Category Archives: Religion & Atheism

Respect my worldview!

Posted by on October 28, 2011 No comments | 3,302 views

You probably have heard that demand from various people? The idea for the post was triggered by this brief Twitter exchange on #skeptics:

Respect!The top reply there is mine, and this little exchange got me thinking. I have no idea who SnBEternally is and what their problem is. They did tell the whole of CSICON to go fuck themselves though, so there’s some animosity at least.

Anyway. So why this demand for respect? First let me clarify what I am referring to here. I do respect people’s freedom of religion, belief and speech. This is not what I’m targeting her. What I am talking about is why should I respect a given belief by default? There are numerous religious and alternative beliefs I simply cannot respect or accept because I’m a secular humanist. I don’t respect the acts of terror performed by fundamentalist Muslims. I don’t respect the hatred displayed by Christian fundamentalists towards gay people and other groups they target. I don’t respect the homoeopath who sell water and sugar for medicine to sick people. I don’t respect the anti-vaccine activist who indirectly cause great suffering for individuals and put the flock-immunity of dangerous diseases of the entire population at risk. I don’t respect the global warming denier who is too fond of their wasteful lifestyle to want to sacrifice it for the common good. I don’t respect the pope for sweeping child abuse under the rug and opposing prevention of the spreading of HIV in Africa. The list of assholes I don’t respect is long. Too long.

But let’s flip the coin and ask: Why do these people crave our respect? I don’t really give a shit if they don’t respect my world view. My world view doesn’t rely on that. It isn’t fixed. I evaluate my world view based on how well it fits with reality. Specifically I rely on scientific evidence when I make up my mind what to believe. If the evidence isn’t present I either make up my mind based on available data, or don’t form an opinion at all. I have no problem with not knowing the answer! This maybe is the key. The religious and the alternative thinking seem to demand an answer regardless of how well the answer applies to observable reality. Where did the universe come from? God made it. How does homoeopathic medicine work? Quantum mechanics does it. (As a physicist, the QM explanations for homoeopathy is complete gibberish to me). So why this craving for respect? The answer is simple I think: validation. Their world view is not self-consistent, self-evident or self-reliant, thus they need external affirmation. That is why they get so annoyed when we don’t provide this. This is also why it is a bad idea to pay too much lip service to these people. The so-called “accommodationism approach”.

Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism

Posted by on October 16, 2011 1 comment | 3,867 views

Great talk by Sadie Crabtree from JREF (James Randi’s Educational Foundation) from this year’s Amazing Meeting.

Sadie Crabtree – Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism from JREF on Vimeo.

Living Without Religion

Posted by on September 6, 2011 No comments | 1,590 views

Just had to repost this video from the Center for Inquiry. Awesome!

livingwithoutreligion.org

Fundies say the darndest things … Now also in Pink!

Posted by on August 17, 2011 No comments | 1,674 views

FundiesA friend of mine posted a link to this site on Facebook. It is a website called «Purity Ball», an overly pink and innocent looking site with a dark agenda:

The Christian Center is once again thrilled to host the Father-Daughter Purity Ball. It is our pleasure to hold high the banner of purity in the midst of a culture that destroys it.

We hope you will join us as we encourage young women to commit to moral purity and help them understand the beautiful and righteous life God offers them.

The Bible lays the responsibility of protecting daughters at the feet of their fathers. We desire to charge men to take up this mantle of responsibility!

God thinks the protection of a woman’s purity should be extravagant and so do we! We look forward to this formal evening and hope you will join us.

Firstly it speaks a horrific message of these people’s view of women as weak and in dire need of protection by noble god-fearing fathers and men. But then, these people have many good examples from the bible of good god-fearing men and how to treat daughters, just have a look at Genesis 19. That piece of disturbing scripture would certainly refute the last point of the quote as to what God thinks is OK to do with women.

Secondly it speaks of the warped view of sexuality you find in Christian fundamentalist puritanism. Sex is something sinful and impure that needs to be controlled. They claim for instance:

No program or event can overcome the power of sin in a person’s life. Only Christ and his work in the heart can do that. The Purity Ball can, however, be a catalyst that draws the hearts of fathers and daughters together, and hopefully, in turn point them to Christ.

Infusing guilt into young people who are simply being human beings as we are defined by our biological instincts is simply just cruel. Also, as in the case of oppression of women in Islam, these people seem to find it most convenient to target young women. Why not a «Mother-Son Purity Football Game»? or something similarly stereotypical (they may actually do that for all I know). With responsible education, young people in general are perfectly capable of managing their own sexuality. But Christians have always been obsessed by controlling it, even to such extreme lengths as the Catholics go to when they prohibit priests from getting married—we all know what sexually deprived priests far too often do—and their ban on responsible family planning by use of contraceptives.

To my knowledge there has been public funding of these sorts of programs in the US. That is a horrible thing to do to the nations youth and is not at all an effective sex-education.

At the pub with PZ Myers

Posted by on August 16, 2011 No comments | 1,053 views

PZ MyersThe Norwegian skeptics moved the monthly pub-gathering a week ahead this month so that we could invite PZ Myers to join us as he was already here in Oslo for the 2011 World Humanist Congress.

PZ Myers was kind enough to join us, even though he was suffering from jet-lag all weekend and both him and Greg Epstein joining us on the pub the night before after the end of the congress.

Although this was a public pub, we were lucky enough to have the backyard all to ourselves. Some 60+ skeptics and a few people from the congress showed up. PZ had a talk and a long Q&A session with questions about atheism and the state of religion in the US, and even a few questions about biology. Afterwards he stuck around for several hours talking to people. Am altogether very nice and pleasant evening, but then skeptics and atheists are very nice people.