Investigating Atheism
(Via the Secular Outpost.)
UPDATE: Well, they do have an article from well-known net kook John A. Davison. That's a bit of an odd choice.
Posted by Lippard at 8/07/2009 08:00:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: atheism, history, philosophy
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Posted by Lippard at 7/31/2009 05:17:00 PM 28 comments
Labels: Creation Ministries International, creationism, history, movies
Posted by Lippard at 7/24/2009 09:56:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: Creation Ministries International, creationism, history, religion
There is no reasonable debate about whether waterboarding is torture. Waterboarding has been legally determined to be criminal torture by U.S. courts in 1947, when Yukio Asano was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor for it (among other war crimes). Other Japanese war criminals, such as Kenji Dohihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Heitaro Kimura, Akira Muto, and Hideki Tojo, were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for engaging in torture during WWII, including waterboarding, and several were executed for it.Another commenter replied to point out that waterboarding has been legally torture for longer than that in the U.S.
U.S. soldiers who undergo waterboarding as part of SERE training receive that training in order to understand what torture is.
It is bad journalism to defend "there are two sides to every issue" as a form of phony objectivity. Sometimes there are more than two sides of merit, and sometimes there is only one (and there is *always* some nut who will take issue with any well-established claim). In this case, there is no reasonable argument by which waterboarding is not torture. It makes no more sense to call it "what some people refer to as torture" than it does to insert similar qualifications on the front of every noun used in a sentence on NPR.
Posted by Lippard at 7/12/2009 04:51:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: ethics, history, law, politics, rationality, torture
Posted by Lippard at 6/23/2009 06:47:00 AM 12 comments
Labels: history, religion, Scientology
The only place Darwin and Lincoln are equals is in the mind of author Adam Gopnik ["Twin Peaks"]. What a stretch to weave their lives together because they share a birthday. "High peaks [that] look out toward each other"? Total hyperbole.Unfortunately, Dr. Munsell, a veterinarian from Florida who got his college degrees in Mississippi, doesn't tell us which reputation he thinks is exaggerated. Given his status as a southerner, he could either be a fan of the Confederacy and southern secession, or he could be an anti-evolutionist. Then again, perhaps he just thinks nobody is ever equal to anybody else...
Rick Munsell
The Villages, Florida
Posted by Lippard at 5/11/2009 12:23:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: creationism, history
In any event, the next Carolina sighting is only briefly detailed, sadly, since it sounds even more interesting than most. On the afternoon of 16 September 1904, in the countryside near Troutman, North Carolina, Mrs John B Lippard and her children saw "30 or more large snakes sailing through the air" over their farm. Each was about 5ft (1.5m) long and 4-5in (10-13cm) wide. "They watched the snakes sail around and alight in a piece of thickety pine woods... Most assuredly these people saw something." (Statesville Landmark, 20 Sept)Quoted from p. 34 of Jerome Clark, "Sky Serpents," Fortean Times magazine, #248, June 2009, pp. 30-36.
Posted by Lippard at 5/08/2009 06:16:00 PM 4 comments
Labels: animals, cryptozoology, history, pseudoscience
Posted by Lippard at 4/15/2009 02:33:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: books, Goldwater Institute, history, Institute for Justice, law, politics
Posted by Lippard at 3/21/2009 06:50:00 PM 1 comments
In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.To which Dennett's response was: "Exactly!" He illustrated the point with an example that is now somewhat commonplace, the computer. Dennett observed that prior to Alan Turing, "computers" referred to people who were hired to perform tasks that today are performed by mechanical devices with the same name. In order to perform these functions, people had to understand arithmetic. Dennett cited Turing's 1936 paper, "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (PDF), a demonstration that arithmetic computation is a specific case where, in fact, understanding is not required to perform the action--another example of the same kind of "strange inversion of reasoning." Dennett quotes Turing: "The behaviour of the computer [meaning a person] at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing and his 'state of mind' at that moment," noting that "state of mind" is in quotes because Turing's showing a method by which no mental activity or understanding is actually required. Substituting into MacKenzie's argument, we get "IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS."
