a convenient truth

Excellent post from PZ Meyers: Effectively non-existent.  He quotes Roger Ebert (who needs news when we can all just link to each other) who says:

Science has no opinion on religion. It cannot. Science deals with that which can be studied or inferred by observation, measurement, and experiment. Religious belief is outside its purview, except in such social sciences as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, where even then not the validity of the beliefs but their effects are studied.

This particular claim seriously winds me up, and it winds PZ up too.  PZ however is better at explaining why:

In the United States today, we have tens of thousands of priests, rabbis, mullahs, pastors, and preachers who are paid professionals, who claim to be active and functioning mediators between people and omnipotent invisible masters of the universe. They make specific claims about their god’s nature, what he’s made of and what he isn’t, how he thinks and acts, what you should do to propitiate it…they somehow seem to have amazingly detailed information about this being. Yet, when a scientist approaches with a critical eye, suddenly it is a creature that not only has never been observed, but cannot observed, and its actions invisible, impalpible, and immaterial.

So where did these confident promoters of god-business get their information? Shouldn’t they be admitting that their knowledge of this elusive cosmic beast is nonexistent? It seems to me that if you’re going to declare scientists helpless before the absence and irrelevance of the gods, you ought to declare likewise for all of god’s translators and interpreters. Be consistent when you announce who has purview over all religious belief, because making god unobservable and immeasurable makes everyone incapable of saying anything at all about it.

Anyhow, read the whole thing, he makes the point far better than I ever could.

From the Friendly Atheist:

Nearly a third of the inmates in the Creek County Jail were baptized Thursday night in a corrugated steel horse trough set up in the jail’s kitchen.

…

Seventy men and 12 women were baptized Wednesday, the second time baptisms have occurred in the new jail, which opened nearly three years ago.

The Rev. Luis Torres, chaplain of the Creek County Jail and pastor of the First Assembly of God in Sand Springs, said a baptism was held in the old jail six years earlier.

He attributed the high number of baptisms to the work of the 75-some volunteers who lead worship and teach Bible studies at the jail and to convicted inmates’ realization that they soon will leave the jail for hard time in prison.

“And,” he said, “in the last four years, there’s been a surge of the move of God, a revival. Inmates that have found the Lord are telling other inmates about it.”

Inmates are not allowed to be baptized until they have gone through an orientation, with teaching about the meaning of baptism, and have “accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior and want to follow him,” Torres said.

Mr Atheist, as an American, is mostly concerned about The Constitution - but surely there’s a wider point here. So lets imagine they weren’t becoming Christians, but were joining Islam.

How do y’all reckon everyone would feel then?

Some extracts from Christopher Hitchens’ polemic new book.

An essay from Richard Dawkins to coincide with his new book: Richard Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God - Yahoo! News.

It is a matter of wonder to me that the religious ascendency in the US doesn’t scare people so much more than the rather feeble attempts of the “Islamist” movement. They cannot destroy our society — but those in the US most certainly could.