Search for "More About Buddhism & Science"

Why Such Outrage Over Star Trek Actor’s Geocentrism?

By Joseph Laycock

…the Star Trek pantheon function as a shared mythology for those who value science over supernaturalism. Recruiting a Star Trek actor for an anti-science film smacks of sacrilege. The Principle is the brainchild of Robert Sugenis of State Line, Pennsylvania. Sugenis is a traditionalist Catholic whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has called, “one of the most rabid and open anti-Semites in the entire radical traditionalist movement.” Sugenis found…

Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

By Chrissy Stroop

…emonstrable facts, all to the detriment of democracy. The recent headlines about evangelical absurdities illustrate this nicely. If not for the questions The New Yorker’s exposé raises about apparent congressional ethics violations by North Carolina Representative Mark Meadows, former chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus, it’s unclear how newsworthy many journalists would consider the events surrounding the discovery of an Allosaurus skeleton use…

Gulf Residents Urged to Unite in Prayer

By Lauri Lebo

…he proclamation came two years to the day that Jindal signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which inserts anti-science, creationism-friendly language into the state’s public school education standards. Forrest writes: The fact that people would turn to prayer is not surprising. Devout residents all along the Gulf Coast are understandably turning to anything they think will help. A good deal of prayer has been prompted in Louisiana in recent…

Christian Schools International v. University of California

By Lauri Lebo

…ic education when it comes to being accepted into a rigorous college-level science program. Interestingly, lawyers with Pepper Hamilton, including Eric Rothschild, whose cross-examination of Behe exposed ID as a vacuous fraud, co-wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the California school system. The brief disagreed with Behe’s assertion that the textbooks were valid: “Students educated with these textbooks will not be adequately prepared for science…

The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

By Spencer Dew

…Originally the El Rukns were affiliated—at least in name—with the Moorish Science Temple of America, one of the multiple organizations to emerge from the fracture of Moorish Science after the death of the religion’s founder, Noble Drew Ali, who died in Chicago in 1929. Ali presented himself as a prophet of Allah, advancing a vision of religious nationalism in which black Americans were called to recognize their true heritage as “Moors” and theref…

Atheism is Doomed

By Paul Wallace

…uits of modernity — natural science, for example — is also doomed. Because science is here to stay. But really, science is not all that. There is an historical conceit among many who view science as humanity’s lone candle in the dark; I call it the Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit. The idea is that religion, with its origins among “Bronze-Age goat herders,” belongs strictly to the past. In this conceit, the Enlightenment is seen as humanity’s “comin…

Finding Noah’s Flood: A Misconception of Biblical Proportions

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ominous foreshadowing of a future end-times and Rapture. They are vigilant about debunking anyone who tells them otherwise. See what they said about Ryan and Pitman here. Let me state for the record: many archaeologists and geologists have discovered evidence for many different floods, some of them large, or sudden, or both. But they all have end points, high water marks if you will. They certainly did not cover the entire Earth. (Sorry, creationi…

Defying Gravity Defies Sci-Fi Conventions

By Gabriel Mckee

…aining a few years earlier. Set in 2052, it’s a pretty daring form of hard science fiction that’s a far cry from the fun-but-implausible space opera that most television viewers think of when they hear “science fiction.” There are no phasers, warp drives, or stargates here— just chemical rockets, spacesuits, and lots of calls back to Houston. There’s even a (only slightly unsatisfying) explanation for why everybody sticks to the floor instead of f…

David Brat, Theological Conundrum

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker and Bridget O'Brien

…If Brat means to identify as a Catholic, one wonders what he has concluded about science. To be sure, his campaign site only says that he attends a Catholic church, not that he is Catholic. Here’s what’s confusing, though. David Brat is someone who, as recently as 2011, published an article in which he describes himself as an “orthodox Calvinist.” He lists four different denominational affiliations on his CV. Yet on his campaign website, the only…

Christian Patriarchy Clouds Social Science Findings On Happy Marriages

By Darren E. Sherkat

…In The Negro Church in America, Professor Franklin Frazier wrote at length about the patriarchal norms of African American religion, and three decades later in The Black Church in the African American Experience, Professors Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya begin a full chapter on the problem of patriarchy and gender with a quote from Sojourner Truth. In Jonathan Walton’s missive against Anthea Butler, he fails to understand the importance of gende…