I am going to pursue a collaboration between my own organization (Group Of Intellectuals Negating Godless Atomism + Generic Atheism) and the re-Discovery Institute. Just look at the wonderful materials they are producing to combat the pernicious theory of the godless chemists. Read more

A fragmentary manuscript discovered just this week is likely to be extremely controversial among both Christians and Pastafarians. It is a letter written by the apostle Paul to the Pastafarians in Galatia. On the one hand, Paul’s adherence to Pastafarianism will be shocking for many who assumed that Paul’s adherence to Christianity was exclusive. On the other hand, Paul’s teachings about pirate regalia are not in keeping with later Pastafarian orthodoxy and will be controversial in those circles as well.... Read more

What is Progressive Christianity? For me, it is a form of Christianity which tries to do justice to the following: 1) Christianity has naturally (if not consistently) historically stood for those values that bear the label “progressive” or “liberal”: racial equality, social justice, poverty, inclusiveness, and so on. 2) To be a Christian at all, one has to allow for progressive revelation. One cannot claim that the Bible is authoritative, inspired, or anything else without realizing that there is change... Read more

“I do not peddle atheism in the classroom, and am actually very careful, since I am a vocal atheist in the blogosphere, to reassure my students that apostasy is not required to get an “A” in my classes, and that they are free to hold whatever religious beliefs they want — the biology classroom is about evidence, not belief, and explanations supported by logic, not revelation” (P. Z. Myers, on his blog Pharyngula). Read more

My last post featuring Expelled! The Video Game uses Java to allow the game to be played directly on the page if you have Java installed. If you don’t and you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, you just see a box with a red x. Someone recently told me that on Firefox this crashes the browser altogether. This is bad news, but perhaps someone reading this knows enough about Firefox to suggest a solution. I’d prefer to not remove the playable... Read more

Pseudoscience needs the support of a video game to really flourish. Following on the great success of our Michael Behe vs. the Mousetrap game, we’ve now added a new addition to our products: Expelled! The Video Game. Ben Stein is the wizard trying to defend his movie theater of hocus pocus from intruding scientists. Use left and right arrows to change P. Z. Myers’ direction at any time. Press the space bar to have Ben Stein cast his spell and... Read more

Metacatholic discusses the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John and their implications for C. S. Lewis’ famous ‘trilemma’. Thoughts in a Haystack highlights an insightful article about fundamentalism. Jim West also did so. Henry Neufeld gives a wonderful summary of why there is nothing appealing about seeing the movie Expelled!. Matt discusses what to do when the dishonorable ask you to do the honorable thing and stop pointing out their lack of honor. Read more

“I don’t think we can describe God in any way. Human saying that God exists is to me a nonsense statement. That would mean that God is somehow confined within our intellectual capacities. The only thing we can do is say we have experiences and talk about some of those experiences by using God language. It is the only way we have to talk about such wonders as how we find ourselves at one with each other and the universe”... Read more

A clip from Stephen Colbert’s Democralypse Now has been shared on the Commonweal blog. It offers an entertaining view of the relationship between presidential candidates and controversial preachers. Read more

Yesterday I mentioned Stephen Webb’s review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution for Christianity Today‘s web site. A while back I wrote a review of Behe’s book on this blog, which I also posted at Amazon.com, where it also led to some discussion. I also addressed the old “monkeys with typewriters” illustration, emphasizing that to be a meaningful analogy, one has to have a typewriter with only four letters (A, C, G and T), a language where every word has... Read more