Winter’s Haven

Jose Flores, a Christian pastor from Bolivia, used a fake bomb to hijack an Aeromexico flight on September 9th, demanding to speak to president Felipe Calderon. Why was it so important for him to speak to the president?

Flores, 44, has said he was acting on a divine revelation and wanted to warn Calderon of an [...]

Suppose that your next-door neighbor beats and rapes his wife. What is the ethically appropriate response on your part? The commonly accepted answer to this question, with which I agree completely, is to forcibly subdue the husband and lock him in a cage, both to prevent him from committing further violence and as a punishment [...]

Matt Nisbet, of Framing Science infamy, has posted a draft chapter of his book. Here’s my favorite section:
Dawkins, for example, argues as a scientist that religion is comparable to a mental virus or “meme” that can be explained through evolution, that religious believers are delusional, and that in contrast, atheists are representative of a healthy, [...]

Billy Graham apparently has a newspaper column in which he answers letters (hat tip to PZ). One person writes:

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are [...]

The Cato@Liberty blog quotes from a previous Cato piece by Neal McCluskey:
Ultimately, the problem in Texas isn’t whether or not the theory of evolution has weaknesses, or whether pointing to such weakness is religiously or scientifically motivated. The problem is that the public schooling system requires everyone in the state to fund schools that take [...]

In the comments to a previous post, George W. raises a common concern regarding school choice schemes:

School-choice sounds great on paper, and I’d go along with it if there were strictly enforced standards for education content. Too often in this country it just boils down to keeping kids from learning about evolution and sex.

George is [...]

Why, you ask, are Creation scientists not truly scientists? Item one: provided that it doesn’t appear to contradict their holy books, Creation scientists couldn’t care less about how the natural world works. The creationist I recently encountered certainly exhibited that mindset. He of course, was merely a random engineering student.
To see how professional Creation [...]

I generally don’t spend much time following the propaganda and misinformation put forth by creationists, and PZ’s recent post nicely illustrates why I don’t: this stuff is surreal. It’s positively sickening to witness people so full of hate and fear that they invent vile, baseless slanders against their opponents and then go on to believe [...]

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams’s statements advocating the introduction of Sharia law for muslim residents of the UK has drawn plenty of well-deserved criticism. Johann Hari, writing for The Independent, offers some particularly enlightening commentary. He argues that by advocating Sharia law, Williams has pushed the doctrine of multiculturalism to its logical conclusion and unwittingly demonstrated [...]

I found this comic via Hemant.

That hypothetical situation sure showed what an intellectually dishonest fellow that fictional atheist was! I have no idea whether this comic is trying to make some sort of point, or what that point might be.
The only reason I’m posting this is because I’ve long dreamed of launching an array of [...]