Obama Rama

this story popped up on "the raw story"

"Obama defends his stance on Christian right 'hijacking faith'"

Highlights:

"When you have pastors and television pundits who appear to explicitly coordinate with one political party; when you're implying that your fellow Americans are traitors, terrorist sympathizers or akin to the devil himself; then I think you're attempting to hijack the faith of those who follow you for your own personal or political ends," the freshman Illinois Senator said at The Brody File.

"[S]omewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together...Faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked," the New York Times reported.

He went on, "Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of non-believers."

i would at least concede that obama is reaching out to a demographic of unbelievers in a way that was previously demonized by previous presidencies. the political nature of religion is nothing new; there are literally hundreds of books on bush's political use of christianity that you can pick up.

faith, again, that magic word--it always comes up, nonetheless, as something to be applauded--a virtuous, spiritual act. just what is so special about having faith, and in what other context would it be applauded to blindly accept something to which has no evidence?

obama's convenient conversion to christianity from a secular background seems a little phoney...and i'd speculate it's all for show, but nonetheless we don't need another decade of blind faith.

Pope defends Evolution; What else is new...

Full Article

Some highlights...

The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

“They are presented as alternatives that exclude each other,” the pope said. “This clash is an absurdity because on one hand there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”

He said evolution did not answer all the questions: “Above all it does not answer the great philosophical question, ‘Where does everything come from?’”

Though not necessarily a revelation for some religious figureheads to proclaim so-called respect towards evolution, it is not such a impressive concession considering that the religious probably know as much about their own faiths as they do about real science.

You can't have it both ways.

It is one thing to say that science does not answer our origins. It possibly cannot. But still, to just glaze over it and say, "well, it must be God," is such an incredible gap of logic that science simply is not prepared to make, and thus, earning my respect.

Of course, no practicing theologists will be able to explain where god comes from, thus making their "origins" point mute. This is to say nothing of the incredible intricacies of religious belief and the church itself, the sheer egoism of believing in the correct deity and knowing what that deity wants and doesn't want.

It is a silly admission, in the end, because the religious will never give science the credit it deserves, or really seem to provide signs of a real understanding of how science utterly demolishes theism over and over again. Their faith is a comfort blanket that they cannot rid of, no matter how unnecessary.

(And may I speculate that the real reason for all this talk of fusing religion with science is merely a conversion strategy for the more reason-minded individuals.)

Circumcision is Mutilation.

A post title you probably weren't expecting, but nonetheless, onward with conscience-raising! A question I pose to others when I'm feeling saucy, particularly those yet childless, is the following: Will you circumcise your children?

It's almost as off-putting as asking someone if you are a registered organ donor. There probably is not a single good reason why wouldn't donate organs, and yet, some won't do it. I've heard rather interesting explanations for this, none that made a lick of sense, and most involve some sort of zombie after-life I cannot comprehend.

And so it goes for circumcision, which is, in effect, legalized, involuntary mutilation which provides not a speck of scientific or otherwise social relevance. It's not something we talk about in casual conversation, and yet the vast majority of us American males have had the privilege of entering this world of ours to a steel blade, to have a piece of our otherwise "perfectly" designed body removed--for what reasoning?

The science is in: there is no justifiable health benefit. Simply google "Doctors Against Circumcision" and read away if you aren't convinced. I won't comment further on this point, other than say that the "inconveniences" of a foreskin, as some claim, are no more off-putting than the need to wash your underarm. And it's certainly true that we might avoid a lot of maintenance if we simply removed the hair from our bodies. Fortunately for us, our hair can grow back if we've had enough.

What other reason, perhaps? It may come as a surprise that a good deal of our sacred texts (Galatians, etc.) are devoted to the principle and execution of circumcision in accordance with our celestial dictator who would like nothing more than to create your foreskin, and then symbolically (and physically) command it removed in order to create a psychological state of submission and perverted perspective of sexuality. I can't say this is something that might be useful to a god who considered your body his creation and wanted his creation to be fruitful. It might, however, be very useful to the men who really made it up. (...but why these men, and some Jews today, wish to take their newly circumcised sons into their mouth, I will never have a good answer.)

