This is just as instructive if you replace “Santa” with “God”.

Wondermark #474; In which you better Watch Out, December 23, 2008

Be good for goodness' sake

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I saw this in a church where I worked recently.

Mother Goose & Grim, September 14, 2008

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Christopher Hitchens owns Rabbi Harold Kushner when the rabbi jokes about circumcision.

That religion compels good people to do very bad things is a point everybody ought to ponder.

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Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy
Dennis Overbye, NY Times, January 26, 2009

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

It requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors these last few years.

Science is radical. God is so…boring and stupid. I do hope during the Obama administration science will be restored to its “rightful place”.

It’s a great essay. Now go, give it a read.

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Trials for Parents Who Chose Faith Over Medicine
Dirk Johnson, NY Times, January 20, 2009

When a father molests and rapes his daughter we rightfully condemn him as a monster and seek the harshest penalty under the law. Yet, when a parent watches and prays while their child needlessly suffers an agonizing death some excuse the neglect as the parents’ “constitutional right to religious freedom.” The pious parent, in this case, is far worse than the pedophile predator.

The god of theism has been proved powerless time and time again. There is no evidence of an answered prayer or performed miracle. I’ll support faith-healers when they show prayer to be at least as effective as medicine.

Religion is a retarding force that leads to real suffering. It is past time for the delusion to end. It is time we as a species moved on!

I pray the Neumanns are convicted and receive the harshest punishment available. I hope state criminal codes protecting credulous fools are repealed.

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