I am reposting this in response to the terror attacks in France last night, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred people. As ever, the internet is awash with right-wing shouts to “kill all Muslims” and refugees, to the left-wing shouts that it is the Imperial West to blame and not Islam or Muslims. Neither of these positions are correct. It is obviously thoroughly complex, indeed involving international politics. However, to deny the Qu’ran, Muhammad and the Hadith causal responsibility in these atrocities is to deny the self-determination of those very terrorists who claim that they are doing these actions in the name of Islam and their god.
Continuing from my last post, I will take a look at some of the historical claims of the Nativity of Jesus from the Bible and see how Pope Benedict XVI defends them in his most recent book.
First, let’s make a note of an argument that His Holiness seems to use several times in defending the historicity of the stories from modern critics. Many scholars will point to the theological reasons as to why the author of a given Gospel would tell such a story, which in turn gives us reason to suspect that the tale make not be historically authentic. Benedict, on the other hand, says that that is not sufficient to consider the tradition inauthentic. Perhaps not, but it should make us suspicious. Besides, this is not the only reason scholars doubt things such as the birth in Bethlehem or the miraculous conception of Mary. There are other things to consider.
Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the “intellectual elite” considered themselves atheists than the national average.
A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.
There has been a fair bit of press about the newest publication from the current head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger, better known now as Pope Benedict XVI (don’t you just hate sequels?). There was even a humorous take on some of the aspects of the new book from the colossus of comedy Stephen Colbert.
Jonathan recently (and by recently I mean a while ago and I’m just now getting to it) asked me to comment on an episode by Reasonable Doubts. The subject was whether we are born depraved. I’ve touched on this in a past post where I concluded that consistency requires adherents of so-called total depravity to adopt the belief that babies that die are eternally damned; and this was solid ground for either not parenting as an evangelical Christian or renouncing the doctrine with all of its concomitants.
Now, granted, this is the sort of thing one would expect at an American University with a Christian bias. But on our fair and level-headed isle? Seriously? Come on guys! Sort it out Bristol! From HuffPo:
Wow. There have been lots on the Scouts recently as many SIN bloggers boycotted them this weekend for various reasons.…
I am writing this piece in response to a recent exchange that has come to involve a growing number of people in some particular corners of the blogosphere. Most of you who will be reading this will not need me to go into great detail as you will probably have already read the exchanges. This is how, effectively, the process took place.
So I gave my first public talk on my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination yesterday. It was a bit…
Rebecca Watson, a speaker at skeptical conference and events, and someone who has courted controversy before (I think she was involved in the Elevatorgate issue, though I know almost nothing about it since it holds little interest to me)., has taken it upon herself at the recent Skepticon conference to diss Evolutionary Psychology (EP). I use the term diss, because that’s about the sum of it. There seemed to be no real desire to interact with the required academia or methodology involved in critiquing scientific findings. This is sad coming from the source and the event that it did.
Sorry, /i know I have posted a lot of news articles recently, but this one from the British Humanist Association has made…
This is one of my favourite essays on the subject of morality and God. It is by P. Wesley Edwards and can be found variously online, such as here. JohnM was espousing the idea in his comments here that under an atheistic worldview, there is no moral foundation. Moreover, as the argument goes, only God can provide a sound underpinning for morality. In this essay, Edwards shows how this tack is circular and thus incoherent. As ever, let me know what you think.
Check this article out from The Washington Post. What annoys me is that even if you took this statement as a weak generalisation, it is still wholly wrong. I would hazard a guess that the overwhelming proportion of terrorists in the world are religious:
This is a hilarious video. I thought Bill O’Reilly was a tool before this. Now I think he is a total tool. With a cherry on top.
Whilst some countries are moving back to the dark ages with INTRODUCING blasphemy laws (an international one or one in…
In this video I set out that intrinsic moral duties are incoherent. That is to say oughts are dependent on…
The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth.
Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on Earth could have gotten its start, even before the first genes or living cells came to be. Despite differences between various proposed scenarios, one theme they all have in common is a network of molecules that have the ability to work together to jumpstart and speed up their own replication — two necessary ingredients for life. However, many researchers find it hard to imagine how such a molecular network could have formed spontaneously — with no precursors — from the chemical environment of early Earth.
We are less than one month away from the winter solstice when the days get shortest and the sun is slowest in the sky. Doom, I say. DOOM. Well, not from the solstice; civilization has had thousands of those, yet no catastrophes connected to them.
But we are lead to think there is one this time because of beliefs about the Maya calendar. This is the whole 2012 apocalypse belief, and it’s one that isn’t well-founded in either archaeology or science. To show the problems with the latter, let’s look at all the proposals I can find about how the world will be destroyed on December 21, 2012.
In Kentucky, a homeland security law requires the state’s citizens to acknowledge the security provided by the Almighty God–or risk 12 months in prison.
The law and its sponsor, state representative Tom Riner, have been the subject of controversy since the law first surfaced in 2006, yet the Kentucky state Supreme Court has refused to review its constitutionality, despite clearly violating the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
This really is a fascinating article. Properly. Could it be that we are starting to unravel the neural basis…
Jonathan recently posted some excerpts from young earth creationist teaching materials. Have a look at this example:
Virtually every single sentence on this page is misleading or a straight out lie. But one passage that particularly stuck out to me was this one: