Although much of the talk about the new Bush Supreme nominee John G. Roberts is (perhaps rightly) about abortion (Battle Over Nominee May Center on Abortion), folks here might be interested to note that this is a guy with a pretty awful separation of church and state record, including having argued (and lost) a case before the Supremes in which he defended allowing religious language in public high school graduations.

There are some decent links to fairly straightforward factual stuff about Roberts at the Supreme Court Nomination Blog.

An recent interesting (and, at times, a little weird) article about atheists: A Time of Doubt for Atheists.

Convicted Christian terrorist and serial murder Eric Rudolph was sentenced to life today, as expected (Rudolph Victims Tell of Pain at Sentencing). Of course, as I’ve mentioned before (Christian terrorist Rudolph enters guilty plea), almost nobody is willing to call him a Christian terrorist. Because, you know, Christians aren’t really terrorists, but more like soldiers of conscience — right?

loan midwest

[citation needed] Simultaneously, airlines may offer phone services to their travelling passengers either as full voice and data services, or initially only as SMS text messaging and similar services.

Cardiac Patients in New Study Fared No Better With Spiritual Intercession

Praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering, according to a large, carefully designed study that casts doubt on the widely held belief that being prayed for can help a person heal.

The study of more than 700 heart patients, one of the most ambitious attempts to test the medicinal power of prayer, showed that those who had people praying for them from a distance, and without their knowledge, were no less likely to suffer a major complication, end up back in the hospital or die.

Just gotta love this part:

While skeptics of prayer welcomed the results, other researchers questioned the findings, and proponents of prayer maintained that God’s influence lies beyond the reach of scientific validation.

Yeah, how DARE you try to SCIENTIFICALLY show that prayer improves the MEDICAL condition of a CARDIAC PATIENT in — of all places — a HOSPITAL!

That was the headline of the San Francisco Chronicle today. Because the London suicide bombers played cricket and ran fish and chips shops. That made them ordinary. Of course, any freak who walks onto a crowded train with a rucksack full of explosives, and blows himself and those around him to smithereens, is anything but ordinary. Perhaps there is more going on here? A reasonable mind might say: “Probably.” Good, that’s a half-assed start.

Here is an article where, for once, some actual “soul”-searching is going on about the so-called “War on Terror” (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

I have a British co-worker who thinks that part of the problem also is that radical, intolerant belief systems — like the misogynistic, theocratic sharia — are not questioned in Europe’s extremely PC culture. Post WW II Europe: don’t send your military into other countries, even for humanitarian reasons, and don’t ever speak up against anyone’s beliefs. Violating both of these doctrines reminds people of Nazism over there.

The key questions are just now being raised after all this time: a) gee, maybe they don’t suicide bomb us because they “hate our freedom” — maybe, since these guys themselves were totally free and raised in freedom, it is about our foreign policy itself, and b) on the flip side, should we allow sharia and other such insanely intolerant culture to thrive and be taught in mosque after mosque within our otherwise tolerant, secular society?

The Brits are beginning to have the real conversation… Which the French, by the way, the world’s current Thinkers (according to my Brit co-worker), began a while ago.

When will we start? After Oprah brings it up?

Same-sex foes risk charges, Cardinal fears

OTTAWA — Canada’s top Roman Catholic cardinal says vocal opponents of same-sex marriage will risk criminal charges if the institution is legally extended to include gay and lesbian couples.

“Already, the appeal to conscience in any matter pertaining to homosexuality risks being dismissed as ‘homophobia,’ ” Cardinal Marc Ouellet told a Senate committee hearing arguments for and against Bill C-38, the same-sex marriage law.

“These attempts to intimidate persons who do not share the state’s vision of marriage may well multiply after the adoption of Bill C-38. Once the state imposes a new standard affirming that homosexual sexual behaviour is a social good, those who oppose it for religious motives or motives of conscience will be considered as bigots, anti-gay and homophobes, and then risk prosecution.”

This whole “matter of conscience” phrasing is the problem: “I can’t give out birth control, because it violates my conscience,” “I think that gays are harmful to society and shouldn’t be allowed to marry, because it violates my conscience.” One should simply ask: Do you actually have a good reason for thinking this, outside of the religious views you hold and were indoctrinated with since you were wearing diapers? No? You just feel that two guys kissing in public is “just icky and wrong” because of God? Fine. But if you fear that people will call you “homophobic,” it’s because — duh — you are homophobic.

