First bandits make off with a holy man’s holy leg, and now, via Skeptico, I discover this delicious little story about a provincial judge in India ordering two gods, Ram and Hanuman, to appear in court to give evidence in a property dispute. The judge is not about to grant any special dispensations to them …
Category Archive: superstition
Dec 14 2007
Irrationalism hasn’t got a leg to stand on
None of you is likely to forgive me for the bad joke in the headline when you read this article. But still, I think this little event shows up the practical risks of embracing irrational beliefs in magic and the occult. So the next time some wide-eyed individual calls me a closed-minded old grumpus because …
Nov 30 2007
Our stupid nation: a jeremiad
Not surprising, perhaps, but still sad. I will never understand why people so eagerly embrace fantasy while flushing reality down the nearest commode as fast as they can. [jeremiad] The American Century is definitely over. In the 21st century, expect precious few great achievements from these shores. We’ll be an intellectual third world country, as …
Nov 12 2007
Cripes, why not sacrifice a @#!!* chicken?
Headlines that make me embarrassed to be an American: Georgia governor prays for rain amid drought. They’re even going to do it on their capital steps. Oh the humiliation. Of course, if it rains at any time in the next three months, they’ll squeal that their prayers were answered. Makes us in Texas look not …
Oct 31 2007
Halloween and the fundamentalist inability to distinguish fantasy from reality
While the rest of us gather ’round every October 31 for parties, dressing up, taking the kids (if you got ‘em) trick-or-treating, and watching scary movies on DVD till all hours, it’s easy to forget that there is an entire segment of the populace — Christian fundamentalists — who go out of their way to …
Oct 01 2007
The Impact of Explanatory Function on Existence: Show #520
For some time I’ve been considering the idea that Christian apologists argue both sides of any issue and call it proof of god or of their doctrine’s validity. Examples would be “faith” versus “reason,” or “god answers prayers” versus “sometimes god answers prayers ‘no,’” or “the world is perfectly suited to human life” versus “the …
Jul 03 2007
The mindlessness of religion in one convenient, snarky package
In a couple of amusingly juxtaposed incidents that demonstrate how religion is little more than some leftover, atavistic rubbish from our days as hunter-gatherers picking fleas off one another, we have Church of England bishops wagging their fingers and pronouncing a recent rash of heavy rains and flooding to be divine wrath for “Western civilisation’s …
Apr 17 2007
Reality vs. fantasy: a visual metaphor
Via PZ, a YouTube clip of a martial arts “master” who seems to have watched too many Shaw Brothers wire-fu movies from the seventies, and who thinks he can vanquish all comers by the use of his “qi”. In the video on Pharyngula, you can see him goofily flapping his arms in the general direction …
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