101. Fox News Attacks 'Godless' Free Thought Radio

Comment #78292 by Steven Mading on October 12, 2007 at 11:22 am

Speaking of which, the FFRF has its annual convention this weekend, starting tonight.

102. The Price of Freedom

Comment #77436 by Steven Mading on October 9, 2007 at 9:54 am

Fanusi, Fighting Islam is a great idea. The Afghanastan portion of the war, with the Taleban as the enemy, was justified and should have received the bulk of the effort. We don't disagree with Hitchens when he says we are at war with Islam. We disagree with him when he helps spread the propaganda that this is what invading Iraq was all about. Our operations in Iraq have helped, not hindered, the Islamacist movement. Why didn't we put this much effort into rooting out the rest of the Taleban? Why did we divert our attention from Afghanastan to Iraq? It sure as hell wasn't to help fight Islamacism, since the Taleban was (and hopefully you can understand the thinly veiled extreme understatement here) just a wee bit more theocratic than Saddam was.

103. The Price of Freedom

Comment #77432 by Steven Mading on October 9, 2007 at 9:39 am

Keith, the reason for the confusion over why Hitchens would support the Iraq war is chiefly over this one point: Bush claims it had something to do with the terrorists of 9/11. It did not. Hitchens bought into it and repeats the mantra that it's all about the war on terror. There may have been good justifiable reasons for it. It's just that fighting terrorism was certainly NOT among them. There might be all sorts of valid reasons for the war, ousting Saddam among them, but I could at least disagree respectfully with someone who thinks those reasons made it worth it. But specifically on one particular reason - the allegations that it had something to do with terrorism - Putting forth that position means he fell for propaganda hook line and sinker, and is helping to spread it every time he repeats it. And I thought he was smarter than that.

104. The Price of Freedom

Comment #77169 by Steven Mading on October 8, 2007 at 4:22 pm

I have read her book.

I'd be willing to contribute something to her personal defense if it comes down to that, but ideally it shouldn't have to (and there's no way a private group of sympathizers would raise anything matching the 2 million per year that the dutch government has been able to put out.)

I fear for her life at this point. I'll keep watching this space. Presumably if such a trust fund ends up being set up, the news will get announced here.

105. Response to My Fellow 'Atheists'

Comment #77142 by Steven Mading on October 8, 2007 at 2:56 pm

Harris' approach is much better than that of "KeepTheReason" over in the forums.
KeepTheReason: STOP SAYING ATHEIST!!! LABELS ARE IMPORTANT! Use this New Label Instead!!! Everyone who does not agree clearly is a moron. (Okay, so it's not expressed that clearly in his actual posts, but I think I have summarized the point accurately).

Harris: Labels in general aren't important, period. Don't swap atheist for some other label, just don't bother with a label in the first place.

I find myself much more likely to agree with Harris.

106. Researchers devise way to calculate rates of evolution

Comment #76319 by Steven Mading on October 5, 2007 at 1:05 pm

The other problem with speciation, in addition to the fact that its actually continuous rather than discrete as our words tend to model it, is the dishonest dodge that's used with the whole "intermediate forms" stuff: Let's say we have two species called "species 1" and "species 3". That we believe are related either by common ancestor or by one being a derivative of the other. Now let's say some creationist argues that without the in-between species between them, evolutionary theory falls flat. Well, let's say that someone DOES discover the inbetween species and calls it "species 2". Now we have three species, "1", "2", and "3". Now instead of conceeding the argument, the creationist will now claim there are two gaps where there used to be one so the problem is now even worse. Let's say someone discovers more in-between species called 1.5 and 2.5 so we now have 5 species called: 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, and 3. now the creationist will claim there are 4 gaps in the record, and so on it progresses.

No matter how many intermediate forms are found, finding them means more gaps between. The relevant fact that these more numerous gaps are of course of smaller MAGNITUDE and so we are approaching toward a continuous, fully filled-in record, is not mentioned. Just the fact that there's more of them is all they mention.

So the nasty thing is that the weaker the creationist argument actually becomes in this regard, the stronger they think their argument becomes.

