1. Religious bigotry upheld in court

Comment #208475 by icanus on July 11, 2008 at 1:20 am

from earlier coverage of the case:

Miss Ladele told the tribunal there had been times when she was treated in such a hostile manner that "the only way to have dealt with it would have been to have gone up to those people and to have had a fight".

"But I did not do that," she said. "I restrained myself and showed them how to behave [well]."

Well, bravo! What a model citizen she is. Just imagine, someone having the restraint not to physically attack anyone who disputes their attempt not to their job but still get paid.

The whole case seems to have been based on her claiming that she was being "bullied" - i.e. people calling her homophobic just because she discriminates against gay people.

"I'm not a racist, but...--insert racist rant--" doesn't wash. Neither should "I'm not a homophobe, but..."

2. Religious bigotry upheld in court

Comment #208095 by icanus on July 10, 2008 at 3:14 pm

This implies that someone can opt out of something encompassed by their job description because it offends their religious sensibilities.

Sweet! Now how do we go about getting the church of the FSM to declare all the bits of our jobs that we don't like immoral? I vote for starting with "Thou shalt not turn up at the office before midday".

Seriously though, she's free to be a bigot on her own time (providing she doesn't do anything against the law), but why should the council have to pay her to do it on their (publicly funded) time?

You do your job or you quit. No one's forcing her to stay on - if her fairytales mean that much to her, she's free to sod of and find another job.

3. Common New Atheist Fallacies

Comment #200746 by icanus on June 28, 2008 at 7:31 am

I'd agree with Mr Koukl that some people, while intelligent and competent in other areas of their life seem to "lose their minds" when discussion turns to "spiritual" matters. I suspect, though, that he was referring to a different set of people than those I have in mind.

Koukl seems to be wilfully blind to the fact that atheists for the most part don't have an argument to make - we don't need one. We simply don't accept the theist's argument that god(s) exist. We aren't making some competing claim to the existence of their god(s), we're just saying that their claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and providing counters to their "arguments" for it.

I've never seen anything even approaching an argument for the existence of god that, when you "separate the wheat from the chaff and push aside all the nonsense" (as he seems so fond of saying), doesn't boil down to "I really want god to be real".

At a certain point in the debate, ridicule is one of the few ways left to say "I didn't buy it the first 300 times, and I'm not buying it this time. Give me some new arguments or go home", and has the added benefit of being more socially acceptable than stoving in your interlocutor's skull with a chair.

4. As the world becomes smaller, the need to understand each other's faith grows

Comment #192850 by icanus on June 14, 2008 at 3:55 am

Good grief. What bafflegab. And this guy was in charge ? Did he display this sort of nonsense when running for office ?

A lot of "sounds nice but doesn't really mean anything when you examine it closely" stuff and liberal padding of the figures, but he stayed very quiet on his religious views until after he stepped down. The most embarrassed I've ever seen him was when he was asked if he had prayed with George Bush.

Blair strikes me as incredibly naive in some areas, religion being the prime example - peacful coexistence when each faction is convinced that the others are not just wrong, but so wrong that they're going to be tortured for eternity along with anyone who listens to what they have to say, seems just a tad optimistic to me.

In a lot of other areas, of course he's a real cut-throat scheming bastard (or 'politician' to use the technical term)

As to faith groups working on issues like malaria, we've seen how that goes, thank you very much:

"Why certainly, you can have the malaria drugs just as soon as you hand over all your condoms so that you can die of AIDS instead."

5. Group finds Starbucks logo too hot to handle

Comment #180836 by icanus on May 15, 2008 at 11:44 pm

"The Resistance" say it's a picture of a prostitute...right.

Well I'm choosing to be offended by their logo. It contains an uppercase "R", which is clearly a stylised image of a large breasted woman with no head viewed from the side. Disgusting.

Ooh. This is fun. What other innocuous imagery can I find to be offended by? If only there were some group insensitive enough to use an execution/torture device as their logo.

