PZ Myers on Religion in the science classroom
PZ Meyers admits he’s not the politest person in the world. In this talk he throws about some rather abrupt insults at the creationist movement and why he is justified in doing them. He mentions his talks with Dawkins
Prof. Paul Zachary Myers works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). A selfavowed godless liberal and outspoken atheist, he is a vocal skeptic of all forms of religion, superstition, spirituality and pseudoscience.
He is quoted as having “nothing but contempt for Intelligent Design”, arguing that it is “fundamentally dishonest”. In 2009 Myers was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year.
Via Atheist Media
Bible gets Twitter makeover
“In the beginning was the word. And then came 140 words. And at the rate that Twitter versions of the Bible are developing, there could be more than 140,000 words in the next few months.
Rivalling the speed of Creation, as described in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, tweeting the holy book has spread rapidly across the internet since the Guardian highlighted a Durham evangelist’s daily version last week.
News of Chris Juby’s almighty precis of scripture’s 800,000-odd words to 1,190 daily tweets (@biblesummary) has prompted other versions from eastern Europe to the US, as well as a wider airing for similar projects already under way.
Among these is the “Twible”, tweeted daily by American author and academic Jana Riess, who shared Juby’s feeling that the good book needed better reading, but with added jokes.
While Juby’s Twitter Bible plays things straight, the Twible adapts the Old Testament to the light-hearted quipping familiar in everyday Tweets. The story of Moses in Exodus, chapter two, for instance, is reduced to: “Baby Moses: I’m cool with floating down the Nile in a basket, but who is this Egyptian chick I’m supposed to call Mom?”
Riess, who converted to Mormonism as an adult, started condensing after hearing an Easter Sunday sermon that included a tweet of the Bible’s opening words in Genesis, chapter one. Unlike 32-year-old Juby’s staid version, which tops off the actual text’s “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth” with 17 equally straightforward words, Riess’s effort is played for laughs.
Using the online abbreviations BRB (be right back) and LOL (laugh out loud), it read: “Day 1: Lighting system installed. BRB. Days 2-6: Some assembly required: sky, plants, cows, people. Left humans in charge, LOL. Day 7: Siesta.”
Riess tracked it to another Twitter Bible project called What Would God Tweet (@WWGT), by an anonymous prophet called The Holy Ghostwriter.
“I wanted to find humour in the good book too,” says Riess. “The project started with the one key hermeneutical (interpretative) question I felt no one was asking about the Bible: what would the Onion say?”"
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
The Intelligence² Debate – Stephen Fry (Unedited)
Stephens speech from the Intelligence Debate held last year.
Via Daily Motion (Thanks Mattis)
Thinking About God Calms Believers, Stresses Atheists
“Researchers have determined that thinking about God can help relieve anxiety associated with making mistakes. However, the finding only holds for people who believe in a God. The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn’t.
“Eighty-five percent of the world has some sort of religious beliefs,” says Michael Inzlicht, who cowrote the study with Alexa Tullett, both at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. “I think it behooves us as psychologists to study why people have these beliefs; exploring what functions, if any, they may serve.” With two experiments, the researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently—in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes. Participants either wrote about religion or did a scrambled word task that included religion and God-related words.
Then the researchers recorded their brain activity as they completed a computerized task—one that was chosen because it has a high rate of errors. The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal and alerting us when things are going wrong.
Interestingly, atheists reacted differently. When they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.”
Read more at Live Science
Why Does God Reveal Himself to Some People and Not to Others?
“Doesn’t it seem likely that the reason all of us can’t see God is because there is no God?
If God exists… why isn’t his existence obvious?
And is “free will” a good answer to this question?
A few weeks ago, in this very publication, I posed the question, “Why did God create atheists?” If God reveals himself to religious believers, in visions or revelations or other spiritual experiences… why doesn’t he do it with everyone? Why are those revelations so contradictory — not to mention so suspiciously consistent with whatever the people having them already believe or want to believe? And why doesn’t everyone have them? If God is real, I asked — if religious believers are perceiving a real entity with a real effect on the world — why isn’t it just obvious?
Why is God playing hide and seek?
When I wrote that piece, I addressed (and dismantled) two of the most common responses to this question: “God has revealed himself to you, you’ve just closed your heart to him,” and, “God doesn’t care if you’re an atheist — as long as you’re a good person, he doesn’t care if you believe in him.”
But I neglected to address one of the most common religious answers to this question:
Free will.”
Read more at AlterNet (Thanks Erich and @XxLadyClaireXx)
Florida church to hold Quran-burning
“Following in the tradition of bigots everywhere, a Florida church is preparing to hold a book-burning. Not just any book; the Quran.
