NHS Tayside sacks 500, seeks homeopath *

Aug 17th, 2010 | Filed by

At £68,000 a year. Everybody should apply.… Read the rest



Russian tycoon to employees: join church or lose jobs *

Aug 17th, 2010 | Filed by

Says the drought and fires are “punishment for the Russian people’s sins.” Doesn’t say how he knows.… Read the rest



Pink Triangle outraged at the attack on Leo Igwe’s parents *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

PTT secretary George Broadhead said: “Mr Igwe has demonstrated his staunch support for LGBT rights.”… Read the rest



BioLogos at Huffington Post

Aug 16th, 2010 12:07 pm | By

You can blame Jerry Coyne for pointing out Pete Enns. The damage is done, at any rate.

He’s a condescending bugger, I must say.

To say that God’s existence is detectable with certainty through reason, logic, and evidence is a belief because it makes some crucial assumptions. For one thing, it assumes that our intellectual faculties are the best, or only, ways of accessing God. This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.

See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.

It is an old argument but a good one: any god worthy

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Reserve’s last rhino butchered for her horn *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

Rhino horn has been used for centuries in “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” though it has no magic properties and is like a fingernail.… Read the rest



See here, chaps, what Afghan chaps do is their own affair *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

Is it not presumptuous to insist that a proud, patriarchal society that has survived for 3,000 years should now instantly stop cutting women’s noses off?… Read the rest



Surprise: jobless women don’t need babies *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

The need for abortion goes up in a recession because pregnancy doesn’t magically make women financially secure.… Read the rest



Scots peer campaigns for biblical law *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

“The Bible is a unique resource as the foundational source book for Scotland’s legal system.”… Read the rest



Taliban stones a couple in a crowded bazaar *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

“The Taliban warned villagers if anyone does anything un-Islamic, this will be their fate.”… Read the rest



Clerical rape survivor “shattered” by pope’s decision *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

“If those two had stood up, children would have been stopped from being abused. The fact that the Pope doesn’t see that is the final straw for me.”… Read the rest



Pope rejects resignations of Dublin bishops *

Aug 16th, 2010 | Filed by

Deirdre Kenny of the One in Four group, which supports survivors of clerical rape, called it an “extraordinary decision by the Vatican.”… Read the rest



This is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind

Aug 15th, 2010 12:31 pm | By

More from Paul Cliteur’s The Secular Outlook. The first chapter is an extended analysis of atheism, agnosticism and theism. At the end of his discussion of Pascal’s Wager PC says Pascal did have one strong point, which is that we cannot suspend judgment on the transcendental realm – italics his. Quite right. If there is a god and it does want us to act in certain ways and it has given us reliable and unmistakable knowledge on the subject, that does make a difference. We may well think the god is evil and that we’re not going to act in the ways it wants us to, but it would be feckless not to think about it one way or … Read the rest



Four horsemen video *

Aug 15th, 2010 | Filed by

It’s non-believers who are the most indignant and outraged; what is that about?… Read the rest



Whooping cough epidemic and anti-vaxers *

Aug 15th, 2010 | Filed by

At three schools in California, 80% of parents have signed a “personal belief exemption” to keep their children from being vaccinated.… Read the rest



Nick Cohen notes: David Cameron is not middle class *

Aug 15th, 2010 | Filed by

For a half a century, the British elite has pretended that it does not exist.… Read the rest



Hitchens is still doing words *

Aug 15th, 2010 | Filed by

Talking, writing and perpetuating the belief he has upheld throughout his life: in “free inquiry, open-mindedness and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”… Read the rest



If there is no design, there is no designer

Aug 14th, 2010 5:08 pm | By

As a companion piece to the one on Gary Gutting’s suggestions about god’s simplicity, here is Dawkins on why the whole idea is a non-starter (TGD p 121):

Creationist “logic” is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed

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Money for old rope

Aug 14th, 2010 4:18 pm | By

Russell has done a thorough dance on the exiguous “arguments” of Suzanne Fields’s “atheists are poopyheads” in that pride of journalism, The Washington Times, but I thought I would still take just a moment to point out how incredibly lazy it is. There’s no evidence that she’s ever even read anything on the subject before writing about it; all she’s done is string together a selection of very stale atheist-hating chestnuts.

Atheism is fashionable. The Bible sells way more copies. Nobody puts atheist books in hotel rooms. Atheists think they’re nonconformists but atheism is way old. Satan. Smug, shallow and arrogant. Cheap. Hitchens and Hitchens. Zealous. Lenin. The 60s. Muslims. Leftists. The worship of power.

That’s it. Seriously. Sarah … Read the rest



Travels

Aug 14th, 2010 12:20 pm | By

All right, I’ve adjusted my attitude since yesterday and the day before. We had a nice chat on the phone, and it will be okay. The seminar will be mostly discussion and q and a, so I won’t have to give a big long talk while yawning and scratching, so I can handle it. And hey, it will be fun. A conversation with a lot of people interested in women’s rights and the role of religion in interfering with same, in Stockholm. Fun!

And the cover of the Swedish translation of Does God Hate Women? is by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, whose Homosexuality in religion exhibit was canceled by one museum in June.

Sweden’s Museum of World Cultures canceled

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Hauser inquiry: privacy v reliable evidence *

Aug 14th, 2010 | Filed by

Harvard is keeping its findings secret, which leaves other researchers unsure which of Hauser’s experiments can be relied on.… Read the rest