First up: Jesus and Mo. This cartoon, and I say this rarely, has been confirmed by a recent study. Turns out that your personal beliefs about the reality of the world and your God's tend to coincide. It's not luck.
Over three months in 2006, as her five children grew more emaciated and listless by the day, Estelle Walker made no move to find a job, no effort to scrounge up a meal, her kids told a jury yesterday.
"We were supposed to wait for God to provide," said Walker's oldest daughter, now 21. "And that's what we did."
At one point, the daughter said, she and her siblings went 11 days without food. When police were at last summoned to the Sussex County cabin by neighbors, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.
You would think that after watching her own children waste away for months, she'd realize that god will not provide. Never has and never will.
Three: One reason why the mean ol' New Atheists are popular is that they're very good debaters. They're very good with this whole reason in argument thing. Take a look at this debate between Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry and representatives of the Catholic Church. What's remarkable is that they were polling this very literate audience and the more the Catholic reps spoke the more people they lost. I must confess that I find 99 percent of the debates between the New Atheists and religious people to go this way. However, this is the first time I've seen polling to confirm it. Watch the entirety of the debate here.
These are the people who fuel the kind of self-righteous ignorance that encourages people to picket reproductive health clinics, treat ob-gyns as public criminals, and incite murder. The heroes are the doctors who sacrifice so much — privacy, security, and in this case, their life — to provide essential services to women, the women in whom Reaganites find so little value, unless they are pregnant. One of the tragedies of this recent killing and the conservative tradition is that it will be increasingly difficult to find heroes brave enough to step into this role…exactly as these narrow-minded, puritanical enemies of human liberty want.
Two religious toons for Sunday. And here's a daily strip that will never EVER receive daily syndication. Its called Cectic. Throw a donation his way or my way (upper left corner. I could use a new laptop...)
John Lennon's sons and widow, Yoko Ono, are suing the filmmakers of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" for using the song "Imagine" in the documentary without permission.
[...]
The documentary, which features Ben Stein, an actor, comedian and former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, looks at alleged discrimination against scientists and teachers who support so-called intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.
Last I saw Ben Stein, he was on 700 Club hawking his latest investment strategy book. Pat obviously hadn't read the book, but he was full of typical gee-shucks optimism about it. Seemingly annoyed, Ben kept cutting through Pat's stammering. Ben looked very, very tired.
(Article link via Pharyngula, whose comments board to this particular post is unfortunately full of nasty comments about Asian women.)
Update: Haha. In this comment Pharyngula commenter Curt Cameron links to a YouTube page he claims to contain the clip from the documentary which features the song Imagine in context, but the clip has been taken down. According to the YouTube page:
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Premise Media
Premise Media Corporation produced the film EXPELLED. So they're enforcing their copyright to a clip posted on YouTube which contains an unauthorized segment of "Imagine" while at the same time arguing in civil court that their unauthorized use of "Imagine" falls under the domain of fair use. From the Reuters article:
The producers cited the fair use doctrine, which allows the use of copyrighted materials for the purposes of commentary and criticism.
"We are disappointed therefore that Yoko Ono and others have decided to challenge our free speech right to comment on the song 'Imagine' in our documentary film," they said in a statement.
Demonstrating once again that consistency is the hobgoblin of Designer Intelligence.
Related: Daniel Dennett at this year's Beyond Belief conference, which I'm waiting to see more of on Youtube. And go here for google roundtable featuring Dennett, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchins.
A sample of the original content that appeared in OVO blog this month:
Christ @ Work. The Bible does contain some fine moral advice in it. It also contains some inhumanly evil moral advice. It also contains some foolish nonsense that dresses itself up as moral advice. That doesn't make it much different from any number of other books, ancient and modern.
Extremophiles. What might humanity be able to engineer for ourselves to become extremophiles? What dangers do exremophiles present to humanity?
Interfaith Dialog. In some places, disagreements are resolved by discussion. In other places, disagreements are resolved by flogging.
Islam is Peace. Islam, like Christianity and all religions, is a collection of mean-spirited superstitions invented by illiterate pre-scientific nobodies that we have no reason to heed.
More Sperm. February 2005 saw the return of OVO after 13 years of hibernation. The theme for that issue was 'sperm.' Sperm remains in the news, and here are some of the top sperm stories from the past two years.
Peaceable Protests After Amsterdam Attacks. Police in the Dutch city of Amsterdam say several peaceful protests were held in the sixth night of memorials after officers shot a Moroccan man dead.
Priorities. It seems that other people being free to celebrate or have their own superstitions is intolerable to Muslims, while public whippings and stoning are just fine as long as they occur in-house.
Publius Enigma. It has something to do with Pink Floyd and the Internet and a treasure hunt.
Saturn Return. Saturn Return is when Universe picks you up from under the Christmas tree and shakes you to see if it can figure out what you are.
SB777. SB777 protects religious belief against discrimination. It also protects discrimination in religious belief. Only religion can distort the rule of law to this degree.
Sharia in the United States of America. It is illegal to non-surgically amputate people's hands as a punishment for a crime. Illegal under United States law, but legal under sharia law.
Superstitious Exemption from the Rule of Law. For better and for worse, it is not the case that we can all happily get along. But where there is the rule of law and not force, fiat or superstition we can at least get along peaceably.
Two Links via God is for Suckers. All money spent on religion is money wasted, wasted more thoroughly than money spent on weapons or torture. At least when someone is killed or tortured, something happened.
First from an incisive piece called "God's Dupes" from Sam Harris that I think hits a number of points. I guess the premise is that the relatively sensible Mullah Rob (Can't let this one go: Could you name those angry atheists? Could it be that the overwhelming number of studies--there's more than one--show no positive correlation or perhaps these unnamed angry atheists understand the placebo effect?) gives cover to Catholic Jihadists like Funky Dung. So they must all be...destroyed. Okay he didn't say that last part. He has said that people who take the Old Testament God at his angry off times malicious word should be taken as seriously as, say, palmists and astrologers. Sounds good to me.
Here's a snippet:
PETE STARK, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.
Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."
Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.
Oh here's the whole thing. Its that good.
The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.
Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.
Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.
Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.
Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.
The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?
There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.
Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.
"Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight."
--James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Ensure a Free and Fair Election (Ban Paperless Voting Machines
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
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