“There’s a type of climate that exists where we no longer feel we can express our opinion,” he told reporters after his presentation to the Senate committee.

“We realize if we say certain things we may get accused of homophobia or of hatred, bigotry. . . . Even our priests sometimes do not feel free even to preach on homosexuality on the morality — sexual morality — because they are accused of homophobia and they are threatened for prosecution,” he said.

Now, I’ll admit that I don’t know what to say about the legal aspects of prosecution when it comes to hate speech. Turning to a latino woman at a bus stop and for no reason saying to her, “You Fucking Spic Whore” might be harmful in the legal sense of “harm” or it might not, and I’ll admit that things can get murky in specific contexts. (Such is life.) But to think that it’s not hate speech in the first place is just false. It’s hate speech, pure and simple. When you talk about the lifestyles of gays as being wrong like you would other things that qualify as bigotry (i.e., interracial relationships), then it’s bigotry, so just call it that. Call it what it is, and leave it at that. But xians can’t do that, for some reason.

“This is an insane atmosphere in our country and our communities and it is not good for religious freedom.”

And there ya go. Enough said.

On a pretty regular basis, the site gets email of various sorts. One of the most common types is nicely represented by this one from “Jacob”. I thought I’d take a minute to answer this one publicly:

I am not an atheist. As far as I can discern, one would have to be omniscient to *know* that there isn’t a God. Agnostic is as philosophically honest as a doubter can get.

I believe in God, I am a follower of Jesus Christ, but I abhor – with you – the idea of a Theocratic state. Christianity, in and of itself, does NOT fuse with politics, and throughout history the mixture of the two has caused great harm. Inject political motivation and you’re no longer dealing with Christianity. So we agree on something.

My question for you is this: What is a “vocal” atheist’s motivation? What reason does an atheist have to be, in a sense, *evangelical*? I assure you, I am not trying to be facetious; I honestly don’t understand it. I recognize that this country is free and that you have the right to live as you please. There is no command in the Bible that encourages the force-feeding of it’s contents to non-believers, either. Why, then, is there hostility towards a peace-driven ideology? Is your stance against the idea of the political “religious right” or of the religion itself? If the religion itself, what do you have to gain as an atheist by discrediting it?

First, as for whether “one would have to be omniscient to *know* that there isn’t a God”: If you incorrectly take “know x” to mean “have completely infallible proof that x”, then I wouldn’t count as “knowing” there’s no god — or “knowing” there are 50 states in the USA, “knowing” I have two hands, and so on. But given the (correct) sense of “know” in which I do count as knowing such things, and which then obviously doesn’t require omniscience, I can perfectly well consistently claim knowledge of the non-existence of the Easter Bunny, tree nymphs, and the God of Abraham.

Second: You say you “honestly don’t understand” the “vocal” atheist’s motivations. Frankly, I think you’re either being very disingenuous, or you haven’t tried. After all, we agree that “throughout history the mixture of the two [Christianity and the political] has caused great harm; as someone who takes the religious view to be false, why wouldn’t I vocally oppose it as one path toward avoiding that harm?

But in addition to all the evil purposes religion in general (and Christianity in particular) have been and continue to be put to in the political realm (e.g., justifying wars and genocide, constraining freedoms that conflict with “Christian morality”, etc.), there are also good reasons for vocal opposition that aren’t about political misuse. Here are two obvious ones:

(a) Because mainstream Christianity claims that for my religious views (and even if I’m a nice, decent, generous, fair, and compassionate person for my entire life), I will and should be condemned to eternal suffering and damnation. Even if I thought that no Christian would ever actually hold the fact that I deserve eternal torture for my religious views against me (which I don’t), it’s still about as far from a loving or even decent and respectful attitude toward me and those like me as I can imagine. If someone advocates a world view that calls for and justifies the (eternal) torture of anyone who fails to accept a particular set of (false) supernatural metaphysical views, then that view should be loudly opposed by people of decency.

(b) Because it’s false; and I think that the pursuit of truth and the encouragement of others in its pursuit is an excellent part of true human flourishing.

So come on, you believers might not agree with us; but surely it’s just not hard to see how it is that if you were an atheist, you might well think that you should be vocal about (what we take to be) the foolishness, dangerousness, and viciousness of the religious beliefs you reject.

Anyway, to quote Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”