6. Who wants to kill the elderly?

Comment #153312 by icanus on April 1, 2008 at 11:25 am

So, religious groups want to stifle research that promises to improve the quality and duration of people's lives - old people included - and we're the ones who want to "kill surplus old people"?.

I guess just letting them die of diseases we could have cured is the way to go?

7. US 'doomed' if creationist president elected: scientists

Comment #108935 by icanus on January 8, 2008 at 1:21 am

I'm constantly surprised that the republicans are so ready to support IDiocy getting into the classroom - I thought they were based on that aspect of the American Dream that involves having so much money in your pockets that you have to employ two people to hold your trousers up.

If you want any sort of economy worth mentioning in the 21st century, you're going to need a decent science education system.

More people publicly taking the "ID=tech industries moving to Europe/China" might do something to break the republican-evangelical alliance that seems to have US politics tied up at the moment.

8. Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan

Comment #104655 by icanus on December 29, 2007 at 4:40 am

It's easy to poke fun at the latest round of papal lunacy, but I'm very concerned that this will lead to lots more poor sods with mental illnesses being deprived of proper treatment in favour of ritual nonsense which is at best ineffective, and at worst mentally and physically scarring.

I really can't think of a situation where telling a schizophrenic that there really is a malicious intelligence controlling their thoughts and actions is not so misguided and harmful as to be criminal.

9. Russia prohibits denial of Santa

Comment #104523 by icanus on December 28, 2007 at 5:33 pm

I don't necessarily agree with the ruling. I'm against telling children lies wherever possible, and vehemently against censorship.

The ideal solution would be for people to stop telling children that santa exists (with all the complications it brings - "I'm good (but poor), and santa brought me an orange, but little Johnny Smythe-Wealthington is a right little shit, and he gets a nintendo Wii?") though once the damage has been done and the kids already believe in Santa, there are more sensitive way to let them down than a TV advert.

10. Archbishop of Canterbury Praises Richard Dawkins

Comment #104364 by icanus on December 28, 2007 at 11:27 am

So the senior representative (who as part of the job gets to live in what is officially termed a palace) of one of the biggest land owners in britain, with an anual incomewell in excess of half a billion pounds, is denouncing human greed?

11. Russia prohibits denial of Santa

Comment #104138 by icanus on December 28, 2007 at 1:29 am

I actually believed in Father Christmas until I was about 6, whereas I never (as far as I can recall) believed in gods. Like most kids, I kept up the pretense of belief for a couple more years after the penny dropped, just to be sure the presents would keep flowing).

The difference to me is that there *was* evidence for Santa (although it later turned out to have been falsified) - the sudden appearance of gifts where there were none before, the sooty foot prints and half eaten mince pies.

On the banning of the advert, I suspect we'd see the ITC do much the same thing in the UK if an advertiser did something similar, though it would probably be couched in terms of not wanting to "spoil the fun" rather than "discredit parents and teachers".

12. 'Christian God is not to blame'

Comment #103325 by icanus on December 25, 2007 at 5:30 am

ADH:

What is it that sets the story of Jesus apart for you from the stories of Mohamed or Joseph Smith, which you presumably don't accept?

Why aren't you a Muslim? The evidence for Christianity and Islam seems comparable to me in credibility. I'm curious as to why you accept one and reject the other.

13. The Evangelical Rebellion

Comment #103286 by icanus on December 25, 2007 at 1:04 am

I wait for the day the science discovers that magic bullet, and cast's christianity into the realm of mythology.

It already has - evolution, radiometric dating techniques, and a plethora of others.

Science has emptied a couple of magazines into Christianity over the last century or so, but it just keeps getting up and shambling onward (as, I suppose, is appropriate for a belief in a cosmic jewish zombie - though the analogy breaks down because chrsitianity clearly has no interest in "Braaaiiins!")

14. Taking children for a ride

Comment #102922 by icanus on December 24, 2007 at 12:44 am

Nice article. Good to see some sense in the press on the topic of religion.

