Why the west invaded Iraq 12 Oct 2009 It’s awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who “got saved.” He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars. From here. Politics Religion
Accommodationism Science outreach: A conversation 2 Feb 201420 Feb 2014 From the Freethinkers Blog Con: With PZ Myzer and Aron Ra. Read More
Religion God of the gaps 1 Feb 201118 Sep 2017 Phil Plait has addressed the incredible inanity of Bill O’Reilly’s comment that the tides prove God. It is, as Phil notes, a classic “God of the gaps” argument. I thought I should reprise the original source text of that criticism. It is from Henry Drummond’s book Ascent of Man in… Read More
Biology Around the internets 23 Jul 2009 Razib has a post on a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology that shows, fairly well, I thought, that Australian aborigines are most closely related to relict populations of indigenous Indian tribes. They are touting this as evidence that the “southern route” from Africa was the one taken by the Australians… Read More
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” The question is would it have mattered if the other head of states expert theoligian would have said, yea sounds right to me… Why was there any puzzlement to start with? There is no new data since the time of the various Gog and Magog stories… “crackpot” is a term that presupposes there is evidence to bring to bear on the veracity of this claim, in a world of accomodation to faith it seems out of place.
Theologians are not scientists, any more than poets are, so it is not, I think, useful to say they have no new data. They are in my view more like those experts in role playing games who adjudicate on matters of arcane game lore. But I bet that the French president asked someone who happened to have the knowledge that made the comment and request comprehensible, to some degree, so that he would know how to respond. That it was a theologian is beside the point. He may as well have asked someone who had once been an evangelical but left the faith. It was simply a tradition with which he, as a cosmopolitan and refined man, knew nothing of.