107. Researchers devise way to calculate rates of evolution

Comment #76316 by Steven Mading on October 5, 2007 at 12:48 pm

1. Comment #75853 by eric.malitz on October 3, 2007 at 9:54 pm
what I dont understand is why would mutation and chance alone build adaptation and survival and of certain traits over others? Despite the rate of mutation, shouldn't selection determine what traits we see or don't see over time?
Can someone clarify this for me, am I missing something or are they making conclusions that don't mesh?
Maybe I'm just a brainwashed darwinian

Imagine that we have access to a roulette wheel. Now imagine that we're going to play a game where we only keep track of how many times we guess correctly at the roulette wheel, and forget about all the times we lose. Now, how might this contest be biased in favor of one contestant? There are really 2 general types of ways. One way is to bias the odds of each trial - for example if if one contestant is required to pick a specific number to get it right but the other only has to guess even or odd to get it right. But even if both contestants have to make the same type of guess with the same type of odds, say both of them have to pick the exact number, there is a second way to bias the game and that would be if one contestant was allowed to spin more often than the other. If I was allowed to make a spin only once per hour, while you could make a spin every minute, then clearly you would win the contest over time simply because you've had 60 times as many opportunities to get your rare lucky wins than I have, even though on each individual trial, our chances were equal.

That's what this article is talking about. The species that gets to make more mutations more often gets more chances to hit upon a sucessful mutation by random chance, and therefore will evolve adaptations to environmental changes faster.

I think there's probably a point of diminishing returns, though. If a sexual species mutates too quickly, then this might hinder breeding, by effectively creating lots of mini-species that can't breed with each other (the father's DNA and the mother's DNA being too different from each other to sync up and make a child DNA).

108. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #75757 by Steven Mading on October 3, 2007 at 2:59 pm

How is it that after seeing the execution of Theo Van Gogh and the threats to do the same to Ayan, people can still say "Islam is the religion of Peace"? If they won't allow dissenters, and they won't allow people to leave the religion if they want to, that prevents peaceful coexistance.

109. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #75414 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 3:02 pm

Sane 1 said:
Having been completely confused by the use of the term "school-leavers," I appreciate Dr. Benway's attempts at understanding and those of you who tried to help.

"School-leavers" means something like a high school graduate going on to graduate school, to us Americans(?).

From what I read (I too am an American who has never seen the word before) that's not it. Imagine this: To use an analogy with American High school: Imagine if the last two years of high school was actually a different educational level altogether. So the normal mandatory schooling ends when you're 16 years old, roughly the same age as a sophomore in US high school, and you only bother going on to the next two years of further education if you think you're going to need to take the exam to go to college (your "A-levels" as they're called). If you're planning on getting a job where college is unnecessary, you can just leave as soon as you're done with your minimum requirements.

The people who opt to leave like that, as soon as they are legally allowed to, are called "school-leavers".

The controversy is over whether or not these people can be admitted to theology college without going through the normal channels all the other subjects require and getting those two more years of education first.

Do I have it right?

110. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #75405 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 2:38 pm

Nick Good:
That is to say I never have asserted or implied that US policy is NOT biased in favour of Israel!

You claimed to support the US foreign policy. That indicates pretty strongly you don't think there's any unfair bias toward Israel, but that you think things are evenhanded. I don't think I was out of line in interpreting that in what you said in this context meant this: You support US foreign policy == You don't think the US is unfairly biased in its Israel policy. It's a pretty direct implication. If you didn't mean that, then that's fine, but don't try to claim that a careful reading of what you wrote makes it clear.

111. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #75365 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 12:02 pm

I think a much better example would be to ignore the US foreign policy entirely and just point out there there's more openly Jewish politicians in the US than openly nonbeliever politicians, and yet the nonbelievers outnumber jews in the population. That's simpler, avoids partisan political opinions, and yet still drives home exactly the point Dawkins is going for.

112. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #75364 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 12:00 pm

My only complaint about Dawkins's comment on the power of the Jewish lobby is that his evidence does not lead to his conclusion in the slightest:

Evidence: The US policy that strongly biases in favor of Israel.
Conclusion: The US Jewish lobby must have a lot of power.

