Jan
15
2012
“Islamophobic” eBooks
Jun
20
2009
Spirit on the Brain
Book-in-Progress: Spirit on the Brain: The Paleolithic, Neolithic, Neurological and Magical Origins of Religion
This forthcoming book (c. 2015) will trace the evolution of religion and meditation-based spirituality from paleolithic, pre-scientific times into our own—from shamanic rituals and healing, through alchemy, into the neuroscience underlying higher-state-of-consciousness experiences.
Recent Posts:
December 11: Why we invented monsters
March 7: Eye
January 23: Mead, Butter, and the Indo-Europeans
August 1, 2010: EEG, Hans Berger, and psychic phenomena
July 30: The religious state of Islamic science
Feb
04
2012
New Rule: Atheism is not a religion!
"Atheism is a religion like abstinence is a sex position."
Feb
04
2012
Israel warns Iran could attack American Jews inside the U.S.
Israel warns Iran could attack American Jews inside the U.S.:
The head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, told an audience at a closed forum in Tel Aviv recently that Iran is trying to hit Israeli targets because of what it believes are Israeli attacks on it nuclear scientists. Yoram Cohen said that Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the same militant wing of the government linked to the recent alleged plot against the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., is working tirelessly to attack Israeli and Jewish targets abroad in order to deter Israel. Local and regional law enforcement and intelligence officials in U.S. and Canadian cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Toronto have been monitoring the situation closely for several weeks, and have stepped up patrols at Israeli government locations and Jewish cultural and religious institutions. They have issued awareness bulletins reminding officers to stay vigilant.Great. Just great.
Feb
04
2012
Seeking Major Tom
I've been listening to Shatner's Seeking Major Tom album since I got up this morning.
The album features many noted musicians, including Sheryl Crow, John Wetton, Patrick Moraz, Ritchie Blackmore, Alan Parsons, Peter Frampton, Warren Haynes, Nick Valensi, Zakk Wylde, Mike Inez, Chris Adler, Steve Howe, Michael Schenker, Dave Davies, Johnny Winter, Brad Paisley, Bootsy Collins, Carmine Appice, Ian Paice, and Toots.I'll be damned if it isn't growing on me. I mean, sure, at first you listen because "it's so bad, it's good." But then you start to get into the fact that Shatner is a legitimate actor (over-actor?), and these are his campy performance-art interpretations of a bunch of space-related songs, and ... well, I can't put it any better than this review on Amazon:
[T]he album is a feast for the ears when listened to in its entirety. This is due to the eclectic array of songs from Space Oddity (of course) to Space Truckin' (a standout), Shatner's immortal Rocket Man (subdued here but still captivating), She Blinded Me With Science (a hoot), Walkin' On The Moon, Spirit In The Sky (another standout), Lost In The Stars (excellent), Mr. Spaceman (Cash-like), Twilight Zone (you just know Shatner's winking at you with this one), Iron Man (Heavy Metal Shatner? Why not!) and Bohemian Rhapsody here is one for the ages. Sheryl Crow's Mrs. Major Tom has to be heard to be believed, it's that good!P.S. "In 2008, [Crow] told Ellen DeGeneres that 'If it didn't have a drum beat, you can just forget about it!'" Well, I'm glad she "forgot about it," for at least this one song. :)
Feb
04
2012
Jews Wouldn’t Do That!
Saw this yesterday, on RD.net:
Islamic law and Jewish law do have similar punishments for certain offenses, though Jewish law never allowed mutilation as a punishment. The difference is that Jewish law also included some very strict procedural rules that made it very nearly impossible to actually impose a death sentence for anything other than murder. It had to do mostly with the still obvious problem that you can't undo an execution if it turns out you were wrong, and a rabbinic and proto-rabbinic preoccupation with nit picking the law to make sure absolutely nothing could possibly be misinterpreted. Islam never bothered with the safeguards."Jewish law never allowed mutilation as a punishment"? Tell that to the chaps who wrote Deuteronomy (25:11-12):
When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets [i.e., genitals]: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.At least that thread did eventually bring up a number of good responses to the total liberal moron Steve "PZ Myers in drag" Zara, whose clueless love for multiculturalism seems to be based entirely on ethnic food and music. (If you still think that multiculturalism can work, even in principle, to ease conflict rather than inherently create it, you owe it to yourself, and to society, to read my mapping of the Robbers Cave experiment to multiculturalism. Identity-group based multiculturalism can never work, by basic human nature. In fact, victim-hierarchy based multiculturalism [and feminism] is just about the exact opposite of people working toward a common goal where everyone has to cooperate and each person has to contribute, as a team, in order for the venture to be successful—cf. Robbers Cave, or the "jigsaw classroom.")
