In recent news, another highway bridge collapsed. Every 20 years or so, a major bridge fails unexpectedly. The nature of civil engineering is to understand how things fail, and design the next generation to avoid that failure. Each failure leads to better designs. Each of the major bridges that collapsed…
Silly bureaucracy in action! An internationally renowned cyber-guru who often comes into the U.S. to train DoD, DoE, and other alphabet soupers was held for 4 hours by customs, and deported as he came in to speak at a Black Hat convention. His own report on the issue makes it…
Here's a cute video by "AngryLittleGirl" called "Gullible is not in the Dictionary" [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OruQy-X32O0[/youtube] It makes the simple point that one should check the source when someone presents a "fact" such as "95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate" or "Jesus rose from the dead". That reminds me of "Passion of…
It’s not because I am obstinate, though I can be obstinate.
Rather, I simply can’t believe things like: “A virgin had a baby” or “A man who was dead later became alive” or “This piece of bread is really a man’s flesh.” I can’t believe such things because these things are simply not true. To me, such assertions are nonsense and it befuddles me when I hear other people uttering them. It’s especially befuddling to see the way many people utter religious claims. It’s as though they believe they have knives in their backs and they damned well say such things, or else. “Or else what?” I often think. “Let go of those scary thoughts. It’s just a bad dream. Free yourselves! Wake up!”
I also try to be kind. I am sadded to see people wasting their time and energy due to fear and ignorance. I want to do my part to help those who feel compelled to utter patently untrue things, even if they only do this on Sundays.
I am not alone, of course. In our frustration, many of us non-Believers wish to come up with a quick and dirty explanation for why other people publicly proclaim oxymoronic religious claims. It is this urge to quickly dispense of this mystery of religion (the mystery that anyone takes religious claims seriously) that is addressed by Pascal Boyer in his 2003 article, “Religious thought and behavior as byproducts of brain function.” Boyer is a faculty member in the departments …
It's another chapter of a disturbing and repeating story: Where good science conflicts with the aims of the Administration, science loses. Stir in the arrogant ignorance of yet another unqualified Republican political hack. This story is from today's Washington Post: A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to…