1. Former state science director sues over intelligent design e-mail

Comment #203382 by polishrequiem on July 2, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Brilliant. She'll win.

2. What Happens When a School Board of Religious Zealots Will 'Lie for Jesus'?

Comment #197302 by polishrequiem on June 21, 2008 at 4:07 pm

Lebo is a class act. I'm so glad she's written this book. I look forward to reading it.

3. Bible Theme Park Faces Opposition in Tennessee

Comment #180887 by polishrequiem on May 16, 2008 at 3:05 am

If the local government is giving money to this operation, I see a separation of church and state lawsuit in their future. Why couldn't a theme park with a Christian focus say that it's non-profit and then become tax exempt?

4. God seekers go public

Comment #179454 by polishrequiem on May 13, 2008 at 9:12 am

They'll pony up or they won't. If it's good science, then it will pass. If it's not, it won't.

5. Discovery Challenges Finding of a Separate Human Species

Comment #142163 by polishrequiem on March 12, 2008 at 5:19 am

For more on Eckhardt's role in this, go to this article at the Research Penn State:
http://www.rps.psu.edu/indepth/hobbit_print.html
They quote Eckhardt as saying:
"A lot of things didn't make sense," he says. "For instance, the overall height seemed to be off. I took the long-bone measurements from the paper and plugged them into standard regression formulas." Where Morwood and colleagues estimated an overall height of 1.06 meters for their specimen, Eckhardt came up with figures ranging from 1.15 to 1.33 meters, with an average of 1.25 meters�"more than seven inches taller than Morwood's estimate. Eckhardt also wondered about the proximity of the small cranium to sophisticated stone tools, including points, perforators, blades, and microblades. Over a century of research by anthropologists has established a rough correlation between an increasing brain size and advances in stone-tool technology. The kinds of tools described in the Nature article matched those made elsewhere by Homo sapiens. Says Eckhardt, "It seemed very unlikely that a human with a chimp-sized brain would have invented such tools independently and in total isolation."

The article I linked to shows how contentious science gets. Eckhardt is a geneticist and an evolutionary morphologist who thinks the data has been read wrong and he has some very strong arguments. Read that article.

6. What I Think About Evolution

Comment #46549 by polishrequiem on May 31, 2007 at 3:54 pm

What utter driveling nonsense. Way to write over a thousand years to say absolutely NOTHING about evolution.
1. If you look at the tenets of science and faith they are bound to overlap and cause problems for one another no matter Gould's NOMA. Science asks questions and gets the answer from the universe (as Lawrence Krauss can't stop saying) and faith puts the cart of divinity before the horse of questions. Brownback came to the table with the answer and sadly, they contradict eachother.
2. The best people of faith can do (Collins, Miller) is compartmentalize. It's at best a little deception and at worst, as in Brownback's case, a lie.
3. I can't really agree more that we all have special places in the world. It is fundamental that we love and respect the dignity of individuals. In no way does the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection say that we are neither special or not unique. In fact, because of evolutionary biology and biochemistry, we know that we are all unique. It's not just an appearance but a fact. Our genomes are entirely our own. They are not just our dad's or mom's. They are a new iteration, a new ripple in a new part of the amazing river of life that sprang from the earth billions of years ago, a river that proceeds inexorably, if messily, along the surface of time on our little planet.
And Brownback is in a way correct that we were willed into existence, but not in the way he wants to believe we were. Our parents created us, some of us more deliberately than others (hey accidents happen). But we didn't select the sperm that fertilized the egg. That sperm's unique position, timing, and biochemical print made that possible. But that sperm was randomly generated among billions of others in a man's testicles. Why be so wasteful with all of those other sperm? If God wills it to be, couldn't he have been a little bit more efficient? The average male ejaculates 250,000,000 sperm. Most intercourse doesn't result in conception either. I'm glad God wasn't the engineer for my car, it would get 1 mile for 250,000,000 gallons.

Anyway, I wrote a massive blog about this today if anyone wants to read it.
http://formsmostbeautiful.blogspot.com/2007/05/so-what-does-sam-brownback-think-of.html

7. The Dawkins delusion

Comment #45926 by polishrequiem on May 29, 2007 at 4:25 pm

I guess that for the most part I am not very interested in pandering to the middle on this issue because of their ineffectuality and their permissiveness.
I haven't much truck with people with rather amorphous religious beliefs, who are uncertain but enjoy some level of ceremony and aren't interested in literalism. Interpersonally they are generally fine people whose ideas about most of the world are ok. They have some kind of "feeling" about the universe and their own relation to life and one another is filtered through their rather amorphous culturally-located traditions. Most of them don't want to legislate their beliefs because they don't have religious beliefs to legislate. But their lack of personal conviction and their incredible interpersonal permissiveness (which makes them so "nice") makes a huge space for the fundies to run amock. I hate to say it, but it can look sometimes (with guys like Aslan and Hedges as recent examples) as though decent and well-educated people end up like so many cattle standing around chewing their cud and rationalizing it with their frontal lobes.
That interpersonal pleasantry needs to end. As Harris says, we need the moderate to close the space that lets the fundies spew their filth everywhere. So we may are simply calling on the moderate to s*** or get off the pot. Actively help us end the nonsense.

8. Heliocentrism is an Atheist Doctrine

Comment #44540 by polishrequiem on May 25, 2007 at 4:10 am

I really hope it is a joke. But I fear it isn't.

9. Despite what the scholars say, God isn't dead yet

Comment #44530 by polishrequiem on May 25, 2007 at 3:52 am

I have an extended response to this at my blog: http://peterdawsonbuckland.blogspot.com/2007/05/its-not-just-irrationality-its.html
Basically, I find her whole argument to be what we Americans call "moving the goalpost." Such nonsense.
I find especially irritating her lack of information on the eugenics aspect and her characterization of the eugenicists and German intellectuals as rational. No! They were hijacked by their own true belief to a level we only see elsewhere in the relgiously convicted.

