1. Workers' Religious Freedom vs. Patients' Rights

Comment #222517 by contrarian on July 31, 2008 at 1:46 pm

Simple...

Religious convictions do not, in any way reasonably fathomable, trump ACTUAL people's health. As a medical care professional, you either accept this or you do not... and choose your profession accordingly.

While I think a committee of peers works quite well already, this being passed will bring all kinds of "in the closet" nutjobs out of the closet, just waiting to prove how religious they are.

This whole thing just yells, "ok, religious nutjobs, it's now okay to disregard human wellbeing once more... because a piece of paper, sufficiently blotted with religious language, says so"

FUCK

2. Origin of the Novel Species Noodleous doubleous: Evidence for Intelligent Design

Comment #205655 by contrarian on July 7, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Shall we now eat pasta and drink tomato sauce as the body and blood of the Pasta Lord?

I'm not pagan... no, it just SOUNDS like I am.

3. The Boundaries of Belief

Comment #205440 by contrarian on July 7, 2008 at 9:19 am

I'm wondering why what we say we believe has anything to do with the nature of our beliefs. Many times I have read and heard prominent atheists write or say quite certainly that our sense apparatuses--of sight, touch, smell, sound and taste--are literally our limits of experience. Richard Dawkins writes in the God Delusion that we only sense a very small amount of evolutionary time (the scraping off of your fingernail example) and can only experience light in certain wavelengths. And these facts are of some consequence, as far as our perception is concerned. We are aware of the fact that we are stuck in the third dimension, only see or feel certain wavelengths of energy and so on. This means, in the most matter-of-fact way possible, that we literally (not metaphorically or any such ridiculous sense) cannot experience anything outsider those sense apparatuses, and the very founding claim of all faiths that there are "special people" with "special gifts" to communicate with "divinity" is just not the way things are. If they did have those powers, they were not human. But, for the Christian faith especially the faith relies on the claim that these "special people," like Jesus and Moses, were actually normal people--just normal people who were "blessed" or allowed" to hear God. Now, you can't deny that the bible stands or falls on these claims. And faith in general falls at every utterance by some brainwashed representative of that a given faith. It's just that Islam is doing the best job of defaming itself. Christianity in America has itself tied into the economic and cultural institutions of this country just like other third-world countries. What do we think is missing in the recipe for America to turn extremist? Is it really that hard to imagine? That if enough people start to believe a lie, it's not a matter of its validity or its coherence, by simple virtue of it being rehearsed over and over again is survives. I like to think of superstitious belief, in this case, as a meme.

4. The Boundaries of Belief

Comment #205161 by contrarian on July 6, 2008 at 5:28 pm

I am quite convinced that there are no gods. The analogy of a child believing in Santa Claus says enough, and needs no elaboration. As Hitchens says over and over again in public forums, our supernatural hankerings are merely remnants of our infantile evolutionary stages, where gods actually explained why the sea was violent and the wind had a voice. BUT WE KNOW BETTER NOW! And that is the point. If I may say so myself, if these fMRI experiments are being done solely or even mostly for the simple esteem reached by being correct about the nature of belief, then it's a waste of good time. The answer is not that these people--most of them--believe these things (nor even, if claimed, actually believe that they have any communicable evidence for these things); the issue that plaques us is that they have found some way to justify a lie by setting it beside their benefits. It's a matter of selfishness. And what we are really worrying about is how that basic selfishness--being raised with it, being brainwashed and scared into it--has psychological ramifications, which CAN be manifested and ARE manifested when tribalism rears its ugly head. This is why theologians of great eminence worry themselves in debates and such with blaiming atheism for the atrocities of the 20th century--Stalin, etc.--because they desparately need to detract from the fact that they represent--albeit a relatively calm portion--a branch off the larger tree of superstitious belief, which they know is how Hitler and Stalin gathered their support. You get someone crazy and sociopathic enough to convince a large enough religious population that their holy texts justify killing, and that population (proven over and again throughout history) is more than happy to pick up a rifle and prove to themselves and their tribe that they are the real deal.

5. The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science

Comment #201438 by contrarian on June 29, 2008 at 4:35 pm

I love it when Dawkins occasionally goes "consciousness raising" crazy... nice ones in this recording