Posted by Lippard at 2/19/2009 09:55:00 AM 15 comments
Labels: Arizona, atheism, Daniel Dennett, history, philosophy, Richard Dawkins, science
... what was a starchy, Episcopalian heir to a blue-blooded Yankee political pedigree to do? And what of his reckless, apparently non-religious, playboy son? These were the intertwined questions faced by Vice President Bush and George W. in the 1980s as they planned Poppy Bush's run for president in 1988--and W.'s political future.Baker's chapter titled "The Conversion" features startling revelations that challenge the well-known narratives of the Bush family's religious history-- including the way they crafted a strategy for winning over the religious right, and the creation of a conversion legend for George W. Bush. The purpose of the latter was not only to position him as a religious and political man of his time, but to neutralize the many issues from his past that threatened to undermine his future in politics (and possibly that of his father as well). The plan probably worked far better than anyone could have hoped. "I'm still amazed," Doug Wead, a key architect of the Bush family's evangelical outreach strategy told Baker, "how naïve so many journalists are who have covered politics all of their life."
Under [Doug] Wead's tutelage, Poppy would learn the ins and outs of the evangelical world. But Poppy and W. had a problem in common. Baker writes that they knew that W.'s "behavior before becoming governor [of Texas in 1994] his partying, his womanizing, and in particular his military service problems--posed a serious threat to his presidential ambitions. Their solution was to wipe the slate clean--through religious transformation."(Via Frederick Clarkson at Talk2Action.)A Tale of Two Conversions
For this to work they needed "a credible conversion experience and a presentable spiritual guide." And so the legend goes that none other than Billy Graham paid a visit to his longtime friends at the Bush family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine. This led to the famous walk on the beach that George W. Bush says "planted a mustard seed in my soul," and to his supposed rebirth as an evangelical Christian. That was the accepted narrative in the media and throughout the evangelical world for years. But Graham later told a journalist that he does not remember the encounter; and to another said he does remember a walk on the beach--but not, apparently, any kind of spiritually meaningful conversation. Whatever the facts of the Graham episode, there are actually two conversion stories. The second was deep-sixed in favor of the Graham story, and only emerged after George W. was elected president.
The itinerant evangelist Arthur Blessitt, famous for dragging (mostly on wheels) a 12-foot cross around the world, posted the story on his Web site in October 2001, noting that he met with George W. Bush a full year earlier than Graham. "Mr. George W. Bush," wrote Blessitt, "a Midland oilman, listened to the radio broadcast and asked one of his friends `Can you arrange for me to meet Arthur Blessitt and talk to him about Jesus?' And so it came to pass."
Wead, Baker reports, "had warned the Bushes that they had to be careful how they couched their conversion story. It couldn't be seen as something too radical or too tacky. Preachers who performed stunts with giant crosses would not do. Billy Graham, `spiritual counselor to presidents,' would do perfectly." And that was the story that speechwriter Karen Hughes wove into Bush's 1999 campaign book, A Charge to Keep. There was no mention of Blessitt.
Posted by Lippard at 2/08/2009 06:13:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: conspiracy theory, history, politics, religion
Posted by Lippard at 2/02/2009 10:19:00 AM 3 comments
Labels: conspiracy theory, history, Holocaust denial, religion
Posted by Lippard at 1/31/2009 07:41:00 PM 7 comments
Labels: arts, history, John McCain, politics, travel
Posted by Lippard at 1/04/2009 03:59:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: copyright, history, music, radio, religion, Scientology, skepticism, technology
Posted by Lippard at 12/31/2008 02:06:00 PM 1 comments
That weird legend of No Man's Land, the gruesome epice of the "hound of Mons," has, according to F.J. Newhouse, a returned Canadian veteran, been vindicated throughout Europe as fact and not fiction. For four years civilian skeptics laughed at the soldiers' tale of a giant, skulking hound, which stalked among the corpses and shell holes of No Man's Land and dragged down British soldiers to their death. An apparition of fear-crazed minds, they said. But to the soldiers it was a reality and one of the most fearful things of the world war.Back before the Internet, the local newspapers met our needs for fabulous hoaxes, and many of them applied, at least periodically, the journalistic standards of the Weekly World News--you only need one source.
