The Age reports on the pressing issue of the growth of independent schools teaching from a faith-based curriculum in Australia. Presenting religious indoctrination in the Howard era clothing of “choice”, some such schools are teaching creationism in science classes and directly counteracting government efforts to provide sex education to students.
For example, the principal of one […]
Archive for the 'touched by his noodly appendage' Category
no ape in 08: i !heart huckabee
06Dec07FYI, Mike Huckabee, potential Republican presidential candidate and by extension potential President of the United States, has this to say about creationism (and the fact that he believes in it):
If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that’s fine. I’ll accept that. I just don’t happen to think that I […]
Repeating the mantra that members of parliament meet with Australian citizens “all the time”, it has emerged that the Government’s links to the extremist Christian sect the Exclusive Brethren remain as strong as ever. As mentioned previously (1, 2), the sect both prohibits its members from voting or from participating in society generally, and […]
There’s quite an interesting post here about this article in the LA Times, in which the Times’ religion reporter William Lobdell describes finding and then losing his faith in the process of reporting on the subject. He was initially attracted to Catholicism:
Meanwhile, Roman Catholicism, with its low-key evangelism and deep ritual, increasingly appealed to […]
Further to previous posts (one, two), here’s some great “Jesus with the little dinosaurs” art (thanks to KO):
Meanwhile Legal Eagle points to this article on the actual details of the legal battle in the Ham v Anti-Ham lawsuit.
it is more important to force raped women to have children than to stop murder and torture: god
15Jun07Those wacky funsters at the Vatican are at it again - this time they’re misrepresenting Amnesty’s new policy regarding abortion and instructing Catholics not to support the organisation. Amnesty’s position is that women who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest, or whose health is endangered by pregnancy, have the right to […]
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 that some of Ham’s former followers have decided to wrest back control of their (pre)destiny as an unthinking […]
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 vote for this legislation must realise that their voting has consequences for their place in the life […]
The Electoral Commission has finally referred the matter of the Exclusive Brethren cult’s involvement in the funding of pro-Government election ads at the last election to the Australian Federal Police. A company linked to the cult spent more on pro-Government, anti-Greens advertising than the Australian Conservation Foundation or the Wilderness Society spent on their ads. […]
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 roach motel, as one might naturally assume, the ‘museum’ is actually dedicated to teaching people about […]
You may or may not recall that over the last few years, the federal government has carefully stacked the ABC’s board with right wing nutcases, including Keith “we never did nuffink to the Aborigines, it was like that when we got here” Windschuttle and Janet “Islam promotes rape” Albrechtsen. The ABC later dropped a […]
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 you may know, Australian scientists recently developed a vaccine for HPV, a sexually-transmitted virus directly linked to cervical […]
an atheist’s point of view
17Apr07This first blog entry by Atheist’s Wager contains a very interesting take on religion.
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 the central challenges identified in the New Testament, such as poverty, and ignoring other major […]
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 process not guided by god
- 48% believe that the theory of evolution is ‘well-supported’
- 91% identify themselves as religious, with […]
