Christians in predominantly Hindu Nepal demand land to bury their dead:

Christians have been protesting since a ban was imposed earlier this year on a traditional burial area next to a revered Hindu temple in Katmandu. The Supreme Court has temporarily lifted the ban, but the dispute continues.

From nytimes.com

Whiplash indeed!

A public bus rolls by with an atheist message on its side: “Millions of people are good without God.” Seconds later, a van follows bearing a riposte: “I still love you. — God,” with another line that says, “2.1 billion Christians are good with God.

More here at NY Times.

Add this to the “learn something new every day” category:

Misotheism doesn’t accord with binary thinking about religious belief. We are accustomed to view people as either believers, who worship a divinity, or nonbelievers (atheists) or doubters (agnostics), for whom the deity is irrelevant. Misotheists are a category-defying species: They believe in God (hence they are not atheists), but they hate him (hence they are not theists).

From Chronicle of Higher Education.

This didn’t make it on to the blog while I was co-teaching the Death and Immortality course. I realize the word is bandied about a lot, blessedly not as much as it was during the Bush administration, but this takes a big dose of bravery to do this.

The former beauty queen stared into the camera, but this was no pageant or performance. She looked frail and thin, and her hair was rumpled. But Eva Markvoort smiled weakly.”Hello to the world at large,” she said in the video. “To my blog, to my friends, to everyone. I have some news today. It’s kinda tough to hear, but I can say it with a smile.” Propped in a hospital bed, Markvoort sat surrounded by her family. “My life is ending.”

Read the rest here at CNN.com

Well, I only stuck with the title because I think Hitchens would see the humor and agree.

I’m not sure this school board in Louisiana has thought this through.

Benton said that under provisions of the Science Education Act enacted last year by the Louisiana Legislature, schools can present what she termed “critical thinking and creationism” in science classes.

Board Member David Tate quickly responded: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?”

Fellow board member Clint Mitchell responded, “I agree … you don’t have to be afraid to point out some of the fallacies with the theory of evolution. Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom.”

Even though creationism in the minds of these school board members may not be the same thing as intelligent design, a Federal court already weighed in on this with a resounding verdict on the side of science, which in that instance fell on the side of evolution.

From The New York Times (Dec. 20, 2005):

A federal judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania school board’s policy of teaching intelligent design in high school biology class is unconstitutional because intelligent design is clearly a religious idea that advances “a particular version of Christianity.”

In the nation’s first case to test the legal merits of intelligent design, Judge John E. Jones III dealt a stinging rebuke to advocates of teaching intelligent design as a scientific alternative to evolution in public schools.

The judge found that intelligent design is not science, and that the only way its proponents can claim it is, is by changing the very definition of science to include supernatural explanations.

On p. 64 of the Court’s decision (pdf), the Court held that Intelligent Design (ID) was not science:

We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980′s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. As we will discuss in more detail below, it is
additionally important to note that ID has failed to gain acceptance in the scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the
subject of testing and research.

It also seem apparent that the Livingston School Board has not passed the “Lemon” test. (No. Not that kind of “Lemon Law”.) Quoting again from the Dover case:

As articulated by the Supreme Court, under the Lemon test, a government-sponsored message violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment if: (1) it does not have a secular purpose; (2) its principal or primary effect advances or inhibits religion; or (3) it creates an excessive entanglement of the government with religion. Lemon, 403 U.S. at 612-13. As the Lemon test is disjunctive, either an improper purpose or an improper effect renders the ID Policy invalid under the Establishment Clause.

The bigger catch here is that the there is something governmental that “inhibits” religion, namely, the First Amendment and the court cases that restrict religious education in public schools. But it’s not much of a snag. If the schools in question are parochial schools there’d be no issue at all. The smaller catch might be that if the school board does not encourage the teaching of other “scientific” views, they are harming their students. This is a clear secular purpose. But one would think the Dover case closed that avenue.

Doesn’t Louisiana have enough on its plate?

Very good blog post on outing oneself as an atheist by Lauri Lebo.  This wasn’t surprising:

57 percent of U.S. respondents said they felt they would suffer at least minor social repercussions in the workplace if they came out as an atheist, compared to only 35 percent of respondents in Canada, 24 percent of Australians, 15 percent of residents of United Kingdom, and 12 percent of Western Europeans.

But this was new and news to me about Pat Tillman’s death.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who led the second investigation into Tillman’s death, said the reason for the family’s dogged pursuit of the truth of his death was because they didn’t believe in God.

Will getting a transplant from a murderer make you evil? More people willing to refuse transplant from a criminal.

Not a great statistic among Boomers.

A reminder about the connection between notions of immortality, obituaries and Aristotle’s view about assessing a whole life. Franklin’s view offers us shades (pun intended) of Plato, too. When Socrates says that philosophers especially should be in training for death during their lives, he means, in part, that the best is yet to come, i.e., a time when the self is unencumbered by the body. This can only happen fully after death.

In a letter penned to the grieving Elizabeth Hubbart, his brother John’s stepdaughter, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A man is not completely born until he is dead.” He was trying to make her feel better about the death of her stepfather by saying that, as a soul now freed from his body, he was just getting started. What Elizabeth thought of as a life completed, Franklin portrayed as a mere rehearsal for the “real life” that is immortality. God gives bodies to all of us wandering souls for a little while, to experience pleasure, learn some tricks. Eventually, these bodies become painful or sad or just too gross to maintain, and are shuffled off while we get back to the business of being eternal. For Franklin, then, life is never done.
I can see how this sentiment might be comforting to a believer, but for those of us living on the other side of faith, the question of what constitutes a completed life is still an open one. Aristotle thought of life as a sum of its total actions that couldn’t be judged until those actions came to an end. This might be reassuring to those hovering about the frustrated middle of their lives, harshly judging their progress. Not to worry, says Aristotle — it ain’t over till it’s over. And it isn’t really over until you’ve been judged by other people at a point when you can no longer prepare a defense, be reformed, pay restitution, be rehabilitated. Judgment completes life.