As to the park itself, £3.5 million for a "multimedia extravaganza" including a TV studio? These people really have lost track of reality even more than I thought.

For that, the best they'll do is a projector in a refurbished aircraft hangar, and a couple of camcorders and folding chairs. At this rate they won't even be able to afford enough Bananas and Peanut Butter to star in their videos.

Some theme parks annually spend more than this extravaganza's whole budget just on cleaning up the vomit (far better than using it to spread it around).

15. Papal encyclical attacks atheism, lauds hope

Comment #92383 by icanus on November 30, 2007 at 11:47 am

"If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world,"

So let's be sure to keep our ethical discussions rooted in a two-thousand year old text, then...

16. God's honest truth?

Comment #79894 by icanus on October 19, 2007 at 1:36 am

Faith schools here in the UK receive the majority of their funding from the state. Most only put around 10% of the costs in from their own pocket.

An easy start at getting ridding of them would be to tell them that they put x% of the money in, they get to select x% of the pupils by religion. The rest come from the catchment area regardless of religion.

It'd doubtless help, but sadly, most of the major religions have deep pockets, and investing in their "schools", even if they end up having to pay 100% of the costs, is a good way for them to secure their income stream for the future. Whatever the immediate cost to them, it's unlikely to exceed the long-term cost of losing of so many pliable young minds who they can tithe later in life.

Better to get stricter on what a school can and can't teach if it wants the right to participate in government endorsed qualifications. There's a big portion of the "faithful" who would quickly abandon faith schools if little Johnny or Jane could no longer expect to get good GCSE results out of the whole Faustian arrangement - I can't see anyone feigning faith to get their kids into a school that's only allowed to offer a Vatican accredited certificate in catholicism.

If a school teaches the necessary science to pass the exam in the science lessons, but then turns around and tells the children "but none of that is really true", it's not actually educating them, just training them to assist in defrauding the examining body.

17. God's honest truth?

Comment #79827 by icanus on October 18, 2007 at 4:25 pm

If a school isn't teaching children the truth to the best of its ability, then it could charitably be called a youth club that happens to run some classes, and shouldn't receive any sort of official recognition as an educational establishment.

If parents want to send their children to such a "club", fine, but they should also be obliged to send them to a school.

18. God's honest truth?

Comment #79772 by icanus on October 18, 2007 at 1:36 pm

The First Amendment would have to be severely altered to allow a policy like this in the US.

Would it? (I'm a Rightponder, so I have to declare a rather shaky grasp of the specific wording - the First is the freedom of expression one, right?)

Would it breach the first amendment for the government to take action against schools that wanted to teach that America was discovered in 1978 by two men blown off course during a fishing trip from a holiday resort in northern Spain?

Freedom of speech dictates that people (teachers included) are free to believe whatever they like and to express that belief, but not that schools, or the government which provides them with curriculum guidance, are obliged to provide them with a metaphorical megaphone. The measure described in the article doesn't say that it's illegal to believe that a particular religious doctrine is true, or illegal to tell others (including children) that it's true. It merely says that it's illegal to do so in one's capacity as a teacher.

It doesn't strike me as any more of a breach of the right to freedom of expression for schools to stop teachers pushing their religious views in the classroom than it would be for a company to forbid its sales staff from recommending the competition's products during their sales calls.

19. Response to My Fellow 'Atheists'

Comment #77282 by icanus on October 9, 2007 at 12:16 am

Whether people like to believe it or not, atheism is in fact a choice. Even if you "just always knew god didn't exist", you still arrived at a conclusion about religion and the supernatural and *CHOSE* to accept the non-existence of god/the supernatural as the most plausible or obvious conclusion.

I think the "Choice" comes a step earlier in the process:

I chose which evidence I would assess (and was fortunate enough not to have the available selection of evidence too severely pre-selected for me by family/community), and used my judgment on how much weight I assigned to each piece of evidence.