The issue is that this "complexity" only begins to surface when the subject is Islam. When it's Catholicism or evangelicals or orthodox Jews, the thread is unlikely to be hijacked by Dan Conquer and turned into [a] thread about Islam. Yet here there have been attempts to turn this thread into a thread first about the "right-winger" Horowitz and second about male circumcision. Why do you think it is that nothing has been learned since the fatwa against Saldam Rushdie in 1989? Even now we get people accusing Ayaan Hirsi Ali of only having herself to blame. Why has nothing been learned in all this time? It's because people like you, tens of thousands of people, all try to muddy the political waters the very second that Islam is mentioned. The result is obfuscation and a permanent lack of resolve. Debate is fine, but perpetual "complexity for the sake of complexity" is not. It thwarts progress and impedes serious discussion of the issues. What are we going to do if the Muslim population in Europe grows significantly and 18 to 24 year-old Muslims retain the views that they hold today? It's a real possibility and real problem (despite various dishonest attempts to write this off), and a climate of "complexity all the way down" will bind our hands and feet.... What is this crazy idea that somehow we need other cultures here in order to fulfill our lives? And the even crazier idea that somehow they are all 'equal.' What was wrong with the culture we already had? OK it wasn't perfect....none are. But one could find far worse.....and that is precisely what multiculturalists have done, and invited them in, and told them that we care so little about our own culture that they can keep their own. Seriously, if ever there was a splendid example of the very antithesis of critical thinking.....it is multiculturalism. I don't see the sort of countries shown in the video reciprocating on multiculturalism.....do you?.... Interesting pair of liberal-left equations that you've got yourself there: Generalizing about Muslims in whose countries they kill apostates and force women to wear burqas = racist. Generalizing about Americans of the Deep South = hilarious.... Yes, Zara, that's why Europa likes to share a bed with Mohammad the child rapist: The music. Don't be ridiculous. And leave your strawmen for someone else; I have no use for them. Multiculturalism is not about diversity or "enrichment" of any kind, it's in fact the "monoculturalism" you think you fear, simply because of the consequences it produces: A future Islamic Europe. Islam is an intolerant monoculture encompassing all levels of society and it's designed to assimilate or destroy peoples of other cultures, not to mention enslave them. There can be no room for Islam in a diverse multicultural society, simply because it's the very antithesis of it. There's no brain or heart [Zara stupidly claimed that having both of those—which righties apparently lack—was what caused him to embrace multiculturalism] in killing your own culture.... It's interesting that Zara mentions music. Funny, because I've never heard Arab music on the radio. I'm sure though that they have their own stations, and that's the essence of the problem of multiculturalism, I think. Rather than adding to our own culture, we're recreating their own countries in a microcosm within ours. Doesn't matter how many Muslims there are on the Tube wearing Western designer clothes: 86% of Muslims feel that their vile religion is the most important thing in their lives. 16 to 24 year-old Muslims are even more religiously conservative than their parents.... According to some schools of Islamic "thought" music is actually haram. No music for you, children of islamists, only prayer and submission. This will, of course, teach them to hate any culture which allows music. I think the non-think of political correctness is probably irrational enough to be classified as a religion, and I'd love to see Dawkins, Dennett or Harris devote one of their next books to it. The multicultural god of political correctness is also a lot funnier than either Jahweh or Allah.... I started scrolling through the thread and, less than half-way through page one, the conversation took a sharp left, from the undeniable accuracy of the footage (we've seen and read this stuff previously) to drivel about political correctness and getting a broader perspective on Islam. Pure bullshit. IMO, footage like this IS a broader perspective of Islam, that is ignored or rationalized by left-wing, multicultural panderers, to the detriment of ALL WOMEN.... Tell you what. I think I'll declare myself a 'moderate Nazi' [cf. a "moderate Muslim"]. I'm sure nobody here will have any objections......nobody will call me a hypocrite......and everyone will warmly welcome me to the multicultural family. I mean...why can't we all just get along. No?All of that, occasioned by this horrific video ... from the "unacceptable source" (to the idiot Zaras of the world) of the right-winger (and former far-Lefter) David Horowitz: P.S. Going forward, please consider me to be a "moderate Nazi." Zeig heil-ish.
