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Ninnyhammer

ingod.jpgI’m conflicted.

As I often am. I guess you can’t BE broad-minded and open, which I flatter myself I am, without often finding yourself stretched between this value and that, one conclusion and the other. Because things are complex, yes, but also because you can’t ever be sure you have full information on which to base a rock-solid conclusion.

And so you have to deal in multi-valued awareness, and conclusions that retain — sometimes forever — some measure of tentativeness. That means you can never see heroes as just heroes, you can never see villains as just villains. 

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Flying Monkeys of Jesus

shadows-225x198.jpgThe Shreveport Times (writer Kristi Richie, June 7, 2008) reports:

Pornography, Harry Potter books burned at monthly meeting

About 30 people gathered for a regional revival Friday night that included a book burning as a statement to reach out to local residents.

Because nothing “reaches out” to people like a good book burning.

“It is allowed for Harry Potter to be taught in our schools, but not the Bible,” International House of Prayer pastor James Crawford said during the Shreveport Regional Unity of Faith Revival.

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Upcoming Carnival of the Godless

I’m hosting the Carnival of the Godless on June 22.

If you have a blog post in the atheist/agnostic/humanist vein you’d like to submit, get it to BlogCarnival before — that’s BEFORE — June 20, and you’ll see it introduced and linked here.

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Jeez.

wilbur.jpgBen Stein, actor and, uh — I almost said comedian, but he’s not that funny — former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and former speechwriter for President Nixon, is turning out to be a serious nutcase.

And I don’t mean “lovable nutcase,” like dear old Aunt Clara from Bewitched who collected doorknobs. I mean malignant, nasty SOB nutcase, an enemy, in his own way, to core American values.

I know whenever you hear “American values” you automatically think of family-related stuff, like raising your kids right and staying married to the same woman (or  man). Saying the Pledge and honoring the soldiers, eating watermelon at the county fair.

But science is a core American value too, one that stretches back to before the founding of the nation. Ben  Franklin is known as a scientist, for instance. Thomas Jefferson is less known as an experimentalist but was no less a rigorous rationalist and scientific thinker. Wilbur and Orville Wright are quintessential American heroes.

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Fired Up, Fired Out

Wheaton CollegeWheaton College, Wheaton, Ill., requires faculty and staff to sign a faith statement and adhere to standards of conduct in areas including marriage. This is, after all, the origin-place of evangelist Billy Graham and the home of the globally evangelistic Billy Graham Center. 

It’s also the place that made national headlines on Feb. 20, 2003, when it lifted its then 143 year-old ban on student dancing. (Whoa! Next thing you know, they’ll be apologizing to Galileo.)

It would be weird to work or go to school in such a place, don’t you think? And yet some choose it, you have to believe deliberately. It does have a pretty respectable academic history.

Here’s a young man (I guess; he kept his identity a secret) who became an atheist halfway through his college years at Wheaton (he just graduated in December), and chronicled the journey in a blog called “Leaving Eden.”

Nov. 29, 2007: “Now is the time when all of my final papers and projects are due, all of which must be from a Christian perspective. Before I started I thought, no big deal, I know what the Christian perspective is, and anyway it’ll be kind of fun using words that I haven’t used in a long time, like sanctification, eschatology, spiritual discipline– not to mention the whole language of Wheaton evangelicalism that I worked so hard to become fluent in. / But man, it sucks. It actually makes me feel a little bit ill to have to do this.”

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Gosh darn it, Francis Collins

collins.jpgUgh. This article bubbled to the top pages of Digg today. I’d known about it before, but found it freshly disturbing upon reading it again. From the Times Online:

Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”.

His book, The Language of God, to be published in [July, 2006], will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been created that science and religion have to be at war,” said Collins, 56.

“I don’t see that as necessary at all and I think it is deeply disappointing that the shrill voices that occupy the extremes of this spectrum have dominated the stage for the past 20 years.”

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Atheists should grow some.

bull.jpgJonah Goldberg is the author of “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” which I haven’t read, but which has one of those woo-woo doublespeak names – something on the order of “The Anti-White Genocidal History of the Murderous, Hateful American Indians, from the 1500s to the Present” – that doesn’t exactly inspire me to want to rush out and buy it.

I’m pretty sure I’ve also seen one or two atheist-bashing articles in the past by the guy. So when I saw this bit in the LA Times Opinion page online, I figured it wasn’t an April Fool’s Day joke, despite the April 1 date on it. (Evidently he liked the piece so much he repeated it in the National Review Online on April 2.)

Just FYI, it’s editors who typically choose the titles for articles, so I don’t blame Goldberg too much for the header, but the piece is called “Evolution of religious bigotry: The cowardice and intolerance of slapping a Darwin fish on your car bumper.”

Ahem. Yeah.

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PZ Catches Some Flack

blood.jpgPZ Myers posted a link to a new video, in which a Dutch somebody or other takes a whack at Islam … by showing pictures of beheadings, bombings, etc. You’ve probably read about it by now. The film is called “Fitna,” and does present a pretty harsh picture of Islam.

A substantial number of the commenters interpreted the posting of the link as a racist attack on Muslims, and they jumped on Prof. Myers in the comments with claws out on all four feet.

Those poor, maligned Muslims, can’t catch a break because so many people are so racist, so hateful, and the Muslims are really just downtrodden lovers of peace, blah, blah, blah.

Basically, they misinterpreted what Myers did, and what he said, and overreacted.

Here’s my comment on the thing:

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Does Jesus Make You Happy?

unbeliever.jpg“People who believe in God are happier than agnostics or atheists, researchers claimed yesterday.”

So begins another of the half-dozen or so stories I’ve seen on the subject over the past couple of years. This particular study, titled, revealingly enough, “Deliver Us From Evil: Religion as Insurance,” was carried out with data from Britain and Europe by Prof. Andrew Clark of the Paris School of Economics, and Dr. Orsolya Lelkes of the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research.

If you’re religious, or inclined to faith, the persistent stories sound very positive. By believing, even if none of the rest of your religion is true, apparently you’re bolstering the chances of a rise in the level of your own contentment.

If you’re an atheist, on the other hand, it seems like yet another smug, annoying advertisement by the godder lobby: “Ha-ha unbelievers! We’re happier than you are! See? Science proves it!” If we aren’t already innately less happy because of our lack of faith, we can thank our goddy brethren for MAKING us unhappy with their insistent carping on how bad and wrong we are compared to them, simply because we don’t have their religion resident in our heads.

But aside from all that, the research, presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference in Coventry, England, has at least SOME science behind it. If the study was rigorously done, it provides a hypothesis worth considering by people on both sides of the god divide.

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Vintage Whine

i-slam-piglet.jpgWhoa. Found this at The Amboy Times. 

Excerpts from “The List of Things that Offend Muslims.”

Sharia law demands submission not only from Muslims, but from non-Muslims as well. This makes respectful coexistence nearly impossible with Muslims in Infidel lands. The examples below serve as reminder that submitting to one complaint or another only emboldens Muslims to seek to further their ultimate goal of establishing sharia.

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