Unlike Nick, I agree with the evidence and I do think the US policy is biased toward Israel, but I don't agree with Dawkins that this is somehow due to the Jewish lobby. Keep in mind that there's a LOT of Christians too who think they should side with Israel for religious reasons.

113. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #75354 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 11:45 am

The link at the top of the article is bad. (The "reposted from" link).

Could someone with the power to edit it fix it? This is the corrected link that actually works when you click on it:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2180660,00.html

114. Harper's Index

Comment #75329 by Steven Mading on October 2, 2007 at 10:59 am

alexmzk,
I don't think it's fair to compare this to the bible because (1) It's based on sales figures "bucketed" into 1 bucket per publication, so if there's 20 different variants of the bible in print right now, the bible's sales figures get divvied up between those 20 different buckets, and (2) The bible has been available for purchase for quite a bit longer so it's much more likely that someone who wants a copy already has one, and this index only measures new SALES of books, not how often the book is read.

115. Oxford's Christian colleges 'are not suitable for school-leavers'

Comment #71648 by Steven Mading on September 19, 2007 at 12:02 pm

What's a "school-leaver"?? This must be some British expression my American brain hasn't heard before. I tried to break it down and the best I could come up with is "student who quits and stops going to school", but then the article really doesn't make sense that way so it must mean something else.

116. Radical Christians in Iraq

Comment #71642 by Steven Mading on September 19, 2007 at 11:54 am

Where they get it right: This is actually about islam. It really is about holoy war and not politics.

Where they get it wrong: The notion that the solution is conversion to Christianity.

117. State Senator Ernie Chambers Sues God

Comment #71624 by Steven Mading on September 19, 2007 at 11:23 am

I like this from a satire point of view, and it does illustrate an important point. But given that everybody knows there's no way to summon up the defendant (even if you believe the defendant exists you still don't think he's under US Court jurisdiction), it can never be anything more than a satirical joke. And my point is that I think that makes it a tactically stupid idea. The notion of filing court paperwork to make a point when you know darn well it's a meaningless case, will make our cause look silly and idiotic in the eyes of the public. I really think this will backfire.

118. Review of Darwin's Angel

Comment #70185 by Steven Mading on September 14, 2007 at 9:25 am

from the article:

Cornwell does, however, start to get sucked in to Dawkins's fact-based approach. And religion is hard to fit in to that agenda, for it simply isn't about facts.

Oh No! - a fact-based approach - how dreadful!

The most disgusting thing about religion is how it tries to defend itself by doing the following convenient switch between objective and subjective modes: When excercising its power, telling people how to live their lives, it's doing so (whether it's honest enough to admit it or not) on the basis that its claims about reality are objectively true, that there really is a god, that the prophet of the religion really said the things he alleged to say, that the revelations of that prophet really did come from an actual god, and so on. BUT, as soon as someone comes along to question all of that and cast doubt on it, then the religion's adherents switch to subjective mode and claim the religion is actually in the realm of the subjective and therefore it's all just a matter of fuzzy opinion and all these complaints about literal truth aren't relevant.

To defenders of a religion, I'd like to say, "It cannot be simultaneously subjective and objective. PICK ONE OR THE OTHER and stick to it! and stop trying to dishonestly pretend you can switch it when it's convenient. If you want to call it subjective when defending it because that makes it convenient, then FINE, but that also means you cannot claim it has anything useful to say about our shared reality whatsoever, because the only reality that we can both share is that part of it that's objective.

119. This human's life, decoded

Comment #67723 by Steven Mading on September 4, 2007 at 2:09 pm

from Bonzai:

Moreover, "intelligence" is not a scientifically well defined concept. As Jarad Diamond observes, it can easily be argued that individual members of technically advanced societies are less intelligent than members of "primitive" societies in terms of the ability to survive on one's wit.

I'm not so sure about all types of intelligence, but specifically the ability to memorize things by rote is no longer as necessary as it once was, and I think it's starting to atrophy. Why waste the effort honing your rote memorization skills when we have machines that memorize things for us now? People used to remember all the phone numbers of all their friends and family. Now their cellphone does it for them. People used to have to be good at doing the rote steps of arithmetic themselves, and now we have computers and calculators that are faster and more reliable than an error-prone organic brain at doing these mind-numbing simple but highly repetative tasks.

