Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
There is a rather strange article in US Today here that claims …
How is raging atheist Richard Dawkins “celebrating” World Youth Day? While Pope Benedict blesses a million youth in Madrid, Dawkins is promoting the latest event of the “Secular Europe” campaign, launched in 2008, to attack Vatican influence.
“Raging” … seriously!!! He refuses to go along with their silly supernatural claims, spells out the facts and gets labeled “Raging” for doing so.
William Lane Craig, the American Evangelical Christian apologist, wants a public debate during his UK visit. However, the problem he faces is that nobody wants to, (You can see where this is going), so he is claiming that the atheists are scared.
Sigh! …
This month president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, pulled out of an agreed debate at London’s Westminster Central Hall in October, saying she “hadn’t realized the nature of Mr. Lane Craig’s debating style.” (thats a polite way of saying that he is a complete kook and really likes babbling mangled pseudoscience).
I stumbled across a Facebook page today called “Against Anti Islamic Groups and Anti Islamic Content on FB”. Basically, the sole purpose of this group is to encourage other Muslims to report any other Facebook group or page as a hate group if they dare to insult Islam or their Prophet.
The guidance they give says …
Anti Islamic Groups to be removed no more insult of Islam in the Name of freedom of Speech
The UK’s Guardian reports today that many parishes in Dublin are close to financial collapse due to child abuse compensation payments. Their source for this is a leaked internal report from the Council of Priests that was published in this week’s edition of the Irish Catholic newspaper. The Guardian article says …
Belief is a very powerful tool for gathering wealth, and because of this some of the wealthiest organisations around are religious groups that also often attract followers that are quite poor. Here now are some interesting statistics that list where some of the main players get their wealth from, how much they have, and what they spend it on. I confess that some of this was a surprise to me.
Looking down the list, if I was to vote which were the slimiest scumbags around, its really difficult to decide between Scientology, Catholicism, and Televangelism.
There exists a modern claim that the Qu’ran contains verses that describe things known only to modern science, but since it was all written 1400 years ago when such things were unknown then “Allah did it”. Challenge this and ask for the best example and you usually are given a poetical phrase which has been quote-mined and twisted out of context to enable some modern thinking to be retro fitted in.