Saturday, May 16, 2009

Burnee links for Saturday

Irish Atheists Speak Out! | AnAtheist.Net

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Who'd be female under Islamic law? - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Commentators - The Independent

Jacob Dickerman: Swines and Birds and Homeopaths, Oh My!

JREF - Shouting Fire
Dispassionate analysis of the ethics of the anti-vaccination lobby

Derren Brown Blog » Blog Archive » Wolverhampton
A tale of ultimate redemption

The Santa Barbara Independent - Reading, Writing, and Original Sin
Another example of how religious evangelists consider that "the end justifies the means"

Accommodationism and All That : EvolutionBlog

Go-faster shark skin swim suits - Creation Science Movement
The science of imitating nature to produce more effective designs is called biomimetics (3). There are many applications, including robotic arms, variable geometry aircraft wings, and this one. It seems that as so often is the case, God got there first!
It seems that as so often is the case, creationists simply ignore the overwhelming evidence for evolution.

Rumours of God's return are greatly exaggerated | David Aaronovitch - Times Online

The Tale of the Twelve Officers - vuletic.com
(via Modusoperandi commenting at Daylight Atheism)

This is what might be called a parable about the "problem of evil". My own take on the POE (or theodicy, in its supposedly reconciled form) is that it isn't much of a concern. For the problem of evil actually to be a problem, you have to believe in a good god. Those of us who don't believe in the existence of gods of any kind do not find our worldviews confounded by something as illogical as theodicy. In the same way we do not concern ourselves with statistical analysis of the likely average length of the typical unicorn's horn, nor with the wing-folding techniques most probably employed by angels who dance on the head of a pin.