh, my! Babu G. Ranganathan is back demonstrating his absolute lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in particular and science in general. Not wanting to risk killing too many neurons by exposing them to the neutron-star-like density of Babu's ignorance, I stopped after I ran across this:A true transitional form would be something like a fish having part fins?part feet, or a bird having part scales?part feathers, partially one function, partially another with neither being complete or functional...

Flying High?

Posted on October 21, 2008
Jeffrey Hart, a former Nixon speechwriter and senior editor for National Review is interviewed in The Dartmouth Review, during which he explains why he is supporting Barack Obama and passes on a few words about Sarah Palin:I think she is a good woman...

Opps!

Posted on October 20, 2008
What was that about voter fraud?The head of a voter registration group hired by the California Republican Party was arrested over the weekend for allegedly lying about his address in the state in order to vote illegally, the office of California's secretary of state announced Sunday...

Do Your Ears Hear What Your Mouth Says?

Posted on October 20, 2008
John McCain and Sarah Palin have (for now) dropped the charge that Barack Obama is a socialist. Besides the difficulty selling that line in the face of Obama's endorsements by Warren Buffett and Colin Powell, it may have a wee bit to do with McCain's own recent past...

Taxing the Truth

Posted on October 19, 2008
Colin Powell makes an excellent point towards the end of this press session he had after the announcement of his endorsement of Barack Obama:To paraphrase: it is ridiculous to call Obama a "socialist" because he wants to look at and adjust the distribution of the tax burden in the US...

Beyond Reason

Posted on October 19, 2008
Don McLeroy has a guest column in the Waco Tribune.Texas is adopting new science standards. Scientists representing evolutionists and calling themselves the 21st Century Science Coalition say that creationists on the State Board of Education will inject religion into the science classroom...

Endorsement

Posted on October 19, 2008
Colin Powell endores Barack Obama on NBC's "Meet the Press."Powell mentions Sarah Palin unreadiness to be president, the negativity of McCain's campaign, particularly the Ayers attacks, the constant suggestions by many in the party that Obama is a muslim (and that, even if he was, it would somehow matter) and the promise by McCain to make the Supreme Court more conservative as some of the reasons for his decision...

Race Relations

Posted on October 18, 2008
FiveThirtyEight.com has a telling story about America in the 21st century:So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for...

Plunging

Posted on October 17, 2008
Joe the plumber is not likely to slow John McCain's passage through the porcelain exit. It seems Joe's savings under McCain's tax plan wouldn't even pay off the back taxes Joe already owes to Ohio ... even assuming Joe really earned enough to go over $250,000 in taxable earnings...

Exercising Both Sides of the Mouth

Posted on October 16, 2008
Just to further demonstrate what a disservice the Texas State Board of Education has done to the children of that state, here is some more from Ralph Seelke, one of the authors of the Discovery Institute's untextbook, Explore Evolution:"Simply allowing the student to look at scientific evidence for and against something, that is not by any means, by any stretch of the imagination teaching intelligent design--which I do not want," Seelke said...

Boffo!

Posted on October 15, 2008
Comedy is better than lies.Bill Maher and Larry Charles' "Religulous," a satiric diatribe on modern religion that opened Oct. 1, will soon pass "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," an argument for the teaching of intelligent-design theory in academia and a favorite of the faith crowd, as this year's highest-grossing documentary movie...

Sabotaging Science

Posted on October 15, 2008
As PZ and Wes have already noted, Texas screws its own children:Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller today sharply criticized the inclusion of three strident evolution opponents, including two authors of an anti-evolution textbook, on a panel that will review proposed new science curriculum standards for Texas public schools...

Eating Their Own Young

Posted on October 15, 2008
Christopher Buckley, son of William F., an author in his own right of satirical political novels, and a contributor and editor to his father's magazine, National Review, has been fired by the magazine for apostasy. It seems that Christopher had the temerity to ...

Who Said This?

Posted on October 14, 2008
From a political speech in the United States on Monday, October 13, 2008:We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change.Hint: it did not come from a politician whose name rhymes with "Osama...

Reading the Bible Doesn't Make You Stupid!

Posted on October 14, 2008
.The Review of Biblical Literature, affiliated with the Society of Biblical Literature has a review (pdf file) of Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski and Michael Ruse in Dialogue by Christopher Heard of Pepperdine University that demonstrates that Heard can see through the ID sleight of hand...

Where the Weakness Lies

Posted on October 13, 2008
The Houston Chronicle has a nice editorial endorsing Laura Ewing, the opponent of David Bradley, the vice chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Mr. Bradley thinks that education involves teaching children to "jump to conclusions." This part of the editorial was nice (despite a slight gender error):The question facing the board, in the first overhaul of the science curriculum in more than a decade, is whether the curriculum will continue to include teaching the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories, including evolution...

Woo Hoo!

Posted on October 12, 2008
Another great announcement!Brian Switek of Laelaps has been tapped by the Smithsonian magazine to contribute to its new blog, Dinosaur Traking. You can see Brian's first post about termite-eating dinosaurs here.We often think of dinosaurs as massive beasts that shook their earth with their footsteps and their roars, but under the feet of those giants were smaller, stranger dinosaurs that no one ever expected to find...

Sail On

Posted on October 12, 2008
The Sixth Carnival of Elitist Bastards is due to sail on October 25th from Port Haystack.I know that there are a lot of bastards out there who'd like to show up the stupidity, ignorance and dishonesty currently masquerading as "small town values," "common sense" and "teaching the controversy...

Lowletist of the Low

Posted on October 12, 2008
Get Fuzzy"Country First" ... or "Stupid Is the New Smart" ... We report, you decide..

Fantasylandier

Posted on October 12, 2008
Truth will out, even when the subject is Answers in Genesis' "Creation Museum" and the speaker is Ken Ham:We made a decision quite a few years ago, that we wanted to do it first-class ... as good as you would see at museums or Disney World or Universal Studios...

Doubling Standards

Posted on October 11, 2008
A thought:What I find most unconscionable is the refusal of the McCain-Palin tandem to publicly condemn the cries of "traitor," "liar," "terrorist" and (worst of all) "kill him!" that could be heard at recent rallies. ...Is inaction tantamount to consent? The McCain campaign certainly thinks so when it comes to Obama and incendiary remarks from the Rev...

Trading Eyes

Posted on October 11, 2008
There is an interesting article, "Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?" by Paul Vallely in Britain's The Independent about the forces that rose up and bit Michael Reiss. To us in America, it might seem like undue worry on British scientists' part, given the relative sizes of our problems...

Loving More

Posted on October 10, 2008
Congratulations to the people of Connecticut on joining the enlightened citizens of the world. Today its Supreme Court overturned the bar to marriage by gays and lesbians. Even though a form of "civil union" was recently enacted, the state's legislature had issued this disclaimer, expressly stating that the gay rights law shall not be: ...

Proceeding Economically

Posted on October 09, 2008
.A thought:When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld...

Happenings

Posted on October 09, 2008
James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix, an Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University, is a thoughtful theist and Christian who values and defends science and secular government.James has now become part of the Christian Century blog network...

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