Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Teach The Controversy

Monday, January 25th, 2010

I believe I would happily wear any of the Teach The Controversy shirts at WearScience, but for obvious reasons, I would especially like this one:

More on Youtube, Russell, whackjobs

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Following up on that earlier Russell finding on Youtube, I see that there’s a veritable treasure trove of Russell stuff on there. For instance, I quite like the little TVO presentation on the Three Passions Of Bertrand Russell, or getting to listen to Russell debate the existence of God with a Jesuit philosophy scholar1, or [...]

Religion, Geography, Scenery

Friday, December 25th, 2009

I’ve spent some time thinking about religion today–primarily as part of working on my argument that Christmas as practiced in North America is essentially a secular holiday1, and thus something I can celebrate non-hypocritcally.
So I was already primed to appreciate the new map at Lapham’s Quaterly (for the religion issue, which I hope will arrive [...]

That’s a new one on me

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

“Thou hadst a whore’s forehead”.
I have to admit I haven’t heard that one before.
That’s part of a Bible quote that crazy old Fred Phelps pulled out this week as part of his ever-expanding GOD HATES X empire. This week X has been expanded to include Lady Gaga.
I’m sure she’s proud to be in company with [...]

Utterly Thought-Stoppingly Awesome.

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Watch this. Just watch it.

A Reflection On Pleasant Punk Blasphemy

Monday, September 21st, 2009

As part of the process of getting ready for our impending move, I’ve been engaged in a process of ripping all my audio CDs that hadn’t previously been ripped. This keeps leading to my having that “Oh, I haven’t though about you in a while” experience.
I had that recently with Crass.

Since I was single-digits old [...]

Cain’s wife: a game the whole family can play

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

As a child–I think around 8 or so–I once got booted out of Sunday school for “disrupting the class” with a series of “outspoken incidents”. What actually happened, at least as I remember it now, was that I was politely but firmly asking the teacher a number of questions she found inconvenient about the material [...]

Serious Ireland WTF?

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Like many North Americans of Irish descent I quite often like to play up that aspect of my heritage–although in my case it runs more to quoting Yeats, listening to songs about killing the English1, and drinking Guinness than to wearing KISS ME I’M IRISH shirts or drinking blechh green beers.
From time to time though, [...]

Saturday Night Shotgun Post

Sunday, July 5th, 2009

While I’m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let’s do the tab closing dance:

Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian [...]

Marco Polo, Nativity, Divine Fire, and blindspots in the mind

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

So I spent some time today–when I probably should have been doing something else–reading some of the Travels Of Marco Polo. Oddly, I don’t have a print copy of this in my library–an omission I shall have to correct at some point–but that wasn’t a problem since Project Gutenberg has a decent translation.
I wasn’t reading [...]

A Monday Night Gallimaufry

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Let’s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I’ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office:

I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who [...]

A What-Day-Is-It-Anyway Miscellany

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

I have now been on vacation long enough that I don’t remember what day it is. I think “if it’s Wednesday it must be San Francisco” logic may apply.
With that in mind, here’s a list of a few things that caught my eye during my little bits of hotel-room surfing after the child goes to [...]

Peaks of rage

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

You know, if I posted every time Harper’s government took and action, or announced a policy direction, that I disagreed with or found repugnant, this blog would be one long bile-laden rant. So I mostly take the “ignore them and hope they go away” strategy, coupled with the occasional rant when something particularly ludicrous or [...]

The appropriate response to their garbage

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I tip my hat to the students of the University of Chicago, who nicely illustrate the appropriate response to the Westboro Baptist Church: mockery.
They were accompanied down the street by a group of students mocking the WBC’s message. The students held a sign reading “Figs Doom Nations” and planted themselves across the street from the [...]

Minor Meditations On Religion and Neurobiology

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

There’s lots to think about in the write up on recent studies into the relation between neural wiring and the concept religion at the New Scientist.
A really simplified version would be that the brain has a couple of built in biases that make the concept of religion arise almost naturally. One is that we have [...]