And it’s a strange thing. It’s a law that slaps anyone who offends “a substantial number of the adherents of a religion” with a €25,000 fine — which is equal to most of my yearly salary, and also means I’m one of the few people that one could make a good case for having committed blasphemy. I guess I won’t be vacationing in Ireland any time soon.
Fortunately, some people are speaking out against the law, especially Atheist Ireland. Join in if you can, work to repeal this medieval nonsense.
It’s rather familiar, I’m afraid. But funny.
I’m feeling a bit uplifted at the word from the other side of the Atlantic: some doom and gloom from the Anglican church.
A long-serving Church of England bishop has predicted that the Church of England will cease to exist within a generation. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Paul Richardson said declining church attendance and the rise in multiculturalism meant that “Christian Britain is dead”.
The Church is rapidly declining, with attendances at its services in freefall, a proposal on the table at the next General Synod meeting to cut the number of bishops, and huge holes in its finances due to the economic downturn and a lack of congregants to donate to the collection plate.
Richardson said that the Church had lost more than one in ten of its regular worshippers between 1996 and 2006, with a fall from more than one million to 880,000.
The only concern would be that some other, more malevolent church could rise to take its place. Maybe the next step would be for the state to declare that the official state religion was atheism, just to preclude any nastier replacement.
How often have you seen this? An affectionate couple are walking along holding hands, and one gives the other a kiss on the cheek.
The only way you might have missed seeing that fairly often is if you are legally blind. It’s common, it’s harmless, and it’s rather sweet — and we normally approve of such mild public expressions of affection.
Unless, of course, the couple consists of two young men, and especially if it is in Utah.
A gay couple says they were detained by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints security guards after one man kissed another on the cheek Thursday on Main Street Plaza.
“They targeted us,” said Matt Aune, 28. “We weren’t doing anything inappropriate or illegal, or anything most people would consider inappropriate for any other couple.”
Aune and his partner, Derek Jones, 25, were cited by Salt Lake City police for trespassing on the plaza, located at 50 East North Temple, according to Sgt. Robin Snyder.
I know exactly where that is — it’s near the huge office building that is headquarters for the Mormon Empire. Good work, Matt and Derek! If there is any place on the planet that most needs some demonstration of gay endearment, that’s one of the best (oddly enough, all the others that I can think of are also centers of established religion…). Maybe a few hundred loving couples of all sexes ought to descend on the place and show the Mormon security guards that they can’t quell people’s feelings for one another.
Mr Aune did show a little naivete, though.
The kiss happened on a former public easement given up by city in 2003 in a controversial land-swap deal. The easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other “offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,” church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center.
Aune said he was one of those who protested the transfer at the time.
“They claimed in 2003 this would never happen, they were never going to arrest anyone,” he said. “It’s clear now they do have an agenda.”
It’s clear now? Trust me, when a church lobbies for the right to police offensive behavior in any place, they’ve got some very specific stuff in mind, and the people who don’t fit into their narrow fundamentalist pigeonhole should know it doesn’t matter what you do — they’re going to get you. You probably don’t even want to bend over to tie your shoelaces when some straitlaced repressed Mormon authority figure with a nightstick is standing somewhere behind you.
Eric Jayne has put together a list of his top 30 atheist songs. It seems like it ought to be longer — to my mind, if it isn’t praising Jesus or any other supernatural entity, it’s an atheist song…which means just about every decent piece of music there is. (That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t any good religious songs — I’ve got a small collection of gospel music on my iPod that’s pretty darned lively).
Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are discussing their book on Daily Kos. The subject of my review has come up a few times, and one commenter cited this sentence from me:
Following this, he proceeds to damn the “New Atheists” for “collapsing the distinction” between methodological and philosophical naturalism, and argues that Dawkins is taking a philosophical position and misusing science to claim it “entirely precludes God’s existence.”
Then the commenter asks, “My question is, did you in fact say that Dawkins uses science to ‘entirely preclude God’s existence?'”
Here is Chris Mooney’s dumbfounding reply.
we use that phrase
although it is not attributed to dawkins.i’ve read dawkins book in some detail, and our objection is to his making god’s existence a scientific question. i realize he does not ascribe full certainty to his atheistic conclusion–but he claims he can reason scientifically about god’s existence. we’re saying that a lot of theologians, philosophers, etc, would say that’s a category error.
i really have to ask that you read our book, rather than its misrepresentation in skewed reviews.
This annoys me. Mooney can disagree with me, he can argue his side all he wants, but to accuse me of misrepresenting his book is inaccurate. I will now quote the entire damn paragraph from the Mooney/Kirshenbaum book. You tell me if I have in any way misrepresented what he said with my short summary.