Beyond this, however, I don't think there was a choice - the evidence pointed me toward atheism, so that's where I ended up. This is not necessarily the conclusion I would choose - there are certain implications of the atheistic viewpoint (particularly the "no afterlife" bit - that gave me many sleepless nights in my mid-teens) that I don't actually like, but I still think they're true, based on the available evidence.

To make an analogy, if I could choose to do so, I'd like to believe I am a musical genius. Ten minutes of failing to force an "F" out of my guitar makes this choice non-viable.

20. Sam Harris seems like a nice fellow, but very confused

Comment #77274 by icanus on October 8, 2007 at 11:54 pm

Personally I see the "Label" as largely an irrelevance - if Sam doesn't want to call himself an atheist, fine. If others of us do, that's fine too.

The real issue is continuing to confront sloppy thinking and uncritical faith-without-evidence (an area in which Sam sets a fine example).

Personally, I'll continue to refer to myself as an atheist when I think the situation calls for it, but I don't feel the need to go out and have it tattooed on my forehead or anything.

If there were no theists, then obviously "atheist" would cease to have any useful meaning, but I suspect religion will be with us for some time to come, so a term to define our viewpoint can be useful, even if we are defining ourselves in terms of what we don't believe.

21. A Face-Off Over Faith

Comment #75551 by icanus on October 3, 2007 at 1:40 am

The debate will be a good morale booster for atheists, but the religious will just do their usual mental duck and weave, shake off any good blows, and none of the arguments against their faith will connect.

The attitude of the religious whenever their "arguments" are used for bird-cage-liner puts me in mind of Egyptian tomb carvings detailing the military exploits of the Pharaohs.

They never admit a defeat, always talk about glorious victories. The only way you can tell that a campaign was going badly is that each "glorious victory" occurs closer to home than the last...

22. Row Brews Over DUP Call for Schools to Teach Creationism

Comment #72662 by icanus on September 22, 2007 at 6:15 am

Up to the individual school?

Maybe it should also be up to the individual school if they want to teach that 2+2=384, or that all matter is composed of varying proportions of earth, air, water and fire?

23. The smallest signs of retreat

Comment #68518 by icanus on September 7, 2007 at 11:43 am

So, that's one serving of "The nasty atheist said mean things", with a side order of "Aha! but I don't believe god has a beard, so nothing you say applies to me!".

How predicatble. I'm beginning to suspect that someone has written a "negative review of the God Delusion" generator, similar to the postmodern essay generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo)

I keep meaning to actually assign numbers to the non-arguments used by these apologists (or in this case the apologist for the apologist), so that we could just post the rebuttals them in shorthand.

Bunting uses Theist non-arguments 1,4 and 7. Please see responses A, F & H.

24. India to charge writer Nasreen with 'hurting Muslim feelings'

Comment #67512 by icanus on September 3, 2007 at 4:12 pm

Several lawmakers and members of a conservative Muslim political party threw flowers and other items at her and called for her death.

Nasreen will face criminal charges

Am I missing something here, or do these two statements not add up?

25. In God we doubt

Comment #67308 by icanus on September 3, 2007 at 3:26 am

6. If we don't wipe out religious belief by next Thursday week, civilisation as we know it is doomed.

6. Of course the mad mullahs are dangerous and extreme Islamism is a threat to be taken seriously. But we've survived monotheist religion for 4,000 years or so, and I can think of one or two other things that are a greater threat to civilisation.

I consider myself a fairly hard-line atheist, as far as that goes (i.e. not very far, at elast wehn compared to a hard-line religionist), but I don;t want to wipe out religion. What goes on in someone's head is their own business - it's only when it spills out into public policy and the treament of others that it becomes a potential cause for concern.

For 3,500 of those 4,000 years of monotheistic religion the most destructive weapon at the disposal of fanatics has been some variant of the pointed stick (and even with this limited arsenal, they seem to have managed to do plenty of damage). Since then we've moved on to guns, and in the last sixty years, nuclear weapons.

