Burnee links for Sunday

Mostly the Reason Rally...

Face to faith: Richard Dawkins, rationalism, and religion as a team sport | Comment is free | The Guardian
Lois Lee's piece is refreshingly calm, and apt in the light of the recent Reason Rally. (Some of the comments, however, feature the usual mix of banality and inanity.)

Can the Reason Rally resonate in this most religious of democracies? | Sarah Posner | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Making up for Lois Lee (above) not mentioning the Reason Rally...

The Reason Rally, and Why It’s Good to Keep Hammering On About Diversity | Greta Christina's Blog
Could this be the watershed moment for diversity in the "atheist movement"?

Live Blogging the UK C4ID Lecture 2011
Instant reaction to Stephen C. Meyer's lecture — the same one I recently watched on video and talk about on the next episode (#23) of Skepticule Extra.

Atheist Richard Dawkins Celebrates Reason, Ridicules Faith : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
Barbara J. King is a mildly hostile interviewer, but Dawkins is well used to her kind of passive-aggressive approach. Audio here:
http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/blog/2012/03/20120326_blog_rd.mp3

Textual transubstantiation

"Why All the Translations?" is the question Denny Burk asks in the title of chapter 44 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. It's a good question; it seems likely that we have more translations of the Bible than of any other ancient text (Beowulf, say, or the works of Chaucer, Homer, Plato, Omar Khayyám...). The only reason for this I can come up with is that many people have been dissatisfied with the extant translations and thought they could do better — and believed it was important to do better.

Burk points out that there are three approaches to translating the Bible: formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and paraphrase. The King James Version is apparently a formal equivalence or word-for-word translation, while the New International Version is a dynamic equivalence translation, which Burk describes as a thought-for-thought rendering. This gives a clue as to why there are so many ways one can interpret scripture. The version I see cited most often is the New International Version, which according to Burk is not a word-for-word translation but one where the translators have endeavoured to get inside the heads of the original authors. This in itself requires a degree of interpretation, so it's not surprising that when Biblical scholars are engaged in exegesis they feel free to contribute their own interpretations.

The third option — a paraphrase translation — isn't really a translation at all. Burk quotes Paul D. Wegner in The Bible in Translation, describing a paraphrase as a "free rendering or amplification of a passage, expression of its sense in other words."

All this concern over different translations cannot help but raise the suspicion that the real reason there are so many is that no-one knows for sure what the original really said, let alone what it meant.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952760

"Nature Deficit Disorder" is not a medical condition

The Today Programme is the BBC's premier morning news radio show. It lasts three hours (from 6 till 9) but inevitably some its subjects are given minimal coverage. One such was this morning's discussion about a report recently released by the National Trust. "Natural Childhood" is authored by Stephen Moss, who was on the programme to support his contention that children are missing out by not spending enough time outdoors. This is all very fine and dandy — I'm in favour of kids getting up close and personal with nature — but unfortunately the National Trust have fallen into the all-too-common view that the way to promote their services (and providing services is what they do by charging admission to their properties) is to spin the reduced outdoor-time as some kind of medical condition.

Taking up an invented syndrome and running with it is a bad way to promote yourself; as a member of the National Trust myself I find this tactic regrettable. "Nature Deficit Disorder" is not a recognised medical condition — Stephen Moss's report even acknowledges this, so why is he using it to spin the statistics to indicate that children are being harmed?

Aleks Krotoski has ably covered this in the Guardian, and she was on the Today Programme to debunk Stephen Moss's disingenuous PR:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9709000/9709957.stm

The report itself is available here:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/servlet/file/store5/item789980/version2/natural_childhood.pdf

It has over 100 references and notes at the end, appearing appropriately scholarly for its 28 pages. I noticed, however, that one of those references was to something by Aric Sigman, which did not inspire confidence (it prompted a search for the word "Greenfield" — though thankfully that yielded no results).

The Reason Rally — A Secular Celebration (video)

Too late for yesterday's Burnee links, so it gets its own post. This nicely produced eight-minute video by The Thinking Atheist seems to encapsulate the flavour of the Reason Rally.

http://youtu.be/d11tcjO--70


I hope that eventually all the talks will be available in video quality to match this. The fact that many people flew hundreds of miles to stand for six or more hours in the rain — and maintain that it was totally worth it — speaks volumes about the significance of this event.

Burnee links for Thursday

When the rug is pulled | The Crommunist Manifesto
Read it. That is all.

Episode 109 | Righteous Indignation
Hayley Stevens talks about her recent trip to investigate a brace of Nessies, accompanying the world's premier paranormal investigator — the incomparable Joe Nickell. (And Michael Marshall talks about his recent visit to Sally Morgan's stage show — sorry Marsh, interesting though your piece undoubtedly was, it was pre-emptively upstaged by Hayley's hobnobbing with a living legend.)

MPs try to overturn 'God can heal' ad ban | Total Politics
Three MPs make twits of themselves. I posted this comment:

"Gary Streeter (Con), Gavin Shuker (Lab) and Tim Farron (Lib Dem) say that they want the Advertising Standards Authority to produce "indisputable scientific evidence" to say that prayer does not work - otherwise they will raise the issue in Parliament."

And I want indisputable scientific evidence that the invisible pink unicorn does not exist and that the government are not spraying tranquilisers into the air using chem-trails and that Messrs Streeter, Shuker and Farron are not twelve-foot tall lizard aliens in disguise — otherwise I will raise these issues with Deepak Chopra. (If David Icke happens not to be available.)

Martin Robbins takes them to task at the Guardian:
Hapless MPs defend faith healers

10 Amazing Practical Jokes « Richard Wiseman
For anyone who thinks Professor Wiseman spends far too much time on frivolities...


Triablogue: Outreach Report: Reason Rally 2012
The presup account. For some reason they don't think they're wasting their time.

The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe, As Told By Neil DeGrasse Tyson (VIDEO)
Grasp it:

(Via Project Reason.)

Adam Rutherford's Darwin Day lecture — pictures

Given that I've started to post my photographs of QEDcon it's about time I got round to posting some of my previous pictures. So here are those I took at this year's Darwin Day lecture. I won't reiterate what Adam Rutherford said as I've already talked about it on Skepticule Extra, and if you want to hear (and see) the lecture yourself there are links below.

My pictures:
http://flic.kr/s/aHsjyDPEct


Watch the lecture here:
http://youtu.be/VEsK6hZjOcQ


Or listen to the audio only, but complete with introductions and Q&A:
http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/2012/02/13/darwin-day-lecture-2012/


Enjoy!

Burnee links for Sunday

Jourdemayne: Profanity and Nuptials, or, Get Your Hands Off My Words
"It is inhumane to deny gay couples equality. I never want to hear another religious person tell me that their beliefs are primarily about ethics ever again."

Graveyard of the destitute set to be site for plush new London flats | Metro.co.uk
Prostitutes were licenced? By the church?!

It's my way or the highway: Christians and atheists in religious road row | World news | guardian.co.uk
These Christians don't know when they're being wound up. (But it's so easy...)

A vision for a secular America - Guest Voices - The Washington Post
Many if not all of Sean Faircloth's ten points ought to apply to the UK, but we'd have to disestablish the Church of England first...

The reports are trickling in | Pharyngula
A useful initial source of links to videos of the Reason Rally.