Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in the case Greece v. Galloway that ceremonial opening prayers were permissible at meetings of local government bodies provided that there was no consistent pattern of discrimination in favor of or against one sect, a Satanist will be giving the invocation at tomorrow’s meeting of the Grand Junction City Council meeting in Colorado.
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Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is one of the great enigmatic characters in scientific history, an extremely reclusive and private man with a fascinating array of foibles and personality quirks. I just finished the newly released book by Rob Iliffe, professor of history at Oxford University, that looks closely at the religious studies of this famous physicist and mathematician, based on a detailed examination of his vast collection of private notes, papers, and correspondence. The book deals largely with the first fifty years of Newton’s life, stopping around the year 1696 when Newton left Cambridge University and took up a government position as Warden of the Mint where he vigorously pursued and prosecuted counterfeiters.
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I had an amused reaction to this paper titled Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief by Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (Science vol. 336, p. 493-496, 27 April 2012) based on a set of studies that looked at the correlation between analytic thinking abilities and beliefs in god. The authors use the language of System 1 and System 2 thinking to describe intuitive and analytic reasoning respectively, terms that that I have discussed in some detail earlier here and here.
Some Buddhist monks in Thailand, where Buddhism is the majority religion, clearly seem to think that evangelical Christians in the US with their fancy mega-churches that provide them with luxury homes, cars, and private jets should not have all the fun. They too have decided to get on that gravy train and are living the high life from money they get from their followers.
The model known as ‘Khulood’ who was arrested and questioned by Saudi Arabian police after a video emerged of her walking around wearing a short skirt and a crop top has now been released without charge, after she said that the video, that outraged religious conservatives, was posted without her knowledge.
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Women in Saudi Arabia have to endure what is probably the most strict dress code in the world, requiring them to wear loose-fitting, full-length robes in public plus, if they are Muslim, a headscarf. But a young model who goes by the name ‘Khulood’ decided to defy that code and had herself filmed as she walked around a historic fort in Ushayqir wearing a short skirt and a crop top. The video has been circulating on Twitter and needlessly to say has all the religious conservatives all of a doo-dah at the sacrilegious sight of women’s skin.
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Many of you would have heard or read about the incredible rescue of people who had been caught in a rip tide off the coast of Florida. Two young boys Noah and Stephen Ursrey were initially caught up by the tide and when other people became aware of their distress and tried to help them, they too got caught in the strong tide so that in the end 10 people were in danger of drowning. There was no lifeguard on duty.
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Ben Norton writes that Sam Harris, the self-styled ‘centrist liberal’, moves further and further into the warm embrace of the xenophobes.
In language eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of the fascist far right, New Atheist pundit Sam Harris has called for reducing the number of Muslims in society, warning on the January episode of his popular podcast, “You can’t have too many Muslims in your culture if you want it to remain enlightened.”
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The crafts company Hobby Lobby has been fined $3 million and asked to return over 5,000 stolen artifacts to Iraq. The name of the company may be familiar to some because they were behind a victorious lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court because they argued that the religious beliefs of the owners of the company should allow them to not provide contraceptive coverage in the employees’ health insurance policies. Yes, the family that owns the company consists of religious zealots.
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Here is a video that shows original unappetizing forms of vegetables and fruits before human beings cultivated and bred them to be the forms that we now eat. We’ve come a long way, baby.