But the thing is, thinking by rote is not really what I'd call the most important part of human intelligence. Pattern recognition and its associated information filtering (The act of reducing the large volume of raw data into summarized tokens for the conscious mind to deal with.) is far more important, and we're still very good at that, in fact there's an increased need for it now with the bombardment of large piles of data at once, so it wouldn't suprise me if we're getting better at that.

120. Another view

Comment #66798 by Steven Mading on August 31, 2007 at 1:18 pm

One of the most frustrating things about the placebo effect is that for it to work the patient has to really truly believe it wholeheartedly and not realize it's a placebo. And since humans are often very good at detecting when other humans are bluffing, it works best when the doctor also believes it wholeheartedly and doesn't know it's just a placebo. So it works best among those who are the most deluded. In some way that just doesn't seem fair to me. It seems like it can create an evolutinary incentive for false credulity. When dealing with illnesses for which no real cure is known to exist yet and the only available treatments are placebos, gullibility is a useful survival trait.

121. There is no God and Dawkins is his Prophet

Comment #66796 by Steven Mading on August 31, 2007 at 12:59 pm

In comment 37, Kevin Ronayne says:

Here we go again:

"The stated purpose of the book is to make its readers atheists."

Where, or where, does RD say that exactly? Lying for Jesus again by the looks of it

Not to defend such an awful review, but in the interest of honesty I have to point out that this is one of the few things the reviewer did get right. The book actually does say in the beginning that RD wrote the book with the hope that one who is not an atheist when he starts the book will be one by the time he finishes it. It really does say that.

122. There is no God and Dawkins is his Prophet

Comment #66795 by Steven Mading on August 31, 2007 at 12:55 pm

From the article:

One point that McGrath makes is Dawkins' definition of religion as "faith without reason", i.e. that religious faith does not rely on reasonable arguments. A belief of this kind exists in fundamentalist groups but is rejected by the main churches.

No, it most emphatically is NOT rejected by the main churches. That's the whole freakin' POINT of that part of the book. Gaaahhh! If anything this bit I quote has it 100% inverted. The moderate mainstream churches have MORE of a tendancy to put faith above reason than the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists try to claim that their belief is backed up by objective demonstrable fact - that the Bible is a truthful account of things. They're wrong about those "facts", of course, but at least they do recognize the need to rely on more than just faith. The moderates, on the other hand, are the ones who recgonize how often the Bible gets the facts wrong, and so they shift to the faith argument, where they want the topic to be treated as if it was subjective - where the bible doesn't really need to be literally true as long as your belief is based on faith.

This reviewer got it 100% backward. The moderates are the ones trying to claim you don't need facts because its just a matter of faith alone. The fundamentalists use distorted facts to back up their claims, but at least they're keeping things in the realm of the objectively arguable, rather than retreating to the subjective fuzzy area to try to stop all debate on the topic and make it all be about feelings.

123. Anger over 'blasphemous' balls

Comment #65919 by Steven Mading on August 27, 2007 at 11:24 am

Kingasaurus beat me to it. If you want tight control over where a word is printed, don't go and put it on your nation's flag, which you know will be reproduced and used in a wide variety of ways in a wide variety of logos. In other words, the only people at fault here are the Saudi's. If the Afghan mullas wanted to vent anger, vent it at Saudi Arabia, the country that put the words on their freakin' flag in the first place.

124. Enemies of Reason

Comment #64973 by Steven Mading on August 22, 2007 at 2:15 pm

Is it just me, or did anyone else find that the video and audio were way out of sync, by something like several seconds, giving it the look of a foreign film dubbed in English?

125. Enemies of Reason

Comment #64972 by Steven Mading on August 22, 2007 at 2:13 pm

I do like the fact that he went after Deepak. There's too much of a sense of "if the religious mumbo-jumbo sounds pleasant then that means there's no good reason to speak agaisnt it" about people's reaction to him. Many in the US who find him to be meaningless drivel seem to think it's perfectly safe harmless drivel so let him be.

