Internet

Two stories about churches of various sorts.

The first is a bunch of them in the US. Leaders from Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities in the United States have signed an open letter about the "serious consequences of redefining marriage". They say these consequences will ...

... arise in a broad range of legal contexts, because altering the civil definition of "marriage" does not change one law, but hundreds, even thousands, at once. By a single stroke, every law where rights depend on marital status—such as employment discrimination, employment benefits, adoption, education, healthcare, elder care, housing, property, and taxation—will change so that same-sex sexual relationships must be treated as if they were marriage. That requirement, in turn, will apply to religious people and groups in the ordinary course of their many private or public occupations and ministries—including running schools, hospitals, nursing homes and other housing facilities, providing adoption and counseling services, and many others.

Not content with confining their ideas about marriage to their own communities, the church leaders want to stop the liberalisation of marriage law and remove the legal sanctions for discrimination against homosexuals and others. This "redefinition of marriage" is being described as "a direct attack on religious freedom". Click here to read about it.

The second story is about a "crisis of faith", according to some religious leaders, as the idea of "de-baptism", started as a joke by the National Secular Society, has caught on across Europe and America. The NSS's "de-baptism certificate" has been downloaded from its website at least 100,000 times, while it's been reported that "the church has put in place a new evangelizing strategy to more strongly encourage parents to get their children baptized".

The UK gay humanist charity the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT) re-launched its online magazine in December last year with a new title, The Pink Humanist.

The PTT, which was founded in 1992, started publishing a printed magazine entitled Gay and Lesbian Humanist back in 1993 and continued this until it went online in 2008. Though described as an LGBT publication, the new magazine is aimed at all atheists, humanists, sceptics and freethinkers and is the only one of its kind worldwide.

Last November, SH&S group members watched a film called The Age of Stupid, which included footage of the environmental damage caused by oil companies in Nigeria.

You may not be aware that similar damage has been caused to the environment in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador by Chevron, formerly Texaco, poisoning the indiginous people who live there. Please click here to view a video about the damage and sign an online petition telling Chevron to clean up its mess, which they've so far denied.

The Internet has been flooded with obituaries to Christopher Hitchens today, since the news of his death. One of the so-called 'New Atheists', his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, upset lots of religious people and delighted many fellow atheists. True, he was exceptioanally gifted with the written and spoken word (there are some examples in the Guardian), and wrote lots of thought-provoking copy for Vanity Fair, among other publications, but I wasn't a fan, especially because he thought that invading Iraq was a good idea, regardless of the consequences - who were mostly civilian.

If an easy target like Christianity could be destroyed solely with words, Christopher could have done it. However, the main effect of his witty attacks on religion was to delight other atheists, not to persuade believers of the error of their ways. It's untrue that "religion poisons everything". That's far too simplistic and ignores the many examples of good things that religious people have done. Philanthropists like Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker, achieved social reform long before the introduction of the Welfare State, for example, and religious people still do good without evangelising or proselytising.

Mary Warnock, interviewed by Laurie Taylor in New Humanist, said,

I find Dawkins’ simple-minded view of religion very difficult to take. It pays no proper attention to the history and tradition of religion. It says that religions have done nothing but harm but that is manifestly not true. He omits all the good things, the education, the cathedrals, the music. All that’s disregarded.

If you haven't seem these sites, they're worth exploring:

The Secular Web has pages and pages of food for thought. Thay say:

The Secular Web is owned and operated by Internet Infidels, Inc., a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet. Naturalism is the "hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system" in the sense that "nothing that is not a part of the natural world affects it." As such, "naturalism implies that there are no supernatural entities," such as gods, angels, demons, ghosts, or other spirits, "or at least none that actually exercises its power to affect the natural world." And without miraculous interventions into nature from a spiritual realm, neither prayer nor magick are more effective than a placebo.

Butterflies and Wheels is edited by Ophelia Benson.

Butterflies and Wheels was established in 2002 and has (not surprisingly) evolved since then. At the beginning it focused mainly on various kinds of pseudoscience and epistemic relativism, aka postmodernism. The latter prompted an increasing focus on moral or cultural relativism and a defense of universalism and human rights. This in turn led to concern with the chief opponent of universalism and human rights, which is religion. This then led to interest in the backlash against overt atheism.

Keep thinking. If nothing else, it'll help to keep Alzheimer's at bay.

We've been visited by a creationist. Feel free to join the debate on whether there were dinosaurs in Noah's Ark, and if scientists made up the theory of evolution.

See the comments on Jesus and a baby dinosaur.

Some of the stuff you could have found for yourselves, if you'd wanted to (that's what Google is for), but I saved you the bother, OK?

Sam Scott Perry was on Channel 4's 4thought.tv, where he opined that men and dinosaurs were alive at the same time, and that Creationism should be taught in schools. Whoever taught Sam didn't do a very good job. His science isn't up to much.

Distrust is the central motivating factor behind why religious people dislike atheists, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia psychologists. They must imagine that all atheists are up to no good. There are untrustworthy atheists and there are religious people I'd trust no further than I could throw them (if it wasn't for my bad back), but there's no more reason to mistrust one than the other.