Dove World Outreach Center is a non-denominational evangelical church in Gainesville, Florida. They have announced a special celebration of the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks . . . something that will show Christian love, reduce hatred between people of different religions, and lead toward greater understanding around the world. Or not.
Dove will host “International Burn a Quran Day” on September 11, 2010. Pastor Terry Jones says the idea came, in part, from the recent success of “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”. He comments that “We feel, as Christians, one of our jobs is to warn,” and that burning the holy books of another religion will provide Muslims an opportunity to convert.
Jones missed the point of Everybody Draw. That event, in response to the irrational attacks (including physical assaults, attempted murder, attempted arson, and successful murder) on Western cartoonists, authors, and filmmakers who drew or otherwise criticized Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, was intended to communicate to radical Islamists that Westerners would not cave to their demands of censorship.
International Burn is not about freedom of expression. It is about hatred of Islam, not just the radical actions of some Muslims.”
Read more at Secular News Daily
Faith healing in Oregon: A picture worth a thousand words
“We’ve talked long enough about faith healing in Oregon. We’ve shared countless earnest conversations about religious liberty and parental rights.
The time for words is over. Now it’s time for pictures.
Another couple from the Followers of Christ church in Oregon City stand accused of criminal mistreatment for deliberately withholding medical care from their child. Timothy and Rebecca Wyland of Beavercreek believe in treating sickness with prayer rather than medicine, even when prayer doesn’t work.
Their infant daughter, Alayna, has a serious eye problem, which they chose not to treat. Someone notified authorities and the state intervened, and now the Wylands are trying to regain custody of their daughter.
Those are the words, wholly inadequate.
Only the pictures do the story justice.”
Read more at Oregon Live
Pope To Be Protected From Arrest On UK Visit
“The Government has moved to prevent the possibility of an arrest warrant being issued against the Pope during his state visit this autumn.
Sky News understands that Whitehall officials have been “seriously concerned” that campaigners would use international criminal rules to try to detain the Pontiff while he is in the UK. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC were among those campaigners reported to be looking at the options for bringing a private prosecution in relation to the Pope’s alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Now Justice Secretary Ken Clarke has proposed changes to the rules on universal jurisdiction, a law that allows individuals to be prosecuted in the UK for serious offences such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture even if they were carried out abroad. The plans would mean the Director of Public Prosecutions would need to give his consent to any arrest warrant issued under universal jurisdiction. This would effectively mean taking that power out of the hands of the courts.
Ministers say the current rules are open to abuse because the evidence required to get a warrant is far below the threshold that would be needed to bring a prosecution. This has meant the rules are often used by those who wish to make a political statement or to cause embarrassment.”
Read more at Sky News (Thanks Tracey)
Twitter and Scientology: Don’t use the ‘S’-word
“When he walked past a Scientology centre on a trip to London last year, a councillor from Cardiff cannot have expected that his reaction would end up fuelling another big hoo-hah over free speech on the internet.
Nor that it would end up with him being hauled up in front of his council’s ethics committee.
But Councillor John Dixon’s mistake was to go on Twitter and say this:
“I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”
Somehow this was spotted by a member of the organisation and in due course a complaint was made to the Ombudsman for Public Services in Wales.
The watchdog has partially upheld the complaint; to be more precise, it has found there is a case to answer under the code of conduct for councillors and has passed the matter on to Cardiff City Council’s Standards and Ethics Committee.
So it seems Councillor Dixon has joined the growing list of politicians who have found that careless tweets can damage their careers. 1-0 to the Scientologists, then?
Not so fast. When news of the case erupted on Twitter this morning, it rapidly became a cause celebre – or rather a cause for mockery of Scientologisty.
Prominent members of the Twitterati – a crowd which includes many who are free-thinkers sceptical about religion in any form – started retweeting Councillor Dixon’s original remark. Very rapidly, the term #stupidscientology became a trending topic on Twitter.
Now there are all sorts of lessons one could draw from this affair – about the dangers of social networking for politicians, the perils of taking on Twitter, the advisability of spending many hours and presumably a lot of public money investigating whether the word “stupid” is sufficiently offensive to constitute a breach of a code of conduct.
But, rather than face being hauled up in front of an ethics committee myself, I think I will allow you to draw your own conclusions.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks @scratchndsniff)
Science historian cracks the 2000 year old ‘Plato code’
Plato was the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy’s findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.
Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.
The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.
“Plato’s books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,” Dr Kennedy, at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences explains.
“In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.
“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.
“This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.”
Full article at PsyOrg
