151. Convention ends with Satan and immigrants

Comment #36227 by stephenray on April 30, 2007 at 2:40 pm

"At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."
"

Wha'fa?

pace Lewis Black: "It's a simple math problem. What quantity of what sort of drug would *you* need to be that deluded?"

He began to CRY? For goodness sake, what has America been doing to its children so they grow up this out of touch with reality?

152. Doctors Opposing Circumcision: An Appeal for Misha

Comment #32526 by stephenray on April 17, 2007 at 9:26 am

Urrrr...

...has anybody asked the kid whether *he* wants to join the jewish faith?

153. The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement

Comment #31112 by stephenray on April 11, 2007 at 3:27 am

Just been reading Coulter's biog on wikipedia.

You know what's astonishing? She appears to have been a top law student and highly regarded lawyer. And yet her political, social and scientific babblings show that she has no idea how to actually *think*. You know, identify the correct data and analyse it in order to produce useful information.

Did she go to a crap law school? No, that won't work, she clerked for a senior judge. Boy he must have wondered when he read her briefs, if she was as accurate and painstaking then as she is now. The *average* law students of my erstwhile acquaintance could out-think her, never mind the smart ones.

154. Praying for the Apocalypse

Comment #30822 by stephenray on April 10, 2007 at 2:19 am

What I like is the legend '"Left Behind: Eternal Forces" uses advanced graphics to depict a battle between good and evil' next to a picture which depicts the Statue of Liberty apparently within a few yards of downtown Manhattan...

Advanced but not very accurate, perhaps?

155. The Coulter Hoax: How Ann Coulter Exposed the Intelligent Design Movement

Comment #30819 by stephenray on April 10, 2007 at 1:57 am

Responding to Comment #30798 by crazy4blues:

Johnny Winter is a recovering albino?!!

That's great. He'll save a fortune in sunglasses...

156. Even non-believers must recognise the moral necessity of Christianity

Comment #30602 by stephenray on April 9, 2007 at 2:02 am

Oh, and atheist violence to believers.

Here's the thing. Taking, e.g., Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, there's no doubt that some of those who tried to espouse a faith were kidnapped or arrested, tortured, imprisoned, killed, sent into lifelong and misery-filled exile.

This, however, was not a function of what they believed, nor a function of what their oppressors did not believe. (At least, not at the institutional level.)

It was a consequence of the perceived need of the state to stamp out subversion, of which religious subversion was merely one variety. You can demonstrate this by pointing to the fact that many people who were victimised were not religious (or not more so than their fellow citizens) and they were 'oppressed' on other grounds - Solzhenitsyn, for example, in Russia and teachers in Mao's cultural revolution.

Religious pogroms, on the other hand, persecute their victims precisely because of their beliefs - vide what happened to the Cathars in Southern France.

Therefore the comparison between the murderous violence of the religious and the atheistic is (usually deliberately) misleading.

"The terror of death will always drive our species to search for an alternative."
...and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is pretty much game over and why it is difficult to see religion ever dying out.

157. Even non-believers must recognise the moral necessity of Christianity

Comment #30600 by stephenray on April 9, 2007 at 1:50 am

"Prime Minister Salisbury said that anyone who expected the Christian ethic to survive Christian theology by more than two or three generations was deluded. He has yet to be refuted."

It's just a statement of opinion, I refute it thus - by saying 'He was wrong'.

What was it, 140 years ago? Given the times and the level of knowledge, it was a bit like a goldfish giving his opinion on the likelihood that the large shapes moving around outside its bowl were living organisms.

158. Dawkins says religion is 'like sucking a dummy'

Comment #28436 by stephenray on March 29, 2007 at 7:31 am

One doesn't debate 'Are we better off without god?', one debates the motion '...we are better off without god.'

If the article had been properly written it would have been possible to understand who voted which way, in the figures quoted at the end of the article. n votes in favour of 'Are we better off without god?' is an unresolvable conundrum.

159. Atheist banned from committee on religious education

Comment #27510 by stephenray on March 25, 2007 at 4:44 am

I dunno.

If we want to keep religion out of the science classroom, isn't this the other side of the coin?

