Proof that God designed bananas.

By , on 17 May, 2006

[Editor’s Note: Somehow this entry got set back to pending so I’m reopening it.]

Here’s a video from some Christian nutjob TV channel, where the presenter tries to justify that God designed the banana. Watch it below, or view it at Google Video.

Found via Gia’s Blog.

21 comments   Humor, Rants, Religion, Stupidity in Action   , , ,  

Poorest Brits are healthier than Richest Americans.

By , on 7 May, 2006

A study published by the American Medical Association shows that even the poorest Brits are healthier than the richest Americans:

Middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England, startling new research shows, despite U.S. health care spending per person that’s more than double what England spends.

A higher rate of Americans tested positive for diabetes and heart disease than the English. Americans also self-reported more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.

The gap between the countries holds true for educated and uneducated, rich and poor.

The study focused only on non-Hispanic whites and took factors like smoking, drinking and obesity into account – Brits tend to drink more heavily and more Americans are obese. It concluded that Americans tend to have a worse diet (eating more junk food) and took part in less exercise, but also that in Britain the primary health care provision was better, so that ailments were being picked up and treated earlier.

The media on both sides of the Atlantic constantly derides Britain’s state health care system but actually it does work nearly all the time, and studies like this show that.

5 comments   Life    

British racist politician tries to justify his views on TV

By , on 27 April, 2006

Sky News, a 24-hour-news channel partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., held an interview with Dr Phill Edwards, the press officer of the British National Party (BNP) – a far-right political party. Though the BNP claims it is not racist, it is essentially opposed to all forms of immigration and several of its members have been taken to court charged with making comments which may incite racial hatred, which is a crime in the UK.

The video of the interview is here – in it, Edwards stands by comments made to a student in January 2005 where he says that young black people have low IQs and are likely to mug you, and that black people generally are not high achievers. Edwards has a PhD and he claims that black people are genetically disadvantaged.

It’s worth a watch.

12 comments   Politics    

Jerry Falwell fails to get fallwell.com shut down.

By , on 18 April, 2006

CNet News.com reports that the religious nutjob Jeryy Falwell has failed to get the website, Fallwell.com closed down:

High court skips Falwell Web site case

A legal spat over a Web site criticizing the Rev. Jerry Falwell for his antigay views won’t ascend to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The justices on Monday declined without comment to take up the evangelical preacher’s appeal, which challenged the operator of Fallwell.com, a site that aims to explain “why Rev. Falwell is completely wrong about people who are gay or lesbian.” The televangelist had claimed the domain name’s spelling was too close to that of his official Web presence and asked the courts to shut it down.

The site in question is quite interesting, in that it disproves many of Falwell’s teachings on gay and lesbianism. The court decided that the domain name and site name does not infringe trademarks and is sufficiently different from Falwell’s own site at jerryfalwell.com.

Score one for free speech.

25 comments   Politics, Religion   ,  

Anti-Abortion Extremists arrive in the UK.

By , on 28 March, 2006

Yesterday’s Guardian featured an article about the UK Life League, an anti-abortion group, and the tactics it has started employing to have abortion banned in the United Kingdom. Abortion is legal across the country here, and though there have always been groups opposed to it, such as Comment on Reproductive Ethics, none of them have resorted to ‘direct action’ and have merely taken part in the normal democratic process. The UK LifeLeague, which was founded by a Catholic businessman claiming to be a vicar, is the first direct action group to campaign against abortion, and its first targets have been a Catholic girls school and a gynaecology nurse.

The article does, however, go to some lengths to discredit the organisation’s actions:

The head teacher of Woldingham School, Diana Vernon, has been accused of “child abuse” for providing sex education for her 14- and 15-year-old pupils as required under the national curriculum. Activists are being encouraged to bombard Ms Vernon with hate emails. [..] “I couldn’t believe it,” said Ms Vernon. “What we teach falls entirely within the national curriculum and the way in which we teach the use of contraception is in the context of a committed relationship. Every Catholic school in the country will be doing what we are doing.

In other words, they are targeting one school for teaching the same thing that every other school in the country has to teach. Surely then it is not the school that should be targeted but the government for including this in the curriculum? Then there’s this:

Elsewhere, hospitals have been sent images of aborted foetuses and abortion clinics subjected to noisy demonstrations.

Because I’m sure hospital staff will have never seen an aborted foetus before.

The group’s leader, James Dowson, denies links with US pro-life groups, despite having the admiration of Neal Horsley, the founder of The Nuremberg Files which publishes the details of abortion clinics in the US with the aim of encouraging action against them. He also claimed to have raided hospital bins to find pictures of aborted foetuses, which Marie Stopes UK (a family planning organisation) has said is impossible.

It’s sad when vigilante groups try to take the law into their own, ultimately futile, hands when dealing with issues like this. The UK, like the US, is a democratic country and if people are concerned about issues like abortion then there are ways of having the law changed. Intimidating people, especially those merely doing their job, is not right.

21 comments   Politics, Rants, Stupidity in Action   , ,  

FeedBurner feed available for Bloglines users.

