I hadn’t heard there was a thing about a tweet of Dawkins’s (another one? yes another one). Now I have, courtesy of Fidalgo’s Daily Morning Heresy. There was a thing, and as a result Dawkins wrote a piece saying he said it wrong.
First he gives the background.
Yesterday, on Twitter, I wrote of the British journalist Mehdi Hasan’s belief that the Prophet Muhamed flew to Heaven on a winged horse. [Read more…]
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a sweeping antiabortion omnibus bill into law, reaffirming the state’s current ban on abortion at 20 weeks (without exceptions for rape or serious fetal anomalies), blocking tax breaks for abortion providers, expanding “conscience protections” for anti-choice groups and writing into state law that life begins “at fertilization.”
Because it’s imperative to do what we can to make sure women remain enslaved by their own bodies. [Read more…]
In El Salvador this time. (Blargh, what a name for a country, eh? Imagine being a citizen of The Savior. Gag me.) (And in this case, what a fucking bitter joke.)
According to a report from Amnesty International, a seriously ill and pregnant El Salvadorian woman may face jail time if she goes forward with a lifesaving and medically recommended abortion. Abortion is illegal under all circumstances in El Salvador.
The 22-year-old mother of one, identified only as Beatriz, is four-and-a-half months pregnant, but her doctors have confirmed that the fetus has anencephaly (developing without a brain and certain parts of the skull) and that the pregnancy is nonviable. In addition to the fetal diagnosis, Beatriz is experiencing critical health complications related to her lupus and kidney disease.
The hospital treating Beatriz requested legal permission to perform the abortion more than a month ago, but authorities have still not agreed to let them proceed.
The Savior to Beatriz: die, bitch.
Atheism is because of something missing in the brain.
Autism associations around Turkey have reacted angrily after the head of Adana’s Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children reportedly said autistic children were “atheists due to a lack of a section for faith in their brains.”
“Autistic children do not know how to believe in God because they do not have a section of faith in their brains,” sociologist Fehmi Kaya reportedly said. “That is why they don’t know how to pray, how to believe in God. It is necessary to create awareness [or religion] in these children through methods of therapy.”
He also reportedly said atheism was a form of autism.
Ok I know this one. It’s theory of mind. Autistic people can have a defective theory of mind. If you have a working theory of mind, you understand that other people have minds just as you do, and that they have thoughts that are theirs and not yours. You don’t know what they’re thinking. So…if you have a working theory of mind, you have the ability to believe in a pure Mind that is not in some body near you, it’s somewhere else altogether, and it’s mysterious and hidden.
Therefore atheists are autistic.
Makes perfect sense!
Here’s a disgusting item. Trigger warning, and all that. Video from Burma, in which police look on while Buddhists trash shops owned by Muslims and kill a Muslim boy.
The footage, apparently shot by police officers, shows Buddhist crowds looting and ransacking a Muslim jewellery shop, cheering when Muslims are attacked, and setting fire to mosques and houses. Later, a man who has been set alight and is believed to be Muslim can be seen lying in the road, surrounded by a crowd of people. “Pour water on him,” a man in the crowd commands. “Let him die,” shouts another. “No water for him.”
Both Buddhist monks and police can be seen through much of the footage – the monks often taking part in the violence, the police watching immobile as it progresses.
Dear dear human beings. How we do disgrace ourselves.
An interesting question. American Atheists asked on Twitter:
Seeking input! What blog do you think best represents
#atheists/#atheism positively? Doesn’t have to be an exclusively atheist blog.
But what does AA mean by “positively”? I asked, in several doubtless annoying tweets, but AA had skipped off to other activities so I didn’t find out.
The word has come to be a blanket term for nice or not hostile aka not critical while “negative” has come to be a blanket term for nasty or critical or skeptical.
So you see why I asked. Organized, campaigning, activist atheists don’t necessarily see “not critical” as “positive”…so what are we talking about here? [Read more…]
Allen Esterson has a wonderful article on a 2009 book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, in which they claim that moral passion about the horrors of slavery was Darwin’s motivation for “determined pursuit of an explanatory theory for the transformation of species of which he became convinced as a result of his experiences during the Beagle voyage of 1831 to 1836.”
I once tried to read their 1991 biography of Darwin but I stopped fairly soon because it’s full of nudging innuendo about motives and agendas and complicity – you know the kind of thing. It was obvious bullshit, because it was always stuff they were reading in, not anything they demonstrated or offered good evidence for. I found it very annoying and smug, and it’s a treat to see Allen whisk aside the curtain.
This article explores the means by which the authors seek to persuade readers of the validity of their thesis, and concludes that far from providing compelling evidence, by providing a mass of historically interesting material relating to slavery that is actually tangential to their case, they obscure the fact that they fail to accomplish their aim.
Yes that sounds like them.
I saw it on Facebook this morning and the thought of it has been making me smile all day so it would just be wrong not to post it here.
Do admit.
[click on it to see the larger version]
A talk show on RTE today, Marian Finucane, featured Dr Peter Boylan, the expert witness at the inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar, and Breda O’Brien, Irish Times columnist and patron of the Iona Institute. The Iona Institute is a reactionary Catholic group. Broadsheet.ie has already done a transcript, which is helpful.
Boylan said something quite striking…
And we cannot, as doctors, be expected to do our ward rounds with a calculator in one hand and the law in another hand. We have to be given the liberty to do what we feel is best for a patient and in this…These circumstances are the only circumstances in obstetric care where a woman’s wishes are not taken into account. Where she has no input into her care. Now if you think of any other sort of situation like that you end up talking about the Taliban. Where else are women denied an input into their care? [Read more…]
The inquest into the death of Savita Halappanavar ended on Friday and Praveen Halappanavar still doesn’t have answers. He told us what he thinks of the whole thing.
The medical care she received was in no way different to staying home. Medicine is all about preventing the natural history of the disease, and improving patients’ lives and health. And look what they did. She was just left there to die. We were never – we were always kept in the dark. If Savita had known her life was at risk she would have jumped off the bed and seeked a different hospital. She was, we were never told, and it’s horrendous, it’s barbaric and inhuman the way Savita was treated in that hospital.
It’s very striking. She might as well have stayed home. They went to the hospital, naturally thinking that they would find there what you’re supposed to get at hospitals – treatment. They didn’t get that, and they weren’t even told they weren’t getting that. She was just left there to die. [Read more…]