Feb
01
2012
4.25: 1
The Best of Barbara Kay:
Fewer than 25% of submissions to comment editors come from women. But it isn't just newspaper comment sections they avoid. It's all thesis-driven writing, including literary reviews. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's Magazine: Their ratio of male to female writers ranges from 2.6: 1 to 3.6: 1. In the 2010 New York Review of Books, there were 462 pieces by men, and 79 by women [5.8: 1]. These are all liberal cultural organs. It is inconceivable that they would privilege male over females writers on principle. For this is the one area in which anything but a merit standard would constitute aesthetic and intellectual suicide. For definitive proof that women control their own writing agenda, consider: only 10-15% of Wikipedia editors, all volunteers, are women. There's clearly no conspiracy afoot here. It's self-selection—at least it is here in the West. And hardly surprising, when you consider that for the past 40 years the feminist movement has made such a fetish of "narrative" and "feeling" and the value of personal experience over evidence-based knowledge that many women opinion writers think their duty lies in promoting women's interests rather than amassing credible data to prove a thesis.Somebody tell Ophelia "4/21" Benson. (Four female speakers out of 21 at an atheist conference is a ratio of 17: 4, i.e., 4.25: 1. Right about where it should be.) Separately, also from Kay:
[I]ntimate partner violence (IPV) is mostly bidirectional. But by then the IPV domain was awash in heavily politicized stakeholders. Even peer-reviewed community-based studies providing politically incorrect conclusions were cut off at the pass, their researchers' names passed over for task force appointments and the writing of training manuals for the judiciary. Neither were internal whistle-blowers suffered gladly. Erin Pizzey, who opened the first refuge for battered women in England in 1971, "disappeared" from the feminist movement when she revealed what she learned in her own shelter: She committed a heresy by asking women about their own violence, and they told her. The most extreme IPV is certainly male-on-female, but hard-core batterers and outright killers are rare. In violence of the mild to moderately severe variety that constitutes most of IPV—shoving, slapping, hitting, punching, throwing objects, even stabbing and burning—both genders initiate and cause harm in equal measure. Every major survey has borne out this truth. In fact, the most reliable, like Canada's 1999 General Social Survey, found not only that most male and female violence is reciprocal, but also that the younger the sample, the more violent the women relative to men. A meta-analysis of more than 80 large-scale surveys notes a widening, and concerning, spread—less male and more female IPV—in the dating cohort.That's the effects of feminism for you. Seriously: Generations of bitches have grown up knowing very well that they can get away with murder—literally—so what do you expect?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has just published its National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey to great fanfare. The survey's central finding is—yep—that men and women inflict and suffer equal rates of IPV, with 6.5% of men and 6.3% of women experiencing partner aggression in the past year. More men (18%) suffer psychological aggression (humiliation, threats of violence, controllingness) than women (14%). Feminists often define IPV as a "pattern of power and control," but the survey finds that men were 50% more likely to have experienced coercive control than women (15.2% vs. 10.7%).
Feb
01
2012
Honour Killings, Bible-Style
The Best of Barbara Kay:
The first honour killing in Judeo-Christian civilization is recorded in the Bible. In Genesis 34, we have the story of Jacob's daughter Dinah, who goes out to visit some women in her neighbourhood—she was probably about 13 or 14, marriageable age then—and was raped by Shechem, a local townsman, a prince of his tribe. Shechem was willing to marry her. Marriage would have been politic: Jacob's small clan was new to Canaan, and such a marriage would have cemented good relations with Shechem's long-established people. But Dinah's brothers' collective sense of shame would not permit such a sensible outcome. They duped Shechem and his father, and in the end massacred Shechem and all his peers. A terrible crime in the name of honour. Committed by the very men whose offspring would bring the idea of universal justice and morality to the world. (Jacob was angry, but the episode concludes with the brothers asking if they should have allowed their sister's shame to go unavenged—and famously, the chapter ends with Jacob's silence.)Good thing that was all abrogated by Hippy-Dippy Jesus, eh?
Female-virtue based honour codes are a near-universal phenomenon in Western culture. Up until 1991 in Brazil, adultery-motivated wife killings were treated as non-criminal and were even called "honour killings." Until 1981 in Italy, honour was a legal defence for killing a woman, and fathers or brothers who killed their female relatives might only receive a three-to-seven-year sentence. Until the 1970s, under the Code Napoléon, a crime passionel was a valid defence for murder in French law. In England, "provocation"—adultery—was a legal defence for men who killed their wives until 2009. A UN report in 2002 cited the penal codes of many non-Muslim countries—Argentina, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador—that allow for partial or complete use of a defence of honour. The crucial differences between these Western honour killings and the ones we are seeing today is that Western men murder adult women lovers or wives, not daughters; they act alone; and the killing is based in sexual jealousy, meant to punish one female.... Honour culture has bloomed amongst such disparate groups as Arab Bedouin, Scottish/English herdsmen of the Border country and cowboys of the Wild West. So even though in the present day about 95% of honour killings in the West happen to be perpetrated by Muslims, throughout history it is clear that honour-motivated violence against girls and women has less to do with one specific religion than with the role of dowries, and inheritance and the lack of a dependable legal system.
