Tag Archives | Atheism

The world is explicable by purely natural means!

Depressing

Why is there so much religious nonsense about at the minute? The first two items on the news on BBC Radio 2 at 13:00 today were a story about an employee of British Airways who is suing them for religious discrimination because they told her to cover up a piece of jewellery depicting a cross. The second story was about the Muslim teacher who was suspended for refusing to remove her veil. The BA worker is complaining because she says other religions don’t have to cover religious clothing such as a Sikhs head covering. When you look into the story it turns out that BA don’t ban religious jewellery but just request that it is worn under the BA uniform. The worker in this case however wants to flaunt her religion and is using the fact that other items, like headscarves, are allowed to claim discrimination against Christians. The fact that turbans and headscarves are impossible to hide under the BA uniform seems to have escaped her. Sigh.

As for the teacher who has been suspended. She is claiming that she just wants to wear the veil in the presence of men. I’ve just seen her interviewed on BBC News 24. She was asked if there had been any men on the panel that interviewed her and if she had worn the veil during the interview. She was very reluctant to answer the question and it had to be put several times. It turns out there was a man on the panel and that she was not wearing the veil during the interview. Why was it okay not to wear the veil then? I sense someone trying to make a political statement rather than a religious one.

The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins

I finished Richard Dawkins new book The God Delusion last week. I’m not sure many people will be surprised to learn that I agree with the points and argument presented in the book almost completely. There are a few minor points that I don’t agree totally with. One being the invocation of the The Anthropic Principle, in the guise of a planetary version, in relation to the discussion of the origins of life on Earth. I don’t think it’s required. Obviously as the Earth contains life then, from a weak anthropic standpoint, the conditions we find on Earth must be favourable. But I don’t think we need to invoke a planetary version of the Anthropic Principle for this. Dawkins argues that the formation of the original life was probably a very improbable event but given the number of stars and planets in our galaxy, indeed the Universe, then if on even a very, very small number of these planets such an improbable event occurred then there would be many planets where life had started. We just happen to be living on one of them.

I’m comfortable with the Anthropic Principle (the weak form) when used in relation to the Universe. If the Universe didn’t have laws that allowed creation of stars, planets etc. then we simply wouldn’t be here to ponder and discuss it. But I don’t think we need to use it to explain the origins of life. The laws of chemistry show that molecules self assemble. So in any environment that has the correct chemicals then I think molecules will form and some of those molecules will be able to catalyse the formation of copies of themselves. Some will be better at this than others and therefore will be subject to Darwinian natural selection. Thus in any system where molecules can form and compete for resources we have the first step up the far side of Dawkins’ Mount Improbable.

The God Delusion is a wonderful book. Everyone should read it. Seems many are as it’s top of many best seller lists and has had several reprints to take the number in print, in just 2 weeks, to 100,000+. I promised several people a review of the book here. I plan to read it again and record references in Endnote for future use in discussions with creationists and ID proponents. I’ll post more comprehensive thoughts after that. But the bottom line is get a copy and read it.

Thegoddelusion

More good news

Despite what spin the Church of England might have put on the churchgoing figures that where released last week the fact is that people are abandoning churches, and religion according to other surveys, at a high rate. Happy days. Some stats:


6.3% of the population go to church on an average Sunday, compared to 7.5% in 1998
29% of churchgoers are 65 or over, compared with 16% of the population
9% of churches have no-one under 11 in their congregations

Roll on the day when when religion is studied as ancient history.

Down the line – BBC Radio 4

The new BBC Radio 4 comedy Down the Line is well worth a listen. It’s a spoof and parody of talk radio. The 2nd episode takes on religion and how to name a new primary colour. It’s priceless. You can listen online. The 2nd episode will be replaced online by episode 3 on Wednesday 17th May.

Double standards

Many people on lists I read and post to, mainly posters from the USA, will end their posts with some variant of “god bless” or “I’ll pray for you” in response to someone’s problem. If they think that praying to this god character is a productive use of time and that said entity will be able to help with the problem at hand then I’d like to know where it was when the problem started. If the entity could intervene to sort out, say an illness, then where was it when the illness started. Funnily enough they never seem to address this question. Double standards? Hypocrisy? Or fairy tales?