religion

The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it. The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred. Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation. Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word's major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts. Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because...

We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don't we let people choose their own religion when they grow up? Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children. The second part of Dawkin's documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night - thankfully torrent files are already available. This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion - that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse. In the UK: "The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government's proposed...

Channel 4 - The Root of All Evil

Evolution fight puts suburb in spotlight Evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy's fascination with dinosaurs. "He was really into 'Jurassic Park'", his mother recalled. The trouble was, "we kept reading over and over that 'millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth", Marjorie Rogers continued. "And that's where I said, 'Hmm -- wait a second". Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that the Earth is several thousand years old.

I find it hard to find decent videos on the open web, so have been drilling through sites like Youtube and Google Video with a view to providing a wists list of good stuff to stream. Youtube is 99.9% crap and 0.1% memes that have been around for years, or commercials. Google Video is also mostly crap snippets, but I did manage to find some good programming - stuff on Evolution, and Science and interviews with good people like John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker. After searching for practically every architecture, design and science name I know, I kept getting the same content so realized that there is hardly anything in Google video longer than 3 minutes. When I actually looked at the science stuff, something strange became obvious - a large percentage of it was funded by Intelligent Design groups or religious organizations. If people are frightened about young...

Sam Harris' Atheist Manifesto. Most of what he says is reasonable, however, the editor suggests that Harris argues that religious toleration is a menace - this is not a defensible argument since it empirically leads to persecution. Its true that there is not a single ideology that is truly tolerant of other ideologies, therefore an anti-ideology like atheism can be more tolerant by making no absolute claims of its own but adaptable guidelines based upon evidence and reason. One should not be intolerant of belief itself but unreasonable acts based upon it. However, since ideological dogma, of which religious dogma is a subset, is not based upon reason - its acts are very often unreasonable and intolerant. A consistent maxim for an atheist would be to be tolerant of religious faith, but intolerant of intolerance itself. This is not a nihilist view, but a defense of moral relativism. Its also...

In Worldnet Daily's 'lets rape unfaithful women' OpEd is the following sentence: "There may be a genuine moral argument against rape to be made outside of the Judeo-Christian ethic, but I have yet to hear it." - how very deaf you must be. I've noticed increasing reference to the so called 'Judeo-Christian' tradition. This lumping of Judaism with Christianity together with the claims of Millennium Christian radicals is an insult that could possibly lead to injury, since historical precedent suggests that jews will eventually get the blame. Given that there are three religious sects that worship the same deity and find common ancestry in Abraham: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, reference to the Judeo-Islamo-Christian, or, more elegantly, 'Abrahamic', tradition makes some sense. The permutation: 'Judeo-Christian tradition' stems, obviously, from the fact that Christianity supersizes the Torah into its own edition, whereas Islam rewrites it. But what of the other alternatives: Given...

"if a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic" I'll paraphrase this nonsense because the writing is so bad: 'A woman who considers, for a second, the possibility of sex outside of marriage is no better than a man who actually rapes her.' This is what some people who call themselves Christians actually believe. As an aside, the guy who wrote the article describes himself as a Christian Libertarian (i.e. someone who both rejects and blindly worships authority). Here are some...

"No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future." "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have." I believe - that atheists like Jillette tend to be nicer people because they don't have to pretend to be nicer. NPR : There is No God

The myth: "religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society." The reality:

"It is a powerful, highly addictive drug openly peddled on street corners and in purpose-made buildings across the country. Suicide bombers get high on it and governments encourage its use. It can be hallucinogenic, destroys lives and, in its strongest doses, start wars." Independent Online Edition >Is Gerin Oil the root of all evil?

Christian Exodus is a weird new bunch of religious extremists whose idea is to turn South Carolina into something that sounds like Wahabist Saudi Arabia. The leader of the cult has a blog "ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government... The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina." Christian Exodus :: Come Out of Her, My People