"The death of Dr. Gottlieb Hochmuller in the recent Spartacan riots in Berlin," said Capt. Newhouse, "has brought to light facts concerning the fiendish application of this German scientist's skill that have astounded Europe. For the hound of Mons was not an accident, a phantom, or an hallucination--it was the deliberate result of one of the strangest and most repulsive scientific experiments the world has ever known.
Teeth Marks in Throats.
What was the hound of Mons? According to the soldiers, the legend started in the terrible days of the defense of Mons. On the night of November 14, 1914, Capt. Yeskes and four men of the London Fusiliers entered No Man's Land on patrol. The last living trace of them was when they started into the darkness between the lines. Several days afterward their dead bodies were found--just as they had been dragged down--with teeth marks at the throats.
Several nights later a weird, blood-curdling howl was heard from the darkness toward which the British trenches faced. It was the howl of the hound of Mons. From then on this phantom hound became the terror of the men who faced death by bullets with a smile. It was the old fear of the unknown.
Howl is Heard.
Patrol after patrol, during two years of warefare, ventured out only to be found days later with the telltale marks at their throats. The ghastly howl continued to echo through No Man's Land. Several times sentries declared that they saw a lean, grey wraith flit past the barbed wire--the form of a gigantic hound running silently. But civilian Europe always doubted the story.
Then after two years, while many brave men lost their lives with only those teeth marks at the throat to show, the hound of Mons disappeared. From then on the Germans never had another important success.
"And now," says Captain Newhouse, "secret papers have been taken from the residence of the late Dr. Hochmuller which prove that the hound of Mons was a terrible living reality, a giant hound with the brain of a human madman."
Hound Had Human Brain.
Captain Newhouse says that the papers show that this hound was the only successful issue of a series of experiments by which Dr. Hochmller hoped to end the war in Germany's favor. The scientist had gone about the wards of the German hospitals until he found a man gone mad as the result of his insane hatred of England. Hochmuller, with the sanction of the German government, operated upon him and removed his brain, taking in particular the parts which dominated hatred and frenzy.
At the same time a like operation was performed on a giant Siberian wolfhound. Its brain was taken out and the brain of the madman inserted. By careful nursing the dog lived. The man was permitted to die.
The dog rapidly grew stronger and, after careful training in fiendishness, wa taken to the firing line and released in No Man's Land. There for two years it became the terror of outposts and patrols.
Posted by Lippard at 12/25/2008 09:51:00 AM 1 comments
Labels: conspiracy theory, dogs, history, hoaxes, strange deaths
Posted by Lippard at 12/17/2008 08:27:00 AM 1 comments
Labels: education, history, religion, Scientology, technology
Posted by Lippard at 12/16/2008 06:13:00 PM 3 comments
Labels: Center for Public Integrity, climate change, Heartland Institute, history, law, medicine, politics
Repeal the "Military Commissions Act of 2006" and thereby restore the ancient right of habeas corpus and end legally sanctioned torture by U.S. government agentsEd suggests, and I agree, that writing or calling your elected representatives and asking them to support this bill is a good way to do something to preserve and protect the Bill of Rights.Restore the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" (FISA) and thereby outlaw warrantless spying on American citizens by the President of the United States
Give Congress standing in court to challenge the President's use of "signing statements" as a means to avoid executing the nation's laws
Make it illegal for government agents to kidnap people and send them abroad to be tortured by foreign governments
Provide legal protection to journalists who expose wrong-doing by the Federal government
Prohibit the use of secret evidence to label groups or individuals as terrorists for the purpose of criminal or civil sanctions
Posted by Lippard at 12/15/2008 08:58:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: 9/11 conspiracy, Arizona, civil liberties, gun control, history, Institute for Justice, kooks, law, religion, Ron Paul
Posted by Lippard at 10/18/2008 07:05:00 AM 1 comments
Labels: abortion, Arizona, atheism, creationism, ethics, history, propaganda, rationality, religion