Williams was one of the giants of 20th century evolutionary biology, and he died on Wednesday. Michael Ruse offers a brief summary of his career, while Edge has personal testimonials from people who knew him. I never met him, to my regret, but knew his work, which was enormously influential.
The LDS church has a weird habit of baptizing dead people into their faith — and now you can get even. Atheize anyone!
It works, too! I atheized Brigham Young, and next thing I knew, his ghost was hanging about whining about how I’d gotten him kicked out of Mormon heaven and how all his celestial wives had laughed as they tossed his newly godless patriarchal butt off out of their palace. That may sound like a bit of an annoyance, getting haunted out of the deal, but really, it’s no problem — just remind them that they don’t believe in the supernatural, and you might get a brief look of quizzical startlement before they vanish in a puff of ectoplasm. Easy.
I just felt like the long thread needs some Delgados.
As you were.
(Current totals: 10,968 entries with 1,118,139 comments.)
The Catholic church has announced a few requirements for the papal visit to the UK:
The 100,000 Roman Catholics expected to attend the pope’s open-air “great mass” in Glasgow have been urged by their cardinal to endure the “sacrifices” the event will involve. Tens of thousands of pilgrims in Glasgow will have to get to next Thursday’s event at Bellahouston Park on public transport after their private coaches were cancelled.
Umbrellas have been banned, there will be no seating provided, and pilgrims will have to stay in the park for at least five hours on security grounds.
…
“At the great mass at Bellahouston, you’re there for a serious purpose, to join in the celebration of mass, to listen to the word of God, to listen to the teaching of the church being proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI, and that is a serious business,” he said.
“You’re not sitting back at the beach relaxing: it’s something serious and obviously there’s something penitential. There is penance involved in it, just sacrifice; sacrificing of time, sacrificing of comfort, sacrificing of your energy and so on, to be involved in all that’s going on. And I see great benefit from that as well.”
Well, that sounds like great jolly good fun. I think they’re going for the Woodstock vibe, only without the talent, the weed, and the free love.
So get this: not only do you have to be very serious when you’re alive, but the Australian Catholic church wants to suck all the fun out of death, too.
Footy club songs and popular music have been banned from Catholic funerals under strict guidelines sent to priests and funeral directors.
The guidelines for Catholic funerals, sent by Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart, also declare that a funeral should not be a “celebration” of the deceased’s life.
“Secular items are never to be sung or played at a Catholic funeral, such as romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs,” the guidelines say.
…
The new guidelines say a Catholic funeral should never be “a celebration of the life”.
Jebus, what a bunch of dour old grannies those priests are.
Oh, yeah, there’s a poll:
Has the Catholic Church gone too far by banning footy club songs at funerals?
Yes 87.85%
No 12.15%
I’m surprised there are 12% of Australians who think this isn’t an unreasonable ban.
You know, I’m something of an expert in the public desecration of sacred objects, and I’m seeing the same madness going on right now with Terry Jones and his plan to burn copies of the Koran that I saw in the response to throwing a cracker in the trash — only amplified to a ludicrous degree. People just aren’t getting it; they’re so blinded by an inappropriate attachment to magic relics that they’re missing the real issues.
I publicly destroyed a communion wafer once (OK, a few times). There was a simple reason for it: a few Catholics had responded hysterically to a student who didn’t swallow a wafer with harrassment and threats, and I was demonstrating that that was not acceptable — religious believers may not demand that non-believers grant the same reverence to their rituals and beliefs that they have. Jones’s motivation seems to be more of a fundie head-butt to Moslems while expecting a greater respect for his Bible, but he’s still right — Moslems cannot demand that Christians love their doctrines (and vice versa).
Now what I expected in the wake of my cracker-killing was that Catholics would be annoyed, but that it would be easily rationalized — I’m an unbeliever, their rituals have no meaning to me, Jesus can’t be harmed by some stunt with bread…what I expected was a combination of “tut, tut” and “so what?” and the cleverer Catholics announcing that their faith was too strong to be shaken by a raspberry from an atheist. That’s what I expected; it would have put the poor student’s actions in context and made people step back from the screaming that was going on.
It didn’t work out that way.
The lesson of that incident wasn’t that you can find some jerk somewhere who will disrespect what some group finds holy — that was trivial and uninteresting, and I actually had to ignore many of the elaborate suggestions for cracker disposal sent my way to emphasize the absolute triviality of tossing a cracker/piece of Jesus in the trash. No, the real lesson was that mobs of people will react with irrational freakish hysteria to the idea that other people don’t believe as they do.
The problem isn’t the desecrators. The problem is the people who have an unwarranted sense of privilege, that their beliefs will not be questioned or criticized, ever, by anyone. What I was saying was that it was crazy to believe a cracker turns into Jesus, and what all the outraged Catholics were doing is confirming to an awesome degree just how mad their beliefs were, with their prolonged and excessive outrage.
So I’m looking at this recent episode with Terry Jones — a fellow I don’t like at all, and I think he’s a fanatical goofball — and I see that the serious problem here isn’t Jones at all…it’s all the lunatics who are insisting that burning the Koran is a major international catastrophe.
It’s just a frackin’ book, people.
I am simply astounded at the catalog of high-ranking personages who are contributing to this new frenzy of foolishness.
US President Barack Obama says plans by a small church to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary of 9/11 are a “recruitment bonanza” for al-Qaeda.
Mr Obama said that if the Florida burning went ahead, it could endanger US military personnel serving in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
…
Malaysia called it a heinous crime, while Indonesia said it would damage relations between Islam and the West.
In the UK, Downing Street said it would not condone the burning of any book.
“We would strongly oppose any attempt to offend any member of any religious or ethnic group. We are committed to religious tolerance,” said a spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron.
The plan has also sparked condemnation from Iran, the Vatican, Nato and the top US Afghan commander.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it “disgraceful”.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki warned that the burning could “provoke the reaction of all Muslims as well as that of the faithful of other religions”.
“American statesmen should carry out their obligations in providing the basic and fundamental rights of American Muslims and should prevent the promotion of such obscene and indecent plans,” the official Irna news agency quoted him as saying.
On Monday General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, had warned troops’ lives would be in danger if the church went ahead with its bonfire.
President Obama, you’re a damned fool.
What are you going to do, send in the national guard to prevent Terry Jones’ congregation from destroying their own private property? Will there be new legislation to list items that may not be treated disrespectfully? Shall we surrender a few more liberties because religious zealots are threatening us? Obama can do nothing and should do nothing; he accomplishes nothing by complaining about it, other than being part of the mob confirming the madness of the defenders of faith.
And to suggest that some guy burning a book in a remote land will incite more anti-American sentiment is absurd. We’ve got drones buzzing over Iraq and Afghanistan killing people with a push of a button; we’ve got an armed force occupying those countries; we have bombed their infrastructure into rubble. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. And now we’re to believe that their love of the West will be suddenly devastated by a video of paper burning on youtube? Get a grip, man.
The United States does have an obligation to protect the basic and fundamental rights of all Americans, and that includes allowing them to burn their own property, in addition to allowing them to practice the religion of their choice.
Here’s a hint for appropriate responses. When someone tells you it’s an outrage to burn a bible or a Koran, shrug your shoulders and say, “So what? It’s their own book.” When someone announces that they are going to riot and murder because they are offended, look at them like they’re insane, and explain that offending someone is not a capital crime.
The problem isn’t a few books being burned; that’s not a crime, and it doesn’t diminish anyone else’s personal freedoms. The problem is a whole fleet of deranged wackaloons, including the president of the USA in addition to raving fundamentalist fanatics, who think open, public criticism and disagreement ought to be forbidden, somehow.
And seriously, this whole silly contretemps would have evaporated if a few people learned to shrug their shoulders and react rationally instead of feeding the fury with Serious Pronouncements and Reprovals.
The OKCupid site dug deep into their database of users and analyzed…a lot of stuff. The interesting one is this chart of reading/writing level by religious belief.
Look there: the godless users of OKCupid score higher than the religious users; and furthermore, being more serious about agnosticism/atheism is correlated with better scores, while the more devout you are within a religious tradition, the lower your score.
Is anyone surprised by this? Not me.
We should regard these data with a little suspicion, though — OKCupid is an online dating site, so it’s not an entirely random sample of the population. It could mean that the most earnest atheists have a hard time getting a date, while the smart believers are all off getting married or indulging in wild orgies all the time and have no need of a dating service.
It has become quite amusing to watch the Defenders of the Faith reach for increasingly more hysterical phrasing to describe what the Gnu Atheists are doing. I thought we were writing and talking, but according to William Oddie, we’re carrying out a distressing onslaught.
The atheists’ utter loathing, all the same, is at times a little frightening in its sheer vicious irrationality. These people are in the grip of a barely restrained hysteria. Take the current issue of the New Humanist, subtitle: “Ideas for godless people”; this issue gives a good idea of what it must be like being godless, and at least it makes you grateful not to be godless yourself. “If you were invited to address Benedict XVI during his UK visit,” the New Humanist introduces its special issue, “what would you say to him? Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, Claire Rayner, Ben Goldacre and many more take part in our Pope quiz.”
Ah, yes, the fellow who believes in angels and miracles and magic crackers finds it irrational that people look at his beliefs and point out how silly they are, and even worse, looks at the faith-based bloody-minded malfunctioning policies promulgated by the Pope and criticize them as nonsensical and counter-productive and damaging to humanity. He’s upset now because the New Humanist was insufficiently reverent and loving towards the Pope; in the Catholic World Order, after all, we must ignore the real effects of his ideas and instead adore him and kiss his ring.
This is all horrible for anyone who regards Pope Benedict with the admiration and love most Catholics feel for him; and I find myself almost wishing that the decision had been taken to beatify Cardinal Newman in St Peter’s Square and not a muddy field, and for the Pope to be spared this dreadful business of a state visit.
Someday, they’ll explain to us what there is to admire and love about an old conservative dogmatist who clawed his way up the rigid hierarchy of an ancient institution like the church. I get the impression we’re supposed to love the guy simply for the fact that he is a pope.
And oh, yes, that dreadful business — he’s getting millions thrown away on the pomp of his visit, will be treated like a king, and only simpering lackeys will be allowed anywhere near him, while his critics are held off…and for that, his critics are deranged monsters because they don’t love the narrow-minded old man enough.
Dr Hall had a gig writing for Oprah’s woo-laden magazine, and I didn’t even know it (that tells you how often I’ve looked at O), and it was a good plan: she’d be writing a skeptical column for them that would address common medical myths. Unfortunately, reality smacked hard into the jello of pop pseudo-medicine, passed through quickly, and Dr Hall now finds herself not writing for Oprah. She didn’t belong in that den of inanity anyway.
One amusing thing, though: compare the comments discussing her departure at Science-Based Medicine with those on Gawker. Right out of the gate, the Gawker commenters are whining that science doesn’t know everything, and wondering what’s wrong with Reiki, and accusing Dr Hall of all kinds of egotistical perfidy.
