SF Tidbits for 8/27/06
By John DeNardo |
Sunday, August 27th, 2006 at
11:39 am
- SFF World interviews Scott Lynch, author of The Lies of Locke Lamora. [via Slice of SciFi]
- Spike TV has the nominations up for the 2006 Scream Awards with lots of nominations of interest to genre fans. [via Cinematical]
- Fangoria Magazine Announces the Chainsaw Award nominations. [also via Cinematical]
- The Top 10 Reasons New Starbuck Is Better Than Old Starbuck.
- What do you get when you combine Lord of the Rings and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Obviously you get Once More with Hobbits!
- Solar Flare will be hosting a weekly Sci-Fi Blog Carnival.
- Meme Therapy asks: Should Scientists Criticize Religion?
Related posts:
- LOTR Music Videos
- SF Tidbits Part XXIV
- SF Tidbits for 2/24/06
- SF Tidbits Part XXVI
- Another word from our sponsor…
Filed under: Tidbits
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I wish more scientists would take off the gloves and talk about religion as the phony panacea and power-grab that they know it to be.
Funny that but i have been felling the same way about the institutions surrounding science…i mean point out such small things like earth (and jupiter) is made of dark matter or how volcanos spew out far more CO2 then biotic theries of oils origins predict or state that the pill had a far larger effect on the ability to lower crime then the legality of abortions or show how current climate models have over estimated temp change and you get shut down as a heritic or point out how federal funding of science tends to currupt science into a political game where who ever gets the US seal of approval tends to win rather then which theory holds up to the evidence.
Note: This is a critisim of the insitutions of science rather then the actual scientific method which at this time show little or no relation to one another.
“I wish more scientists would take off the gloves and talk about religion as the phony panacea and power-grab that they know it to be.”
Personally, I wish more refrigerator delivery men would take the gloves off and denounce the impressionist movement in art for the undisciplined painting-on-clouds vulgarity they know it to be.
Er… what are you saying? Delivering refrigerators does not qualify you to have an informed opinion about the merits and demerits of a school of painting? Well. Let’s ask scientists, then. They can weigh and measure the height and breadth of the paintings, and analyze the molecular composition of the paints used. THAT will tell us everything we need to know about impressionism. After all, if you cannot measure it with a yardstick, it must not exist!
(And I know this to be true, because Truth is measurable by particles called Veritons: and any statement that has more foot-pounds of veriton-pressure is truer than not.)
Religion must be a phony, because, um, the overwhelming majority of the greatest sages, philosophers, thinkers and writers of every era on every continent have been religious men, except for Marx and Nietzsche, and their mystical impulses had other outlets. And we know geniuses are easy to fool.
And religion must be a power-grab, because people foreswear worldly position, and wealth, and some even give up the comforts and delights of marriage to better serve God. Those hermits who live without any worldly possessions must all be epicureans lusting for power over us … but they’re really, really subtle. And martyrs: people who die rather than renounce their faith, are obviously motivated by a materialistic calculation of how to make money in the stock market. Washing the feet of beggars in India is a sure way to grab supreme executive power!
All sarcasm aside, religion is a complex phenomenon, found universally among all societies and tribes of men, as far back as anthropology can spy. If religion is false, it is falsehood that is built into the genetic predispositions of the whole race, a massive psychological failure as hard to avoid as the sex-drive, and not the product of some sinister conspiracy of The Three Imposters.