Mortality, Psychology and Worldview Defense

The New Republic has an interesting article about how awareness of our own mortality affects our opinions and attitudes about other people. The main thrust of the article is that this psychology played a role in the 2004 re-election of Bush. I think that aspect of the article is less interesting. The [...]

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Moralist Crusaders

There’s been a rash of people getting caught up in gay and/or sex scandals lately. Specifically:
August 27: Larry Craig, Republican Senator from Idaho and one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s top Senate supporters, was caught trying to have sex in an airport bathroom.
August 8: Young Republican National Federation President under investigation for sexual [...]

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Church of the Designer who Shall not be Named

I stop over at UncommonDescent every once in a while. (I don’t do so very often, though, because I always end up irate over the spin, or feel the need to correct their poor understanding of science.)
One thing that always gives me a laugh is their attempts to distance themselves from the “God” word, [...]

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“God” removed from the airwaves?

I get emails from my relatives sometimes. (My family – both my immediate family and extended family – are pretty religious.) One of the common themes of their email forwards involves this or that “attack” on Christianity (which seems to invariably be a hoax – most of the stuff that gets sent around [...]

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Ben Stein – “Expelled” pro-ID movie

[Via Pharyngula] I would’ve thought Ben Stein would’ve been smarter than to get involved with something like this. (*Although, after looking up Ben Stein’s politics, it’s clear that he’s very right-wing.) He’s narrating a pretend documentary about how “Big Science” is unfair to the theory of Intelligent Design.

According to a Beliefnet blog:
Not set [...]

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Creationist Censorship – WordPress and Turkey

Seems like just yesterday that I was talking about the censorship-happy creationists. Turns out, it was five days ago. Creationists like to pretend that they are censored (so they can stoke beliefs of victimization), but tend to be much more active at preventing critical comments from showing up on their blogs. Well, [...]

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The Myth, the Math, the Sex

The NY Times put up an article recently titled, “The Myth, the Math, the Sex”. It’s about the discrepancy between self-reported sexual partners.
One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British [...]

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The Conspiracy Boom

BoingBoing has an interesting article up called The Conspiracy Boom. It was originally written for Salon, but never published. It’s mainly about the rash of conspiracy theories in the world today.
The Conspiracy Boom
Why is nothing what it appears to be anymore?
Say what you will about conspiracy theories, they are unlikely to go away [...]

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Kurt Wise and the Religious Lobotomy

As a followup to my last post, I wanted to say a little more about Kurt Wise. Specifically, this quote:
“Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible. . . . It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God [...]

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The Irrationality of ID advocates

I stumbled across a blog the other day by an ID advocate. Not just any ID advocate, but “a student at the Honors College at Baylor University where he is double majoring in philosophy and political science. He works as a research assistant at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition, he is the director [...]

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