A fecolith is an ossified 'dropping', so fecolithology is the study of such offerings.Nor would anyone know from reading the latest rash of anti-God books that promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day America (let's see a conservative Supreme Court try to roll that back);
But they make me concerned nevertheless, because I think they strike a blow against something more important (at least to me) than belief in God. In their contempt for any belief that cannot be scientifically or empirically proved, the anti-God books are attacking our inborn capacity to create value and meaning for ourselves.
What utter boocr*p! Siegel, probably for the sake of getting his name in print, is jousting with an invisible straw man. This is not mere distortion of an argument made by the 'militant atheists', but it is something that they are not saying at all*. In fact, Dawkins quite clearly says the opposite of this in TV interviews and in the sections that I have already read of The God Delusion. Siegel is either deficient in understanding or has read theistic reviews rather than the books he is thus libeling. Judging by comments around the blogosphere that Siegel denigrated, the explanation lies largely in the former interpretation.
But that campaign against religious faith and superstition triumphed long ago in the West, where we now live in a technological, irreligious age beyond the wildest Enlightenment hopes.
Technology has definitely advanced in those 200 years, but the Founding Fathers, never mind Voltaire, would probably be horrified at the rampant fundamentalist religiosity that, amongst its other dubious manifestations, put Dubaya into power.
Even Siegel appears not to be impressed by Dubaya's administration when he complains, "For instance, Bush and his gang preach Christian values while lying us into a slaughterhouse overseas, ransacking our public coffers and ignoring social inequities and iniquities at home -- and so our heroic anti-religionists attack . . . Christian values."
Look again, Siegel, many religionists continue to approve of Dubaya, while liberals and atheists were among the first to declare horror at the damage to . . . human values. It strikes me as odd that a Jewish writer should be worring about 'Christian' values.
Oh, go read The Sorrows of Young Werther if you want Romantic fantasy, Siegel! You are clearly unaware that science opens up the wonders of the universe to the imagination, whereas the God of the Gaps explains absolutely nothing and religious zealotry kills. Siegel is obviously unaware, or uncaring, that scientific investigation requires creative thinking on the part of hypothesizers and designers of experiments.When our anti-religionists attack the mechanism of religious faith by demanding that our beliefs be underpinned by science, statistics and cold logic, they are, in effect, attacking our right to believe in unseen, unprovable things at all. Their assault on religious faith amounts to an attack on the human imagination.
Because the existence of God is undemonstrable, unverifiable and the object of an impractical leap of faith, religion, it seems to me, is one of imagination's last strongholds.
Religion is indeed a product of fervent imaginations, but this comment is otherwise utterly and completely unjustified because, as exemplified by the wonders revealed by science and by the creative outpourings of atheists, imagination is not the sole property of religion. Boocr*p yes, creativity and wonder no. Siegel is probably incapable of discerning the difference.
*Mark Hoofnagle sums up the 'militant atheist' position admirably:
Dawkins et al., are not making the argument that we should become robots, tied to cold logic and unable to do anything new because rationality isn't prepared for the unknown. They are making the argument that we should free our minds from dogmatism and illogic which hampers our creativity, our compassion for our fellow men and women, and locks us into patterns of behavior prescribed by ancient texts that are contradictory, bigoted, and irrelevant in our modern age.
Siegel's arguments are absurd, and irrelevant. But then, so is Siegel.
I love that admission. I wish more theists would make it. It's saying that the value of religion lies in its awesome idiocy — that no rational, reasonable person could possibly believe in that load of tripe, therefore, because so many people do believe in it, it must be valuable (and they so blithely overlook the possibility that the reason so many accept it is that they are irrational and unreasonable). A willingness to believe does not make a fact out of fantasy — it makes you a believer in nonsense, nothing more.
I am amazed that Siegel has never heard of George Carlin, Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Pratchett, Salman Rushdie, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Woody Allen, David Cross, David Gilmour, Billy Joel, and, one of my personal favorites, H.P. Lovecraft. That list does not [even] include agnostics. So either Siegel is staggeringly ignorant of the contributions of non-theists to the arts or he does not consider the works of these people significant or he is aware and considers them important, but is being completely dishonest. Considering his past episode of sock-puppetry, I'm going with the last one. _ Atheotatous_
atheism
morality
religion
science
George W Bush
Richard Dawkins
Christopher Hitchens
Lee Siegel
'You must believe' – what a ridiculous misinterpretation of freedom of religion and speech!
Alice Shannon of Soldotna, Alaska appears unaware of the fact that a far higher proportion of the religious rather than of atheists commit crimes. I refer not merely to actual numbers of religious criminals versus atheist criminals, but to the fact that atheists are underrepresented in the criminal factions. Why? Atheists are more likely than the religious to have higher levels of education and the educated are less likely to commit violent crimes. They commit white collar crimes, if they commit crimes at all. (My bet is that the Enron perpetrators were actually religious.)
However, even F-Alice-ous must have heard of this statistic. She argues, purely on emotional grounds, that even if atheists have not committed a crime that this approximately 10% of the USian population is still responsible for the rampancy of crime. Perhaps, knowing that atheists are usually brighter and better educated than the religious, F-Alice-ous believes that atheists, like Danny Ocean, are the masterminds who direct goon religionists to commit crimes. By this reasoning, American prisons are full of religious felons because these criminals are daft enough to get caught.
In her bigotted stupidity, F-Alice-ous is actually ignoring the root causes of crime in America. These include America's policy of slavery and subsequent maltreatment of African Americans; First Amendment protection of gun-related crime; family violence and abuse of children, including authoritarian parenting styles; and, conservative-policies-supported poverty (like Dick Cheney, greedy conservatives have 'never met a welfare proogram they liked').
The further ruin of the US has been brought upon Americans not by atheism but by the worst president in history. Despite his record of lies and incompetence and the enormous cost of his Alienate-Hearts-and-Minds War-to-Invite-Terror, religious bigots love Dubaya because he tells them that God gives him directions. This of course, is quite plausible since Dubaya clearly is not getting any good advice.
I did find something good on the website that posted the video: Manikin Moonwalk a bird with da moves.