10. I Don't Believe in Atheists

Comment #44429 by polishrequiem on May 24, 2007 at 5:03 pm

Is it just me or does he say that God is the word:

Human communication directly shapes the quality of a culture. These believers were being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity. This deity could not be captured in pictures, statues or any concrete, iconographic form. God exists in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception in the ancient world that required the highest order of abstract thinking. "In the beginning," the Gospel of John reads, "was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This is why the second of the Ten Commandments prohibits Israelites from making concrete images of God. "Iconography thus became blasphemy," Neil Postman writes, "so that a new kind of God could enter a culture."

...and then later says that written words in the form of creeds destroy the teachings of God:

Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess. They ossify the message. And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith.

What utter bollocks (to use our current favorite term)!!! Words or not? How is the Bible or the Koran or the Hadith not then, de facto, an ossification of the message that seeks to bend the world into a unified vision by its professed believers? This is such relativist bulls*** that I could barely read through it.
He, like Raza Aslan who Harris debated at the LA Libray, engages in the most effete arguments that treat religion with such kid gloves that his version of religion - a religion so utterly sollypsistic as to make his accusation at Harris so hypocritical as to be laughable - is hardly a religion at all. It's a dressed up version of the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative - a shirt of secular kindness tye-dyed with Ambrahamic religion to lend it some sort of cultural credence.
Additionally, it's as if the man has NO acquaintance with the forty percent of the U.S. population who think the rapture is pending, believe in angels, believe that satan is a real agent walking on the earth, and so on and on. Wake up. Even conservatives like Kevin Phillips (former Nixon aide and author of http://www.amazon.com/American-Theocracy-Politics-Religion-21stCentury/dp/0143038281/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-1714360-0215607?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180051342&sr=1-1">American Theocracy).
This guy is a weakling and I seriously hope that Harris crushed him. By all appearances, everyone here seems to be able to eat him for lunch.

11. Dobson, Armageddon, and Foreign Policy

Comment #41899 by polishrequiem on May 17, 2007 at 9:26 am

This is so f***ing insane. This is exactly the kind of thing that "We the people" need to be concerned about and stop. It is totally reprehensible and globally genocidally deluded.

12. Facing Off on Evolution

Comment #40444 by polishrequiem on May 14, 2007 at 9:51 am

When it came time to explain evolution Brian started on a good path regarding us all being transitional forms but then he dropped the ball and couldn't get it back again. The explanation of evolution just sort of fell apart here.
Too bad really.
What was best about the whole enterprise though was that Cameron and Comfort TOTALLY failed in every way to do what they set out to do and Kelly nailed them on it at every turn.
Man that dress was distracting.

13. True faith is greater than the ranters

Comment #40398 by polishrequiem on May 14, 2007 at 8:28 am

Drivel. Nonsense. Shoddy thinking.
The following, excerpted by several above, really gets to me in a way that no one has addressed yet:
He makes an assertion, that is contrary to common experience, that the vast majority of religious believers are closer to the beliefs of American evangelists or of bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists than to quiet and rational religion. That is a sociological judgment.
As stated by others, Dawkins makes no such assertion (if memory serves). However, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Stenger to a lesser extent, Dennett to a lesser extent, other writers at Free Inquiry, Skeptic, et al all correctly react to the "American evangelist" and "Islamic terrorist" because they are running far too much of the global power play at this point. The fact that a majority of believers are not bloodthirsty abortion doctor killers, hypocritical gay meth-using evangelical pastors, or suicidal nail-and-shrapnel-wielding bombers for Allah doesn't mean that the most potent actions of believers in the real world are not the actions taken by said pastors et al.
It is simply a statement of willful ignorance to pretend that George Bush hasn't been able to carry out his policies (from the denial of global warming, the invasion of a massively debilitated Iraq, the denial of family planning in Africa, and a total disregard for scientific research at NASA, the CDC, or the FDA) without the endorsement of a huge portion of the American electorate. Though the American evangelical voting block may be a small portion of the global population, they have exerted enormous influence through the executive force of their dear leader, George W. Bush and his band of wingnuts. The projection of religious power onto the world stage has been enormous in the last few years and Dawkins is right to attack it at its base - the fundamental existence of the being that these people claim to work for.

14. Richard Dawkins on Canada AM

Comment #38304 by polishrequiem on May 7, 2007 at 1:06 pm

It's a pleasant enough interview.

15. God Exists. A Formula Proves it.

Comment #37911 by polishrequiem on May 6, 2007 at 8:11 am

What a bunch of nonsense.

16. Republican candidates range from ignorant to dishonest

Comment #37910 by polishrequiem on May 6, 2007 at 8:07 am

I bet most of the Democrats would say something like McCain did. They are so bullied into kissing the asses of the religious in this country that they would feel compelled to invoke the divine in it.
Obama? Surely.
Edwards? Clinton?
Biden and Kucinich might not but they are so far back that it doesn't matter.

17. Your favorite book in the last 25 years?

Comment #37207 by polishrequiem on May 3, 2007 at 4:46 pm

Name of the Rose - Eco
Unweaving the Rainbow - Dawkins
River out of Eden - Dawkins
Letter to a Christian Nation - Harris
Demon Haunted World - Sagan
Brief History of Time - Hawking
Why Intelligent Design Fails - various
Tower of Babel - Pennock
Auschwitz - Dwork and van Pelt
Heavy Metal - Weinstein
The Things They Carried - O'Brien
Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter
Consciousness Explained - Dennett