Given what the Inquisition accomplished with just a pair of pliers and a red hot poker, I'd rather not see what their modern day counterparts could do with an ICBM.

26. What do these atheists understand of religion?

Comment #67293 by icanus on September 3, 2007 at 2:56 am

Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the "rational" disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

Substitute "cannot be" for "have not yet been" and we might have the start of a journey of discovery rather than the abrupt derailment of one.

Not too many centuries ago, our propensity to die in our early twenties of all sorts of nasty diseases was one such aspect of our nature that "could not be dissected, categorised and validated". Fortunately for all of us, some people weren't happy to call all a mystery and leave it at that - as a result we now have medicine.

that thing that happens to you when a full moon appears above the sea and is reflected in it. Sorry, but knowing the science of why the moon shines is irrelevant to the experience.

It's irrelevant to the experience if you want it to be, and are happy just gawping at shiny objects.

There are many awe inspiring and beautiful sights in nature, but understanding how and why they appear as they do has always (in my own experience) enhanced the experience rather than detracting from it.

faith gives Muslims hope in many of the most hopeless of states

I think this must be a typo. Fixed version below:

millions of muslims are gulled into tolerating lives of grinding poverty and cruelty under the most dreadful dictatorial regimes simply because the ruling classes couch their oppression in the language of 'faith'

27. Public Debate on Complexity and Evolution

Comment #61216 by icanus on August 4, 2007 at 7:54 am

On a rather more specific point, the last question wasn't answered completely. Take the evolution of a wing, presumably it doesn't offer an evolutionary advantage until it becomes a functioning wing, so what is it the "drives" the intermediate stages, having a couple of "stubs" might even be a disadvantage?

As others have pointed out, even a stubby wing that only very slightly improves the ability to survive falls can give enough of a benefit to get the process of selection going.

There's also a lot of adaptations that may have started out doing something completely unrelated to their eventual purpose - a skin flap that later becomes a wing could have begun life as an adaptation to lose excess body heat in a hot climate and only much further down the evolutionary road have been converted into a gliding surface.

28. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51435 by icanus on June 22, 2007 at 11:21 pm

Just watched the video. There's definately some coaching going on here by the parents. Compare her statement on camera:

The case that we're trying to do will basically, sort of, tell people that, you know, we're christians - We're, we'll fight for what we believe.

with the quote from the article:

"The real reason for the extreme hostility to the wearing of the SRT purity ring is the dislike of the message of sexual restraint which is counter cultural and contrary to societal and governmental policy,"

Does anyone really think that the same person came up with both quotes?

If exceptions can be made to the rules for religion then it's only fair that they also be made for fashion, whim or anything else pupils care to cite as a reason.

29. Doctors' beliefs can hinder patient care

Comment #51388 by icanus on June 22, 2007 at 3:04 pm

"Doctors are people, too," she adds. "We have to be able to leave the hospital and live with ourselves. If you feel in your heart an action would cause harm to somebody — born or unborn — it's legitimate to decline to participate."

Fine by me. Leave the Hospital, decline to participate. Just don't forget to hand in your medical licence on the way out.

30. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51286 by icanus on June 22, 2007 at 7:59 am

Sorry, I have to disagree with the majority of those who posted. I happen to think that uniforms in general violate a child's freedom to express themselves, destroy individuality, and cause the loss of self image as one gets molded into the crowd. I support a child's right to express themselves and disavow that school district for imposing uniforms!

I generally agree on the school uniform issue. I certainly hated wearing one myself. What annoys me is that "It's my religion" gets a free pass as a reason to ignore the rules, while "because I want to wear it" doesn't.

In an ideal world I'd probably like to see school uniforms done away with, but as long as those are the school's rules (which the girl and her family freely accepted by sending her to the school), trying to impress your invisible friend isn't a valid reason to break them.

It certainly isn't a valid reason to divert funds which should be being spent on education into defending against spurious lawsuits.

