Subscribe to feedThe Dawkins Delusion
October 13th, 2007 by Michael KreidlerThis is one of the cleverest pieces I have heard and seen in a long time.
Brilliant, just brilliant!
Catholic Media Connections
The Nativity Could Be Offensive at Christmas Festival
December 2nd, 2006 by Michael KreidlerJust had to share this little bit of rabid political correctness as reported in an Associated Press article:
“Some people are still scratching their heads over what happened in Chicago, where the movie studio behind “The Nativity Story” was dropped as a sponsor of a Christmas festival for fear of offending non-Christians.”
Take that reason and rationality!
Beyond Belief
December 1st, 2006 by Michael KreidlerI came across this in the on an interesting blog called Open Culture. There is a lot in it that recommends itself. One of its recent posts dealt with something to which I have become increasingly aware - militant secular humanism. Militant atheism.
These days, the Enlightenment project finds itself in a tense cultural competition with religion. Go around the US and ask, “how did we come to be?” and you will get different answers. Some, appealing to science and reason, the children of the Enlightenment, will look to evolution for answers. Others, with a religious bent, will refer you to the Bible or intelligent design — which is another way of saying, God is behind it all.
Is the Enlightenment project nearing an end? Can science and reason eventually reassert themselves, perhaps as powerfully as religion recently has? Or, can science and religion at least co-exist and address different questions?
Earlier this month, an impressive list of scientists and philosophers got together at the Salk Institute for a conference called, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival.” The presenters ranged from Richard Dawkins (Oxford’s well-known evolution theorist), to Joan Roughgarden (a Stanford professor who recently wrote Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist), to Craig Venter (who helped decode the human genome). Thanks to The Science Network, the so-called “C-SPAN of science,” you can watch the videos of the different conference presentations for free online. (Note: To watch the videos, you’ll need QuickTime. If you don’t have it, you can download it for free here.)
I am in the midst of the first lecture and am interested and repelled at the same time. It is a lecture dealing with the supremacy of science over religion in the ‘conflict of science and religion’.
I have heard this for a long time. What seems to be different is that I am hearing more about the ‘danger of religion’. In the November issue of Wired Magazine there is an extensive article entitled The Church of the Non-Believer. In it the author, Gary Wolf, writes: “…[W]e vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil.”
In a world without God, there are, it seems, moral absolutes. Among these atheistic absolutes are the beliefs that Science is good and the other is that Religion is evil.
In his keynote, Prof. Steven Weinberg, states: “The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religious belief, and anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may be, in fact, our greatest contribution to civilization”. Sounds more like a religious call to war… but hey, we all gotta believe in something.
During Thanksgiving, I happened upon a book that asserted much the same. In the forward, the assertion was made that all the bad in the last thousand years (or more) can be traced back to religion. All of the conflicts from the suppression of the Cathars to the current conflicts in the Middle East were and are religious conflicts. The, world, therefor would be better off without the poison of religion.
I must get back to retrieve the name of the book so I can read it fully. I wonder how the author interprets the massacres under the atheistic regimes of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and others? The author may address these issues, but, hey one can only spend so much time in the bathroom.
I bring these issues forward to stress the point that we, as disciples, are not proclaiming in a Christian nation, a ‘post-Christian’ culture, but rather one that is becoming militantly anti-Christian. We, as followers of Christ, are seen not any as anachronistic but as a true danger to the people we are looking to serve. It is important we recognize this.
What we do is so important. What we do is increasingly seen as dangerous.
Let me know what you think.
An Alternative to Godcasting!
December 29th, 2005 by Michael KreidlerI found this at Podcasting News forums. I found it interesting or possibly telling. I am not advocating secular humanism, but I think it is important to see ‘how the other half lives’.
There are tons of religious podcasts (aka Godcasts) out there. But only a few shows are dedicated to secular ethics and the nonreligious philosophy of humanism. The Humanist Network News podcast provides humanist perspectives on news and culture.
Humanism is a non-religious philosophy based on reason and compassion. Produced by the nonprofit Institute for Humanist Studies, HNN follows a radio magazine format with multiple segments, studio and telephone interviews, listener comments and music.
Pod blog: http://ihs.libsyn.com
Feed: http://ihs.libsyn.com/rss
Web: http://HumanistNetworkNews.org
ARE YOU A HUMANIST?
Do you think of yourself as non-religious?
Are you skeptical of the existence of a supernatural realm?
Do you think science and reason lead to more reliable knowledge than faith, revelation, authority, or tradition?
Do you believe that a person can be ethical without religious belief?
Is your concept of “the meaning of life” derived from human responsibility and opportunity rather than divine revelation?
Do you expect human progress to result from human accomplishment rather than divine intervention, grace, or redemption?(Did you answer yes to these questions?)
If so, you might be one of the millions of humanists on earth — people who live meaningful, fulfilling lives based on reason and compassion. Welcome to our community!