By , on 20 March, 2006

For some bizarre reason, Bloglines hasn’t been showing any updates from SEB in over a month, which means that around 40-odd people haven’t been able to read anything here for several weeks now. I’ve therefore created this FeedBurner feed for those of you using Bloglines.

There may be a short delay between entries being posted here and them appearing on the feed, but at least they will actually appear.

[Editor’s Note: Thanks Neil, I hadn’t thought of using FeedBurner for that purpose. Just for the record, I do have an open ticket with the folks at Bloglines about the issue and they’ve tried resetting the feed on their end to see if it corrected the problem, but it hasn’t. I’ve sent them another email letting them know. It’s interesting to note that DOF’s blog also doesn’t work with Bloglines.]

Leave a comment   Blogging    

British Jews and Christians fall out over bulldozer boycott.

By , on 23 February, 2006

There’s a bit of a tizz going on here in the UK between the Church of England, the largest Christian denomination in Britain, and the Jewish community, over the CofE’s recent decision to disinvest from Caterpillar, who make construction machinery. The decision was made due to the use of Caterpillar bulldozers by the Israeli army for clearing Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza, which as far as I know is in contrevention of United Nations agreements.

This Guardian article explains the situaton, but essentially the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has accused the CofE of commiting anti-semitism as a result of this decision, and that it “set back Anglican-Jewish relations by 70 years”. This argument, in my mind, is a load of old bunkum. Here’s a Venn Diagram to illustrate my point:

Venn Diagram

Note that the diagram is almost certainly not to scale, but I think it does illustrate the point I’m trying to make here.

In other words, just because you’re Jewish, does not mean you believe that what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is right. I’m not taking sides with regard to the Middle East Conflict, but I think it’s a bit rich to assume all Jews support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. No sane person would say all Muslims are terrorists, so why bracket all Jews in the same way?

I’m sure some will be Jews who do think that this boycott is anti-semitic, and while Mr Sacks is entitled to his opinion he should not do so in a capacity whereby he claims to represent all British Jews. Because I’m pretty sure that he does not.

70 comments   Politics, Religion   ,  

How evangelists preach Creationism.

By , on 21 February, 2006

If like me you’re firmly sold on the merits of the theory of the evolution and find it concerning how people can disagree so wildly with it, then an article in the Los Angeles Times will only add to your concerns. The article, Their Own Version of a Big Bang details how one evangelist, Ken Ham, encourages schoolchildren to challenge their teachers if they are told evolution is fact.

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

“Boys and girls,” Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, “you put your hand up and you say, ‘Excuse me, were you there?’ Can you remember that?”

The children roared their assent.

“Sometimes people will answer, ‘No, but you weren’t there either,’ ” Ham told them. “Then you say, ‘No, I wasn’t, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.’ ” He waved his Bible in the air.

“Who’s the only one who’s always been there?” Ham asked.

“God!” the boys and girls shouted.

“Who’s the only one who knows everything?”

“God!”

“So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?”

The children answered with a thundering: “God!”

It seems that many of the children are sent to these events by evangelical parents who want to give their children ‘another perspective’, or to re-inforce their faith in God. Ken Ham is a former biology teacher, which probably gives him some credibility, and he manages to cobble together some weak ‘scientific’ evidence for his theory, namely cave paintings and the speed at which material can fossilize. The fact that there’s stacks of verifiable scientific evidence in favour of evolution and is the chosen theory of most scientists seems not to matter to him – it’s incompatible with his faith so he chooses to ignore it.

Had Mr Ham just been some random guy off the street this wouldn’t be anything that people like me would lose sleep over, but the fact that he preaches to thousands of people, especially children, every week concerns me greatly.

42 comments   Church and State, Politics, Religion, Science   , , ,  

Are there really doubts about evolution?

By , on 23 December, 2005

The Guardian poses the question, “Are there serious doubts about Darwinism?”. One of the arguments given in favour of the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools in the US is that evolution is “just a theory” and that not all scientists agree with it, and that suppressing the teaching of ID is tantamount to censorship of conflicting views.

And the answer is…

No. Religious fundamentalists have a problem with Darwin’s science because, simply, it does not square with stories told in sacred scriptures. But there the doubts basically end, and the judicial ruling in America that a supposed alternative to Darwinism, intelligent design, may not be taught in science classes is not going to upset many scientists.

It closes with this thought:

Darwin’s “theory” must be just about as solid as Newton’s laws of motion. These aren’t quite absolutely certain either, but they get you to the office every day, to Australia, and even to the moon.

44 comments   Religion, Science   ,  

Up to 1000 boys separated from parents by a religious sect.

By , on 14 June, 2005

Today’s Guardian reports how a polygamous Christian religious sect has been separating hundreds of teenage boys from their parents:

Many of these “Lost Boys”, some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.

The 10,000-strong FLDS, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven.

Apparently the sect is facing a shortage of women who are still available for marriage and so are removing the younger members to free some up. The sect also believes that “…black people are inferior, the offspring of Cain” and that “…America was first colonised by a lost tribe of Israelites and was visited by Jesus after his resurrection.”

37 comments   Religion    
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