Hey, papal apologists (papalologists?), stop reading this! You won’t like it. It’s nothing but a couple of links to religion-bashing, prompted by the naked sectarian stupidity of one bizarre religious leader.
Ugh. John Pieret is right: this effort by Michael Shermer to reconcile evolution with conservative theology is hideous, on multiple levels. It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that Christians are going to consult Shermer, a godless hellbound skeptic, on how to interpret the fine details of the Bible. Either reject it or buy into it—but nobody is going to believe that Shermer accepts the religious premises of the book. He’s being a kind of concern troll on a grand scale.
It’s also nonsense.
Because the theory of evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, it should be embraced.
Oh, really? Ask a Christian what his or her “core values” are, and they’ll probably spit up either doctrinal beliefs, such as the divinity of Jesus and the idea of salvation, or they’ll bring up a list of social concerns, such as abortion, homosexuality, or religiosity in government. Evolution either is irrelevant to those worries or contradicts them, and as I say over and over again, Christians aren’t necessarily stupid, and they know this.
I’m also not keen on someone using science to falsely bolster conservative ideology.
Now we’ve got unconfirmed rumors that Steve Irwin was born again shortly before he died. You may recall that Charles Darwin was also tarred with claims of a deathbed conversion, too.
The message is clear. Don’t convert, or you’ll die.
The only question is whether it’s Jesus that does the execution, or whether wandering evangelicals are actually serial killers. And since I don’t believe in Jesus…
I’ve already done my fair share of pope-bashing, so I won’t kick him any more over this latest episode. Instead, I’ll just tell everyone to go read my homies in the science community, Revere and Sean (who is particularly telling on that jarringly bogus “Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul” claim), and my fellow Minnesotan, Norwegianity, and while you’re plumbing the Minnesota mentality, you might as well take in Tild’s deconversion tale and regular Spong blogging…if there’s some human heart beating under the religious vestments, it ain’t Ratzinger’s, and Spong is a better substitute.
“Archbishop of York”? What kind of silly, made-up title is that?
The Archbishop of York has said British Christians should see Muslims as allies in the struggle against secularism.
In a speech at York Minster, Dr John Sentamu said British Muslims were not offended by Christianity and preferred it to a secular state.
Or maybe he was just mistranslated? Apparently not.
It has often been Muslims, as well as leaders of other faiths, who have joined with Christians in refusing to accept the creeping secularisation that would replace ‘Christmas’ with ‘Winterval’, and remove references to faith from public noticeboards for fear of causing offence. It is both my view and my experience, that most British Muslims do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of secularised culture that denies its own foundations. What they object to is the attempt to build human society without God. And so given the choice between the two prefer a faith environment, even one which they do not share, to that of a secularist state.
Oh. It’s the War on Christmas already.
Give all the fundamentalist Christians a copy of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, then sit back and wait for them to kill each other. I’m amused that the article calls it a “theological argument”: the guy gets upset at the movie, sees his wife, calls her evil, and tries to strangle her. Yep, that’s a “theological argument” in a nutshell.
(via Andrew Brown)
He has asked me to post this section of his book to show that he had not suggested that human origins and the Cambrian explosion might have been a miracle.
To the nonbeliever, there is no spiritual reality, and hence no miracles. To a person of faith, miracles display the greater purposes of God, giving them a meaning that transcends physical reality.
If this is true, why shouldn’t we allow that the creation of our species was a miracle? Or why not agree that the sudden explosion of life in the Cambrian might have been a miracle. Both might have been. In 1900, we could easily have said that the sun’s fire was a miracle. Unable to explain the biological basis of immunity, we could have chalked that up to God, too. And for good measure, we could have told our students that the interior heat of the earth might be the work of the devil.
We are now far enough along in the development of science to appreciate that its track record suggests that ultimately it will find natural causes for natural phenomena.
Did he say it might have been a miracle? Well, sort of. Did he say natural causes are sufficient? Well, sort of. Miracles, no miracles, you can read into it what you want. This is an objection I have to this entire section of the book—in theology, anything goes. I dug a little deeper to see what he means by “miracle.”
By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense—there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense.
That’s a very handy excuse—they don’t need to make sense!
Because their priorities are screwed up.
Benedict—on the second day of a visit to his native
Bavaria—said that spreading the word of Jesus Christ
was more important than all the emergency and development
aid that rich churches like those in Germany gave to poor
countries.
Don’t even get me started on his complaints that science is scaring away the gullible, tithing rubes.
(via Hank Fox)
A reader sent me a link to this unpleasant video of Scientologists in Clearwater, FL. I recognize the work: it’s by Mark Bunker of XenuTV, where you’ll find a whole collection videos documenting the kind of religious fascism Scientology, the creepiest cult on the planet, sponsors.
Bunker’s videos show how these grim fanatics can take over a whole town by terrifying the residents and coopting the police—it’s very unsettling.
Minnesotans are going to be a little less above average in October, when a gaggle of evil morons hit the state: James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Gary Bauer are having a rally in St Paul to “motivate pro-family conservative Christians.” It may also help motivate us pro-family liberal atheists.
Andy wonders which Minnesota politicians will show up for these hucksters for fascism: would Michele Bachmann be a safe bet? Mike Hatch better not; I’ve seen a few of his ads, and his gun-totin’ bird-killin’ pseudo-populism is almostas annoying as Mark Kennedy’s badly acted family dramas that play up his ‘credentials’ as a CPA—if Hatch sucks up to Dobson, he’ll lose my vote. I will rip his sign out of my yard.