I think we would all accept that atheism isn't a religion, so why should the religious let us in the RI classroom?

We have to challenge the unquestioning acceptance of the unchallenged position of religion in education, but attempts such as this may make a rod for our own backs...

160. What We Need More Of Is Science

Comment #26126 by stephenray on March 17, 2007 at 5:08 am

Thanks to Philip1978 for the YouTube link.

It was fascinating stuff. They really need a Goebbels though; as propogandists (nb the origin of the word propoganda makes it especially appropriate!) they need to learn a lot.

I loved the 'dumbest professor the world has ever seen' (my label) in episode 10, some guy who was a *Professor of Biology* in Tulane University but was floored by a student who asked him how 'simple probability' could account for development and evolution of proteins. Duh. When he works out the probability, he decides it must prove god exists. The real question is how somebody that headache-inducingly thick got to be a professor in the first place.

I also liked - in episode 11 - where the woman presenter completely inverted the principle of 'summary judgment'. I think even in the US the situation she referred to is called 'a plea of no case to answer', summary judgment is certainly different in England.
'No case to answer' only happens as follows: after the prosecution/plaintiff has presented its case **the defence** can say "Well, they simply haven't set out a case that needs answering, so can we all go home now?" What NEVER happens is that the prosecution/plaintiff is given the opportunity to say "Our evidence is overwhelming and the other side could not possibly have any answer, so let's skip the defence and rush to judgment."

Such a lot of effort and resources thrown in to fight a rearguard action against science. I don't know whether to be alarmed or saddened.

161. A 'Sad First' in the History of the Congress

Comment #25770 by stephenray on March 15, 2007 at 4:49 am

Unfortunately, two words spring to my mind and they are not comforting.

'McCarthy' and 'HUAC' are the words. "Witch-hunts" don't get called what they do by accident.

162. Evangelicals battle over agenda, environment

Comment #25544 by stephenray on March 14, 2007 at 3:47 am

Does anyone know of any scriptural authority for the assertion that an 'unborn child' has a 'right to life'?

'Unborn child' is a weird phrase, to my mind. Nobody looks at a pile of metal and plastic and calls it an 'unmanufactured car'. It is the act of birth that creates an animal.

How did Catholicism come to decide that the soul enters at the moment of conception? And why do fundamentalist protestants agree with catholicism on that and almost no other issue?

163. In Lice, Clues to Human Origin and Attire

Comment #25316 by stephenray on March 12, 2007 at 3:19 am

"...which provides free health care to gorillas in the wild..."

That's good thinking. Because if they were to wait for the gorillas to buy health insurance, it could take forever...

164. Out There

Comment #25315 by stephenray on March 12, 2007 at 3:17 am

IANAS (I am not a scientist, though IAAL - I am a lawyer) *but*...

...if dark matter and dark energy are so - um - alien that they don't react with the universe (that is, the relativity/quantum universe), why on earth should scientists believe that - if the LHC creates any - they will ever find out about it? It could be that popping baloons creates dark matter - how would we know?

(NB - deliberately silly analogy: it's a rhetorical device.)

165. Academy denies claims from job candidate

Comment #25088 by stephenray on March 10, 2007 at 4:02 am

Will somebody please suggest a way to stop these ignorant pillocks writing for the media these days from using the word refute (= 'prove wrong') when they mean 'reject'.

166. An apology to Peter Kay

Comment #25087 by stephenray on March 10, 2007 at 3:57 am

To do list:

Keep an eye out for Jeevan Vasagar's byline because it would seem that he - despite writing for the Guardian - is one of the legions of journos who don't give a flying f-spaghetti monster about accuracy.

Note the 'Peter Kay was unavailable for comment' bit. So, Jeevan - what did Richard Dawkins say when you phoned to put your planned story to him?

167. Long live satire

Comment #24599 by stephenray on March 7, 2007 at 2:14 pm

"freedom of expression does not constitute a freedom to offend"

Sorry, chum, but that is EXACTLY what freedom of expression constitutes. Otherwise, it would not be worth anything.

168. Why there are almost no genuine atheists

Comment #24596 by stephenray on March 7, 2007 at 2:11 pm

"Naturally it's considered quite rude to press people on such matters..."