But much like the anti-evolutionists do, the New Atheists often seek to collapse the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism. In The God Delusion, for instance, Richard Dawkins makes the dubious claim that the existence of God is, as he puts it, “unequivocally a scientific question.” Quite a lot of philosophers — and scientists — would disagree. It is one thing to say that scientific norms and practices preclude ascribing any explanatory force to God in, say, the movement of atoms, or the function of DNA. It’s quite another to say they entirely preclude God’s existence. In rejecting God or any other supernatural entity, Dawkins is taking a philosophical position.
Mooney has promised a reply to my comments later this week. He should take his time, or not even bother; I think his tactics have been foreshadowed enough here that I’m not going to find much of interest in his response. Although at this rate he may end up simply disavowing everything they actually wrote and trying to pretend it was a completely different book.
She sounds like a nice person: a zoology student (I was one of those, once! Zoology departments are disappearing everywhere, though), with the hobby of making cuddly, squishy plush beasties of all sorts, especially of lots of invertebrates. I think it’s time that the teddy bear hegemony in the world of children’s toys be broken — you can start there, and support a science student at the very same time.
I’ve got to stop being so longwinded. Here’s a very clear summary of the entire “New Atheist”/accommodationist debate. I’ll put it below the fold because it does have a few naughty words in it, and unfortunately the children will use that as an excuse to ignore the message.
Hang on; Klinghoffer is bad, but you haven’t read the clever reasonings of Nancy Greenwood of Red Deer, Alberta yet. She doesn’t like those atheists one bit — she’s got a list of 5 horrible facts about atheists (although it could be longer, if she hadn’t kindly left off the bits about baby-eating).
Being the hot topic of the day, any discussion of atheism, should include these ‘difficult to admit’ points:
Firstly, atheists claim that they themselves are god. They claim they have superior knowledge then the rest of us by trying to say that they have better knowledge because of their own thinking. They will not acknowledge anyone else to be above them.
Personally, I only rank myself as a lesser demon.
Secondly, atheists have been hurt somewhere in their lives, can’t understand suffering, and are mad at God — so it is easier to deny there is one.
I am so confused. They’ve been hurt, so the can’t understand suffering…wouldn’t it make more sense to say they have not been hurt, so they can’t understand suffering, or they have been hurt, so they can understand suffering?
Personally, I’ve suffered the usual losses throughout my life, but haven’t been inordinately afflicted — I’ve actually been fairly fortunate. Her premise fails.
Thirdly, atheists are looking for God for the same reason a thief would be looking for a police officer. They don’t want to be accountable to a higher being because of the wrong things they do.
Wait, what wrong things do we do? Isn’t it a bit much to assume all atheists are criminals?
Strangely, note that her first three items — atheists think they are god, they are mad at god, and they’re afraid of god — all assume the existence of a god. This is the one basic idea these cranks have to get in their heads: atheists don’t believe in gods, period. Plug that in and everything she has said so far is patent foolishness.
Fourthly, atheists forget that when a person goes to a museum and admires a painting, that there was a painter/designer of that art piece. The art piece is absolute evidence of a painter and not caused by random nothingness.
All of the world, stars, animals, plants, oceans, and mountains are absolute proof of a divine intelligent being (beyond our human ability and thinking) who made these things.
Can the atheist make a tree? It is scientifically impossible for bees to fly (laws of physics) and yet they do. It is impossible for our eyes to see and yet they do. What more proof does an atheist need than their own heart pumping in their chest without them commanding their heart to pump each beat in perfect timing each and every second necessary?
Ah, good old argument from invalid analogy. I have a black cat. I have a second black cat. Therefore, all cats are black. Nancy shows me a gray cat. I could say my hypothesis is false, or I could close my eyes and say it’s actually a black cat and stick by my hypothesis. Which makes more sense?
She’s doing the same thing. Here’s a painting, it has a designer. Here’s a sculpture, it has a designer. Therefore everything is designed. I show her a blade of grass…it evolved, and the individual blade grew from a seed, and no designer acted. But Nancy will simply close her eyes and declare that it was designed, anyway. Why is grass designed? Because paintings are!
And, uh, Nancy? Bees don’t fly by miracle. They obey the laws of physics, none are violated. Same for vision: we know quite a bit about the physics and chemistry and biology of eyes, and there’s no step where you can it’s physically impossible.
Fifthly, denial is a strong coping mechanism in crisis, but does not serve anyone in the long run. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand, an atheist denies God not because God does not exist–but because the atheist doesn’t want God to exist and does not want to see the truth and evidence in front of their eyes.
I would rather believe in God and make sure my life is doing what is acceptable to this Superior Being than to not believe in God and find out I will be accountable to this God for everything I’ve done after I die. With 84% of the world’s population believing in the existence of God, I think the majority rules in this case.
A little Pascal’s wager to round out the list, followed by an argument from popularity. She’s one big fallacy!
Some cheerful atheist in Alberta has got to introduce themselves to Nancy, because clearly she’s never met one before. You might give her a primer in logic, too, because she hasn’t met that before, either.