It is NOT harmless to slander the methods of science with false mischaracterizations of how it works. It's a practice that when widely practiced condemns the next generation to more suffering than they otherwise would have had, as ignorance prevents humanity from finding real solutions to its problems.

126. A Defense of Atheism

Comment #64028 by Steven Mading on August 17, 2007 at 11:03 am

Prufrock, the full-on persecution of Turing didn't occur until after the war, and after Churchil was out of power. So I don't think Churchil was the "establishment" power that Lime was talking about.

But yeah, I agree with the comment about people using computers. Every programming language invented is parsed, and translated into a program using some technique derived from Turing's finite state machine principles, so every bit of software people use owes its ancestry to that gay man. If you've got something against gays, throw your computer away.

127. Church and State: Divided we stand

Comment #63668 by Steven Mading on August 15, 2007 at 9:20 am

AWACS77, that last point is, in general, an important principle about upholding human rights in a democracy, and not specific to just religion: When you are in the majority and thus in a position craft laws, always be sure to craft those laws in such a way that you wouldn't mind those laws being used by your opposition if your side ends up in the minority later on.

Not only is it practical in a self-serving way (because you are likely to be in the minority at some point since opinions tend to swing), but it checks that you aren't being unfair against whomever is currently in the minority. It's an excellent principle, akin to the notion that when slicing a pie, the one doing the cutting gets the last pick.

128. Amnesty to defy Catholic church over rape victims' abortion rights

Comment #63153 by Steven Mading on August 13, 2007 at 9:16 am

From the article:

One survivor said: "Five to six men would rape us, one after the other, for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this. He disowned me."

I'm not sure who I'm more angry at - the ones who committed the rapes or the husband who disowns his wife because of it.

129. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62609 by Steven Mading on August 10, 2007 at 10:42 am

I envy Dominic Lawson. The version of planet Earth he lives on, where the religious have thrown away superstition and now no longer believe it, sounds so much nicer than the version of planet Earth the rest of us have to live on.

130. God in the Military - The Pentagon and its Christian Embassy

Comment #61919 by Steven Mading on August 7, 2007 at 11:51 am

Here's what frustrates me: The US military is not powerful because of it's number of troops. Other countries can martial even bigger armies. The US military is not powerful because of good strategy, that's for sure. The US military is powerful because of scientists and engineers receiving big funding money who make the technology they use. And if surveys are to be believed, the subset of the US population consisting of scientists and engineers has a much higher percentage of atheists than the general population at large.

So now that the US military is exceedingly religious, they're using the power of the military to establish theocratic concepts.

In a way they're hijacking the work of atheists. If you're one of these engineers or scientists who works for a military contractor, and you happen to be an atheist, please seriously consider what you're doing to yourself here by putting more power into the hands of those who wish to turn it agaisnt you.

And, no, I'm not advocating a peacenik disband-the-military option here. I'm saying be more selective about whom you hand that military power to. Don't hand it to people who are opposed to you.

131. Arrogance, dogma and why science - not faith - is the new enemy of reason

Comment #61913 by Steven Mading on August 7, 2007 at 11:35 am

This bit in the article really angers me:

The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe - which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.

Because it's one of those cases of telling half the truth with the deliberate intent to decieve. Yes, it's true that the rise of monotheism did give rise to science, but it's a lie to characterize this as an advantage of theism over atheism given that what preceeded monotheism was polytheism, not atheism. This was a shift from many gods to one god (a reduction in gods), not a shift from no gods to one god (an increase in gods).

It's pretty clear what was going on if you read the writings of the early scientists from the enlightenment period. They figured that if the universe is run by one god then it should be more coherent than if it was run by a committe of many small gods each in charge of manipulating things in its sphere of influence. Therefore it should be possible to detect that god's universal coherent rules to the universe that you wouldn't expect to find if lots of small gods ran everything in a hodgepodge manner.

It was NOT an issue of theism over atheism. Not by a long shot.

132. Does the Bible have a place in public schools?

Comment #61907 by Steven Mading on August 7, 2007 at 11:16 am

It's impossible to understand the history of the western world without knowing about what's in the bible, so reading it in school is a good idea, even though it's fiction (for the same reason that understanding greek mythology is a good idea even though it's fiction as well) The problem is that I have zero confidence in the ability of US teachers to grade fairly in a bible reading class.