Why 'naturally'? It seems to me perfectly ordinary to make people explain why the believe in stupid ideas.

"After all, the human race has existed for an eye-blink of cosmological time and will certainly cease to exist in another eye-blink or two.

The only response a genuine atheist would have to that fact is, so what? Which helps explain why there are almost no genuine atheists."

It's like a duck-shoot, only there are so many of the darn things that you spend so much time wondering which to shoot first you end up paralysed.

I'll content myself with writing that I utterly reject the idea that one cannot desire the longevity of the human race and be a 'genuine atheist'. Sexual reproduction makes us strongly desire the perpetuation of our genes, why shouldn't it be extrapolated to desiring the perpetuation of the very-closely-related genes that the rest of homo sapiens sapiens possess?

169. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23662 by stephenray on March 2, 2007 at 1:41 am

Good grief.

I stopped at the point where the writer failed utterly to accurately summarise Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747 analogy.

It's a bit rich accusing another writer of 'sub-sophomoric philosophy' whilst being unable to precis such a simple precept.

170. God, sex, drugs and politics

Comment #22617 by stephenray on February 20, 2007 at 12:25 am

It may sound horribly arrogant, but these people have never been taught (or have deliberately forgotten) how to *think clearly*. How else can you explain such lapses in judgment? The possibility that someone who is utterly 'innocent' (from this idiot Scarborough's point of view, I mean) being prevented by this drug from dying unpleasantly of cancer is clearly not something that has occurred to his labouring intellect.

But then, compared to an eternity of joyful communion with the white-haired old geezer, what's a few painful and miserable prolonged deaths by cancer?

171. Battle for Europe's secular values

Comment #22615 by stephenray on February 20, 2007 at 3:17 am

This bizarro dawkins is a hoot, ain't he? No wonder woo-woos are having such problem with atheism when they have such difficulty thinking straight. I have this picture of him having to lie down after his posts due to the strain of thinking at this level.

I have two problems with Merkel's proposed declaration. First, the statement that she makes shows that she has absolutely no grasp of history. In one sentence she takes your breath away with her total ignorance of the contributions of both Islam and especially Judaism to the development of Europe.

Second, I'd rather have a state (superstate?) religion with a modest amount of religious interference with state business (like, say, the UK) than a declared secularism with an unbelievable amount of religious interference with state business (like the USA). But best of all I'd like a secular state with no religious interference with state business.

172. Believing Scripture but Playing by Science's Rules

Comment #22144 by stephenray on February 13, 2007 at 3:45 am

Refuse to award a qualification to students who simply say what the examiner wants to hear?

Not realistic. We are going to have to live with the fact that people are bamboozled by 'qualifications' and are often too lazy to apply their own mind to the question of whether what someone says is rational or not.

Take the long view - anybody seriously believe that the literalist biblical view of biodiversity will triumph over evolution by natural selection in the long run?

173. Interview with Alister McGrath, author of 'The Dawkins Delusion?'

Comment #20907 by stephenray on February 7, 2007 at 2:18 am

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that each believer defines faith rather narrowly as "that which I, or at most my immediate circle, believe in", seemingly oblivious of how things appear to outside observers.
This is why McGrath and others have no difficulty accusing RD and other atheists of 'sweeping generalisations', because their instant response is 'O, but *my* faith is nothing like that!'
McGrath's rather bizarre assertion that atheism is 'on the rocks' is what makes me do a double-take. But then, it's probably not surprising that as a believer he is accustomed to the wish being father to the thought...

174. Radical cleric sparks fury in Australia

Comment #18201 by stephenray on January 19, 2007 at 1:50 am

If only someone could persuade these mullahs to take their own advice. They might cause a lot of damage as suicide bombers but once they're all dead - phew! blessed relief for everyone.

175. Intelligent design is a science, not a faith

Comment #17013 by stephenray on January 10, 2007 at 4:43 am

The whole of ID is posited on what RD labelled "The Argument from Personal Incredulity" in The Blind Watchmaker.

"Gee, I've thought about this for at least several hours now and *I* just can't figger out how that could possibly have evolved. Ergo it must have been designed. As for how the Designer might have been designed - er - I'll think about that later. Much later."