Michael Zimmerman has two new pieces on his Huffington Post blog. The first is part four in his series “Profiles in Evolutionary Courage” – in this case, focusing on Zack Kopplin, the Louisiana high school student who has started a grass roots campaign to defend science education in his state and overturn a law aimed at giving pseudoscience a foot in the door. The second is about good and bad news related to creationism in Texas. Read more

Otagosh and Tim Bulkeley both discuss slaughtering the Canaanites. Steve Douglas reviews chapter 9 of Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God.John Shuck has a blog post that is not based on the Bible (but is based on something I wrote here). Doug Chaplin notes the oddity of Protestants emphasizing obeying the Bible.Lauri Lebo reports on conservatives giving Texas’ conservative revisions to its history curriculum an “F.” Read more

I will be presenting an overview of the Mandaeans and their religion in class today, and this is a collection of useful videos, some of which I will show in class. Mandaean baptisms around the world Persecution of Mandaeans in their historic homelands Mandaean worship adapts to the Australian context Read more

The blog Bad Rhetoric linked to a piece in the New York Times Magazine connecting modern feats of memory with the ancient Greeks’ discovery of how to utlize memory more effectively. Those interested in the memory of people in the Greco-Roman era, or just interested in remembering things in the present, will find it interesting – and memorable! Read more

Thanks to Ed Babinski for pointing out two pieces related to flat earth views, one of which features an article from a 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics, offering $5,000 to anyone who can prove the earth is spherical. Read more

I was rather struck by the seemingly reciprocal connection between a post at Remnant of Giants, examining an interpretation of the Genesis story about sons of God and daughters of men which placed the blame on those alluring human females, and a post at Clayboy highlighting an advertisement in which a particular body spray causes female angels to drop like flies (and cast down their halos) around a man who wears it. And to the extent that Doug wanted this... Read more

Authors have little control over how their books for a general audience are marketed. But I wish to offer a few comments on what readers should think when they see publicity materials for a new book that is “explosive,” “earth-shattering,” “thoroughly original,” “unprecedented,” “provocative” and/or “turning everything we thought we knew about X completely upside-down.” If a book’s publicity materials claim these things, then one of two actions would seem to me to be appropriate. OPTION 1: Put the book... Read more

Like a Child has posted on Bart Ehrman. In addition to links to here and to Bob Cargill’s recent post, and adding some of her own thoughts and reflections, she links to a video of a conversation between Bart Ehrman and another former fundamentalist. This one, however, ended up in Eastern Orthodoxy rather than agnosticism. That’s quite a different reaction to discovering problems with your assumptions about the Bible! But for those familiar with the mystical, apophatic stream of Eastern... Read more

Several posts with interconnected points and themes have come to my attention. One, an article by John Beddington in New Scientist magazine, seeks to explain the relationship between consensus, skepticism, and peer review. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a sample to whet your appetite: Let’s return to what science actually is: the testing and retesting of hypotheses by experiment and scrutiny to create an evidence base. Where the evidence falls primarily on one side of an... Read more