18 Saturday May 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
The speaker, specially flown in from California, grins at the audience and rubs her hands together in holy zeal, as she tells her little anecdote. A young man is offering his beloved a diamond engagement ring. Unfortunately, he is also offering her gonorrhoea, which, she tells her captive audience of schoolchildren, will last like the ring for the rest of her life, be incurable, and make her sterile.
25 Thursday Apr 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
I get this a lot:
"If people evolved from apes.... why are there still apes?"
- The problem here is with the word "still". The apes you see today, are not the same apes as those 1,000,000 years ago. Apes today are as evolved as we are. As are slugs, spiders, and cats. Apes today are evolved as a different branch from a common ape-like ancestor, shared with humanity.
03 Wednesday Apr 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
Sam Harris is peeved, and rightly so. Two recent articles, one in Salon by Nathan Lean and the other in Al-Jazeera online by Murtaza Hussain, have mounted nasty (and misguided) attacks on New Atheism because of its perceived "Islamophobia." I've previously dissected Lean's piece (see the first link), and Hussain's is just as bad. Here's a bit of it:
16 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in Uncategorized
UPDATE: See today's New York Times piece on the Halappanavar tragedy, which includes this:
Mr. Halappanavar told the newspaper that he still could not believe his wife was dead. “I was with her those four days in intensive care,” he said. “They kept telling me: ‘She’s young. She’ll get over it.’ But things never changed; they only got worse. She was so full of life.
05 Tuesday Oct 2010
Posted in Uncategorized
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