Category Archives: Lunacy

Religious Evolution and Obsolescence

Posted on Friday 9 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve mentioned before that there is an evolution of policy stances by conservative and Republican politicians, because the environment — the American public — has shifted its majority opinion on issues such as gay rights and even same-sex marriage. Thus, … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Mostly about the Evils of Religion, Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It

Posted on Wednesday 7 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Tonight, many links and comments about religion, especially on this day when thin-skinned Muslim terrorists murdered French journalists who had dared to insult their omniscient, omnipotent god by drawing mocking cartoons about Muhammad. Some of the reaction has been to … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Good News about the state of the world; cultural concepts; science; religion and fantasy

Posted on Monday 5 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up on links and comments from the past three weeks or so, given the holiday lapse. * First some Good News: Slate: Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack: The World Is Not Falling Apart In the world is getting more … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Memory, Math, Church and State, Faith, Facts, Stories

Posted on Friday 5 December 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

New York Times: Why Our Memory Fails Us A fascinating NYT op-ed about the fallibility of memory, led by a notorious example from Neil DeGrasse Tyson. \/\/\/\/ Math Anxiety: Why Hollywood Makes Robots of Alan Turing and Other Geniuses How … Continue reading →

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Recent Links and Comments: Ken Ham, Timothy Egan, Valerie Tarico, Adam Frank, Nathaniel Frank

Posted on Thursday 24 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m some two weeks behind on posting comments and links here, though I’ve been compiling such links for eventual posting. Website issues have preoccupied me. Here’s a first bunch of them. More tomorrow. 23 July: Salon: The Christian right’s 5 … Continue reading →

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Today’s Odds and Ends: Conservative rejection of science; Christians’ perceived persecution; Dinesh D’Souza’s paranoia

Posted on Wednesday 9 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There have been several articles in recent days about how people [conservatives] who don’t accept evolution or climate science don’t necessarily know less about those subjects than others… they do so because their “community” rejects such conclusions, by instinct. New … Continue reading →

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Prothero on The Unpersuadables

Posted on Sunday 6 July 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Another review of a review: Donald Prothero (a geology professor at Occidental College in LA, and a lecturer at Caltech), has a review of a new book by Will Storr, The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science, that develops … Continue reading →

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Links, Quotes, Comments: 20 June

Posted on Friday 20 June 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A post today by Amanda Marcotte, on both Salon and Alternet– Salon: Reason vs. the right: Have conservatives abandoned science and rationality? Alternet: Have Conservatives Abandoned Rationality, Skepticism and Truth? The possibility that rationality itself has become a partisan issue … Continue reading →

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The Need to Feel Special

Posted on Wednesday 9 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The scientific kerfuffle of the past couple days has been about a documentary supporting geocentrism (as if the creationists are not crazy enough), the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe, immovable, and that the sun and … Continue reading →

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Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos

Posted on Wednesday 12 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Follow-up article in Salon about the man whose father was lost to the paranoid outrage of Fox News. (The original article on this topic inspired my explanation about how science fiction represents the antithesis of such dead-end traps of ideology … Continue reading →

Posted in Cosmology, Evolution, Lunacy, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Fox, Certainty, Arrogance, Evidence, and Cosmos