Consider the vast numbers of believers who are quick to falsely label atheist critiques of the bible as merely being misinformed critiques by people who don't understand the book in context. Imagine how frustratingly dishonest it is when they use the 'metaphor dodge' to exonerate the bible every time the bible says something that we in modern times have come to realize is bad (like advocating the killing of the unbeliever). Most of us have encountered this bit of dishonesty before, and been frustrated by it.

Now, imagine that you're an atheist kid in school and it's your TEACHER that's doing it. A teacher who is responsible for grading you. Grading you on how well you understood the text. When they mislabel "holding the bible accountable for the bad things it says" as "obviously not understanding the bible."

I think it would be wonderful if people could read the bible for cultural relevance and to put western history from the council of Nicea where the anthology known as the bible was first created to today in context in school, and to be graded fairly in such a class regardless of whether they think the bible is believable or not. But I do not believe such a scenario is actually possible within the US. Teachers will bias the grading because all too often believers confuse the act of pointing out accurate disagreements with the book with a lack of comprehension of the book.

133. God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy: 'No' Says God

Comment #61734 by Steven Mading on August 6, 2007 at 2:46 pm

Dr Benway, I know it's absurd that they allegely "interviewed" God. But is it MORE absurd than genuinely held religious beliefs, absurd enough that you can tell people are kidding? I say no. There's a lot of absurdity in religion that you're competing against here. Given the obvious fact that we are a fragile species on a tiny obscure fragile spec around an ordinary sun on the fringe of an ordinary galaxy among so many other galaxies, the notion of a god that cares specifically about us more so than anything else he did in his creation is no less absurd than the notion that if such a god existed you can get interview answers from him. There are people who seriously believe they talk to god and get answers back. So I repeat my point - that a reported claim about religion is absurd does not prove that the speaker was kidding and it's satire.

Were it not for the fact that I already knew what The Onion was (and live in the city where it started on paper before it became an online publication the rest of the world heard about), there is nothing that would help me figure out that it's a joke - yes it's absurd, yes it's hilarious, yes it's silly - but SO IS THE REAL THING.

134. The Gullible Age: Review of 'The Enemies of Reason'

Comment #61710 by Steven Mading on August 6, 2007 at 1:11 pm

posted by Mails:
The success rate of placebos entered folklore when it was shown in trials to be around 35% (Beecher, 1955).
However, other trials have not been so successful, notably Hrobjartsson and Gotzsche in 2001, who concluded the effect was negligable when comparing 100 trials with real medicine, placebo and no treatment at all.

The difference might very well be that nowadays the test subjects are aware of the use of placebos, and how they do noting, and how every medical study will always include a control group gettting placebos. A modern test subject will think, "I wonder if the pills I'm getting are real or if I'm part of the control group and these things are fake." and thus he will not be as likely to trigger the placebo effect in himself.

The power of the placebo is ruined by, well, knowing about the power of the placebo.

135. Atheists of the world: unite!

Comment #61705 by Steven Mading on August 6, 2007 at 12:39 pm

I like the idea, but I don't like the choice of symbol. A big red 'A' doesn't really get the message across, and just looks, well, silly.
Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose to have a shirt that only says these things:

"A"
Richarddawkins.net
Out Campagin.

None of that helps advertise your atheism to anyone who is not already in the know about this campaign's symbols. The word "atheist" or "nontheist" or "freethinker" or any other such term doesn't even appear anywhere on the shirt.

Even just changing the name to "Nonbeliever's Out Campaign" would help.

136. Could these books be part of the problem?

Comment #61035 by Steven Mading on August 3, 2007 at 11:43 am

There's an issue of prior art here. The complete idiot's guide to christianity has been published for a very long time now. In fact, it was the first mass-produced book ever published on the Gutenberg press.

