Karen Armstrong is a former English teacher and current religious apologist with a strong dislike of science; she has found a novelist who also has a strong dislike of science, and who was invited to give some lectures on the subject at Yale. (Yale invites some very odd fish to give lectures on subjects they don’t seem to know much about. Terry Eagleton for instance, and now Marilynne Robinson. Why does Yale do that?)

[T]he novelist Marilynne Robinson argues that positivism, the belief that science is the only reliable means to truth, has adopted a “systematically reductionist” view of human nature.

Oh yay, a much-needed critique of the reductionism of positivism and the folly of thinking that science is … Read the rest

Let’s celebrate Christopher Hitchens (and the 4th of July, if you like) by watching his hard-eyed look at a putative saint.

… Read the rest

I’m just echoing Norm here, but what the hell.

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani is due to be stoned to death on a bogus charge of “adultery.” She’s already had 99 lashes, but the authorities in Iran have decided to be thorough about it.

“She’s innocent, she’s been there for five years for doing nothing”, [her son] Sajad said. He described the imminent execution as barbaric. “Imagining her, bound inside a deep hole in the ground, stoned to death, has been a nightmare for me and my sister for all these years.”

Yes. Naturally. And there is something hideously, deeply, intolerably wrong with people who can not only contemplate doing that, but actually do it. Who consider it not a nightmare but … Read the rest

Cristina Odone is there, announcing to a breathless world that She is Praying for Christopher Hitchens. Well good, because that is the first thing that leapt to my mind, of course – will Cristina Odone be praying for him?

While condemning the intolerance of religious organisations, he shows zero tolerance for believers: a person of faith must be a fanatic, or a fraud. (Mother Teresa, according to his book The Missionary Position, was both.)  He refuses to consider the evidence of religious do-gooding, found in the Catholic Church’s AIDS clinics in Africa, Anglican schools in Asia, and Jewish charities around the globe. He is determined to persecute Pope Benedict XVI, and would like to see him arrested on