Archive for December, 2006

Louie Savva’s Everything Is Pointless is (like ours, he said modestly) a really good blog you should be in the habit of reading. That fact does not mean, however, that his closing in on our #4 chart position at The Best of Net Atheism can be tolerated. Start clicking, soldier! And suck in that gut!

There’s been another ghastly incident of a zealously religious mother murdering her small children and saying God told her to, and this has sparked an interesting discussion on the ACA mailing list that I thought I’d hijack and migrate over here. The ugly story in brief: Lashuan Harris, a young Oakland woman, believing she was under orders from God to deliver a human sacrifice, methodically flung her three kids, ranging in ages from 18 months to 6 years, into the freezing San Francisco Bay. Her counsel has pled not guilty by reason of insanity, which might seem entirely understandable (except for the “not guilty” part — I’ve always thought the plea should be “guilty but mentally impaired” or something) until you realize there’s this Bible story about a fellow named Abraham and his son Isaac. Evidently this kind of behavior is not unknown in the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, in the modern day California version of the story, it looks as if God forgot to give the kids a last minute stay of execution on the grounds his mother had passed some sort of sick loyalty test. On the mailing list, the indefatigable Stephen Rogers — quite possibly making the Abraham/Isaac connection as well — asked if events like this weren’t enough to wake believers out of their trance and realize how morally reprehensible and deranged their belief system really is. I replied that most Christians will probably just dismiss such a quandary with remarks that the woman isn’t a True Christian™, or that she was just delusional and that God would never ask anyone to do such a thing, though he clearly did according to Genesis 22. Regular AE blog commenter Tracie Harris made a worthwhile point: Everything I was ever taught about Xianity — when I was a Xian — would support her logic. These children are in heaven, according to most Xian doctrines. It’s funny to me that using Xian logic to...
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Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Bummer to those of you being slammed by snowstorms, but in Austin today, the weather’s kind of pretty. 63° and mostly sunny. In the comments, let’s hear a little about what you’d like to see 2007 bring. An end to the war in the mideast may be a little unrealistic, but perhaps we can hope for some positivity here at home.

When I was young(er), Carl Sagan was something of a cultural anomaly: a celebrity scientist. You didn’t see too many professional scientists representing on Johnny Carson and other mainstream media venues. Though I’m sure there were more, the only other scientist I can think of who was known by a large percentage of the public about 25 years ago would have been Isaac Asimov, and he was mostly known for his science fiction, actually a modest portion of his entire writing output. To the young me, then as now a rabid fan of both science fiction and science fact, Carl’s particular expertise in astronomy meant that there was a sound field of study underlying the adventure stories that I embraced for my entertainment. It’s one thing to read a cool space opera by the likes of Gordon R. Dickson or Poul Anderson, and allow your imagination to soar as you dream about what it might actually be like to fly among the stars. But it’s another thing entirely to have a guy like Sagan who could bring you back down to earth with real science, but do so without losing any of that sense of wonder — if anything, enhancing that sense of wonder by letting you see that the real universe was just as wondrous, if not moreso, than how it appears in even the best science fiction. But in the years prior to his death, I got introduced to another, even more intriguing subject by Carl: skepticism. His book The Demon-Haunted World was not the first work of skepticism out there, but it was one of the bestselling ones, and it was the first one that I read. I was, by my mid-teens, already leaning towards a rejection of the religious beliefs I’d been raised with. But as a youth I had no sophisticated arguments with which to defend my skeptical views. Nor was I aware of the extent to which not only superstition and irrationalism thrive in all cultures, but the degree to these problems threaten science itself. I still can never understand why people will...
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See? No church/state issues at all. And if we have to entrust the defense of our nation to an animal, I’m sure this little fellow would do a much better job than the Chimp.