137. God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy: 'No' Says God

Comment #61032 by Steven Mading on August 3, 2007 at 11:34 am

One thing that really annoys me is whenever someone mistakes sarcasm for the real thing, people are quick to criticize the reader for it when rarely is it the reader's fault for not getting it. It's not the reader's fault that no matter how hard you may try to sarcasically portray religious belief, you still can't make it absurd enough that people will be certain you're kidding. The blame for that lays with religion. If there's a group of people who's genuine beliefs are indistinguishable from sarcastic portrayals of their beliefs, that reflects badly on THEM, not on the third party observers who didn't recognize the sarcasm.

Consider this: Yes, this article is absurd, but is it any more absurd than, say, genuine nutcases like the GodHatesFags.com people? It's the existence of groups like that that make religious sarcasm hard to pull off. No matter how hard you try to exaggerate the absurd, you can't out-do the actual genuine absurdity of some of the more absurd fringe groups out there.

138. Camp Joins Summer Fun With Teaching Hindu Faith

Comment #58592 by Steven Mading on July 25, 2007 at 9:56 am

In general I find it rather annoying when people attribute something embarassing in a religion to the "culture" and not the "religion", because they aren't that easy to separate. Religions evolve from the culture, and culture evolves from the relgion. They become intertwined so deeply that they really aren't two different things anymore. The religion is a mechanism for preserving the culture in people's minds, by making people think traditional beliefs and traditional viewpoints are ethically superior to new ones.

Religion and culture are not two different things.

139. Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Comment #58590 by Steven Mading on July 25, 2007 at 9:49 am

To use the rhetoric that automatically labels any sort of criticism of a particular idea as phobia, unconditionally, no matter what the criticism actually is, is a propaganda tool designed to stifle honesty. There can exist islamophobic criticisms, but that does not mean that all criticisms of islam fall into that category. Peter K is spreading dishonest propaganda.

140. Face to faith

Comment #58097 by Steven Mading on July 23, 2007 at 11:56 am

Bonzai said:

The repeated mantra that "religion is false" and therefore not worth studying is ignorant, shallow and tiresome. Yes, religion is factually false but so are the writings of Shakesphare. Would people dismiss literary and theatre scholarship just because "they are all stories"?

You only got one thing right - and that is that there can be value in studying religion without having to believe it's true to study it as a cultural phenomenon. That's true. What's false, and infuriatingly haughty about your claim is that you act like this means it is 'shallow' to criticise the truthfullness of religion. Where do you get off claiming that the kind of religious study you would prefer, (studying it as a cultural phenomenon) is the only type allowed, and that any type of analysis of its truth value is somehow closed-minded or bigoted?

The part you're deliberately ignoring is that we don't live in a world where massive numbers of people try to claim the plays of Shakespere were nonfiction. Furthermore they were not presented by the author with the intention that people who watch the plays believe they are true. Religion is NOT like that at all, and you damned well know it. It is not presented as a deliberate fiction. It is fiction, yes, but there is a massive difference bewteen fiction being presented openly and honestly as fiction, versus fiction being presented as if it was nonfiction. The first is honest, the second is not.

Stop pretending that we live in a world where people merely present religions as interesting enlightening fictional stories in same the way they present aesop's fables. The religious most emphatically are NOT doing that. And stop defending dishonesty and claiming that those who fight agaisnt it are being "shallow" to do so.

141. Phony Piety on the Far Right

Comment #57455 by Steven Mading on July 19, 2007 at 12:10 pm

The theme running through the articile that really annoys me is not that conservatives are calling liberals unreligious, but that the author of the article decided that doing so must necessarily constitute an insult of liberals. The author is operating from the premise that being less religious is automatically a bad horrible thing.

The conservatives are right, they ARE more closely following the religion than the liberals. But that's not a insult to liberals to say that. There'd be no need for stupid holier-than-thou arguments if people stopped assuming that more holy = more good.

142. The New New Atheism

Comment #56611 by Steven Mading on July 16, 2007 at 2:27 pm

Why do the same people who insist we are wrong to criticise the bible with a literal reading of it still think it's right to believe that jesus literally rose form the dead and was literally the son of a literal god? The answer is, of course, that they take it literally wherever it would be helpful to the propigation of the religion to do so, and they take it figuratively wherever it would be harmful to the propigation of the religion to take it literally. They do what is necessary to keep it going and work backward from that goal to decide which parts to take literally and which parts to dump. Those that don't do this don't propigate their ideas. Those that do do this get to pass their ideas on. The just-a-metaphor dodge is an evolved response to help the religion survive in the face of criticism.