31. 'Purity' ring case in High Court

Comment #51262 by icanus on June 22, 2007 at 7:10 am

What a pity I didn't think of this when I was at school. I could have insisted that my faith in the invisble pink unicorn required me to wear jeans and trainers instead of the shoes and black trousers dictated by the school, and sued anyone who tried to stop me.

This really is nonsense. It's not like the school was asking her to have sex, just not to wear a piece of bloody jewellery.

32. Call for 'post-9/11' RE teaching

Comment #50374 by icanus on June 17, 2007 at 11:05 am

I did a GCSE in RE almost ten years ago (it was compulsory at my school, because it was considered an easy pass to push up the school's results).

We barely touched on religion at all. A bit of study of a native american tribe's belief system, lots of stuff about refugee issues, the destruction of the amazon rainforest, and a unit on the Amish taught mainly by making us watch the Harrison Ford film ("Witness"?).

It was mainly practice at writing essays which churned out whatever magic words the examiners were looking for and gave the appearence of coming to a conclusion without actually commiting yourself to a point of view that could be demonstrated as being wrong. Hmmm. Maybe it had more to do with religion than I thought at the time.

33. Atheism is pretentious and cowardly

Comment #48276 by icanus on June 7, 2007 at 9:25 am

I'm really getting sick of all this talk of "militant atheism".

Strident? yes.
Forcefully stated? yes.
Impolite? on occasion.

Militant? not at all. Militant implies some sort of call for violent action against theists. The worst any of the "militant atheists" mentioned in the article have done is suggest that they *think* a bit.

34. Does God answer prayer? ASU research says 'yes'

Comment #25925 by icanus on March 15, 2007 at 5:09 pm

The whole issue of prayer studies mystifies me - how do they make sure that the control group don't have any deluded family/friends praying for them in an unofficial capacity?

35. Atheists come in last

Comment #22898 by icanus on February 23, 2007 at 10:44 pm

Certainly some disturbing statistics, but I wonder how much it reflects how people would actually vote.

I suspect that the percentages who would vote for the various other groups in reality are rather lower than the survey suggests, simply because people answering a poll don't want to be seen as racist/sexist/antisemitic. There's no such taboo against bashing us atheists.

36. Let us test Darwin, teacher says

Comment #10359 by Icanus on November 28, 2006 at 12:21 am

incidentally, I'm all in favour of using ID in the classroom - if explained properly it would make a very good example in a lesson on the importance of scientific method, and the sort of half-arsed "theories" people can come up with when they depart from it.

37. Let us test Darwin, teacher says

Comment #10358 by Icanus on November 28, 2006 at 12:19 am

If Mr Cowan thinks it's important to teach children about scientific debate, I suggest he finds an area where there is a /genuine/ debate.

As to his comments about Einstein criticising Newton, the difference is that Einstein came up with a new theory, which has been bourne out by evidence - he didn't just say "I don't know, so God did it"

38. Top court refuses to hear whether religion can be a murder defence

Comment #7990 by Icanus on November 20, 2006 at 4:49 am

While the crime is of course abhorrant and inexcusable, I can understand the strength of feeling that accompanies such a discovery.

I'm sure that it has nothing to do with Islam - do Atheists, Christians, Jews, Hindus or Sikhs feel any less strongly if their partner has an affair?

Anger is a perfectly understandable Darwinian response, irrespective of belief. The important thing is that being angry or insulted is never a justification for violence.

39. Richard Dawkins and the "new atheists" come to America

Comment #7259 by Icanus on November 18, 2006 at 12:06 am

"We believe that God is all good and without evil; therefore, evil done in God's name doesn't belong to Him."

So he gets all the credit and none of the blame, because beyond asserting that he exists (with no evidence), it is also asserted that he is "all Good" (again with no evidence).

Can I do that? I believe that I am perfectly good. Any good deeds I do can be used as evidence for my perfect goodness - anything bad is all a horrible misunderstanding, doesn't belong to me, and happened in spite of my intrinsic goodness.