And some, including the great faith of Islam, have pondered, why leave the fun for just men? Let's just slice off all of the female genitalia we can get to, tie it up with string and call it a day.

Perhaps George Carlin is correct in saying that "symbols" are for the "simple" minded. But a circumcised penis is in fact, a symbol. But not for great scientific advancements or social enlightenment. It is, in fact, a physical casualty of the total ignorance of a culture riddled with obscene faith-based philosophy.

Ape Aid: Chimps share altruistic capacity with people

Bruce Bower
Science News
Week of June 30, 2007; Vol. 171, No. 26

Many researchers have asserted that only people will assist strangers without receiving anything in return, sometimes at great personal cost. However, a new study suggests that chimpanzees also belong to the Good Samaritan club, as do children as young as 18 months of age.

Without any prospect of immediate benefit, chimps helped both people and other chimps that they didn't know, and the 18-month-olds spontaneously assisted adults they'd never seen before, say psychologist Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues.

The roots of human altruism reach back roughly 6 million years to a common ancestor of people and chimps, the researchers propose in the July PLoS Biology.

"Learning and experience are involved in altruistic helping, but our claim is that there is a predisposition [in chimps and people] to develop such behavior without explicit training," Warneken says.

His team conducted three experiments with adult chimps living on an island sanctuary in Uganda and two experiments with 18-month-old German children. In the chimp version of the first experiment, 36 animals watched one at a time from a barred enclosure as an experimenter in an adjacent room—who had had virtually no prior contacts with the animals—reached through the bars for a stick on the other side. The stick was within reach of only the observing chimp.

Most chimps snatched the stick and gave it to the experimenter, whether or not the experimenter offered a piece of banana as a reward. No assistance came if the experimenter didn't first reach in vain for the stick.

A similar trial with 36 youngsters yielded comparable altruistic behavior, regardless of whether the experimenter offered toys as a reward.

The second round of experiments included 18 chimps and 22 infants who had helped at least once in the first experiment.

The chimps still retrieved a stick for an experimenter, although they now had to climb a 2.5-meter-high platform to reach the item. The children navigated barriers and hurdles to get a pencil for an experimenter. No reward was offered in either case.

The third experiment tested nine chimps' willingness to aid other chimps that they neither knew nor were related to. One chimp watched another in a separate room try to enter an adjacent space through a chained door in order to obtain food. Only the observing chimp could remove a peg in its enclosure to release the chain, allowing the other chimp to nab a snack.

All but one observing chimp did just that in numerous trials.

"These are wonderful experiments and present a real challenge to previous findings," remarks anthropologist Joan B. Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles. Silk and other investigators have reported that chimps don't give food rewards to their comrades, even at no cost to the potential donor.

Chimps may help others who fail to achieve observable goals, as in the new experiments, Warneken suggests. Further studies need to compare individuals' reactions to different types of cooperative tasks, Silk says.

The results "come as no surprise to any field worker who has spent lots of time close to wild chimpanzees," comments anthropologist William C. McGrew of the University of Cambridge in England.

The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women.

By Christopher Hitchens
Slate Magazine
Posted Monday, July 2, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET


Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously. More...

I was a fanatic

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. More...

yes, we will blame their politics, their economics, and our globalization. but we will never blame their faith. we won't do that because it would cast light on our own, and show the hypocrisy and utter evil that is produced when one group of people decides that their god is better than your god. it's not so much that horror has been produced from myth, but rather that such myth has been allowed to persist as truth.

even while the masses revel in their religious mediocrity, barely shuffling in and out of church and afraid to read a verse outside of what their pastors have to offer in passive comfort, your altruism and tolerance for faith cultivates this mythic evil.