ham update: ham sued by anti-ham offshoot of church of ham

You will recall our friend Ham, curator of the Creation “Museum”, from the story about dinosaurs with saddles – he who told us that T-Rex ate grass until “the fall” and other such nuggets of wisdom.

It seems…

fundamentalist threatens NSW members of parliament

The double standards on display in relation to this story are fascinating. A religious leader threatening members of the New South Wales parliament with holy consequences if they vote for a particular piece of legislation:

Catholic politicians who

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god presents: dinosaurs with saddles

You have probably heard about this by now: evangelical Christians will today open a “Creation Museum” (or, ‘moron magnet’, as this blog eloquently puts it) in the USA. Rather than being designed along the lines of a giant…

young americans

This research is interesting – in a survey of American Muslims, the young are both more devout and more radical than those over 30. For instance, 60% of those in the 18-29 age group thought of themselves as…

the only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen

This is an odd little piece of civil disobedience – the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen was draped in ‘Muslim dress’ and a headscarf.

Apparently a previous incident in which a Burqa was put on the…

purity control

You’ve no doubt seen the proposed question for the Australian cultural and ideological purity control test over the weekend: link here in case you haven’t.

Some of the questions are, as John Quiggan puts it, nothing…

little girls deserve cancer because I’m uncomfortable with sex

This story is a typical example of the amazing moral contortions that reactionary social conservatives seem to be able to perform to justify interfering with, and indeed harming, others to satisfy their own arbitrary and irrational beliefs.

As…

an atheist’s point of view

This first blog entry by Atheist’s Wager contains a very interesting take on religion.

talk about a life of brotherly love, show me someone who knows how to live it

This blog post is a fantastic comment on something very mysterious: why so many Christians spend so much time ranting and raving about homosexuality and abortion, which are barely mentioned in the Bible, and so little time doing something about…

oh the history books tell it, they tell it so well

This was in the Oz today: British teachers are allegedly avoiding teaching their students about the Holocaust and the Crusades because this might offend Muslim sensibilities:

These kids are told at home or by Muslim preachers that the

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these people have 10,000 nuclear weapons

This Newsweek poll (full results here) of Americans contains the following statistics about religion:

- 48% of Americans believe that mankind was ‘created in its present form’, with only 13% believing that humans evolved in a…

teutonic baby polar bear kill frenzy scandal

You may have come across this already: there is currently a heated debate about the fate of a baby polar bear named Knut, currently residing (or being held captive, depending on your perspective and level of insanity) in…

this monkey’s gone to heaven

A bit out of date now, but in February it emerged that the University of Sydney has agreed to ban stem cell research at a new facility built on land it acquired from a Catholic residential college.

According…

all your seasick sailors, they are rowing home

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for

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Born Again German

I’ve always been fascinated with the relationship between language, thought, and identity. I remember someone once told me that words are the building blocks of thought, and it stopped me in my tracks. I’d never questioned what my thoughts were made of before, and it led me to the bizarre question – how would we think without words? Try it for a second. Kinda difficult to get anything except basic imaginings & rememberances, huh. Well then – what happens when you are forced to learn, and think in, a new language?