143. The US map of faith

Comment #55807 by Steven Mading on July 12, 2007 at 12:27 pm

The map is very misleadingly labeled. The title claims it's a map showing religious adherants, but the fine print says its actually a measure of church congregations. Those two are not the same thing at all. If you are an adherant of a religion that does not automatically mean you are going to a church congregation - there are some religious people who don't believe their religion requires being in a church. Furthermore, if you used to attend a church in the past, but no longer are a believer and don't do so today, there is a good chance you are still counted as part of the congregation.

144. Is Christianity Good for the World? A discussion between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson

Comment #55534 by Steven Mading on July 11, 2007 at 1:10 pm

I read through this and was annoyed by Wilson's constant attempt to claim that Christianity represents an absolute morality system which makes it better than some relative one. If Christians really followed an absolute unchanging moral system, then why don't they stone people to death for wearing cotton/polyester blend clothing, as dictated in Leviticus? The answer is, of course, that their system has changed and adapted over time. Anyone who is aware of history and still claims Christian morality is unchanging is a liar.

The thing is, if Christians really did treat the morality espoused by their religion as an absolute that does not evolve, then they would all be following the moral norms of 2000 years ago, and clearly they are not doing so.

145. Won't anyone stand up for God?

Comment #55259 by Steven Mading on July 10, 2007 at 11:26 am

Isn't it strange that God and He still attract capitals?

Even fictional characters are still capitalized if they are proper nouns. i.e. "Robin Hood", or "James Bond". The distinction between "God" and "god" in English is whether you are using the name or the generic noun. i.e. "God" means "Yahweh", while "god" means "perhaps Yahweh, or perhaps Zeus, or perhaps Odin, or perhaps Apollo, etc..."

146. Brainwashed children plead to die as martyrs in Red Mosque siege

Comment #55234 by Steven Mading on July 10, 2007 at 10:01 am

I agree with Bonzai that the different religions have varying levels of badness. I do not agree with his implication that one must restrict ones self to only criticizing whichever happens to the the worst of the set and giving the rest a pass.

147. Inferior Design: Richard Dawkins reviews Behe's lastest book

Comment #53861 by Steven Mading on July 3, 2007 at 4:05 pm

[b]From Dawkins himself:[/b]
The biological definition of a species is that, under natural conditions, members of the same species freely interbreed with one another but not with members of other species.

Doesn't that definition completely break apart when dealing with things that reproduce asexually like amoeba? It would end up meaning each individual amoeba is a species unto itself, never breeding with any other individuals. As a biologist, how is this definitional problem dealth with? (And when countering the creationists who claim there's never been a witnessed example of speciation, getting a rock-solid definition of what speciation actually is first is an important step.)

148. In Defense of Witchcraft

Comment #52567 by Steven Mading on June 27, 2007 at 9:52 am

I didn't even notice there was such a thing as the "alternative content" comment page until people pointed it out here and I explicitly looked for the link on the page. I disagree with "mind_rebel" much more often than I agree, but I don't see how his comment *this time* was worthy of bumping off like that. *This* time it wasn't that bad at all. Granted, I'd still say he's wrong, but this time around his case was put forth politely so it could be politely argued against.

149. Supreme Court nixes suit over faith-based plan

Comment #51866 by Steven Mading on June 25, 2007 at 12:32 pm

One scary thing about this ruling is that to avoid having to address the actual issue they ruled that no citizen has standing to even try to sue the government over constitutional issues just for the sake of the constitutional issue itself, It must be attached to some other incident in which the citizen was wronged. So in other words, to avoid having to even hear the case about the office of faith-based initiatives, they destroyed a key means of enforcing the constitution in general, for ANY constitutional issue.

150. Create a back-up copy of your immune system

Comment #51340 by Steven Mading on June 22, 2007 at 12:04 pm

I wonder what would happen if they screwed up the records and later on infused you with some other customer's stored immune cells instead of your own. Would the imported immune cells attack good cells in your body because the imported immune cells have foreign "friend or foe" idenfication critiera?