Atheists win 67% of Tony Blair Faith Foundation film prizes

December 7, 2012 • 4:18 am

According to New Humanist, the outcome of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s film contest didn’t quite come out the way Tony would like it:

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation held their awards for their Faith Shorts film competition on Monday, and of the three prize winners two were atheists. We’re quick to jump on the TB Foundation when they promote faith guff so we should make a point of saying well done when they don’t.

The event was pretty starry by all accounts – with a video message from Hugh Jackman (sporting rather nice Wolverine sideburns) and speeches from TB and Jimmy Wales (who you may know from such fund raising messages as ‘give Wikipedia $5’). You can see for yourself if you want.

Of the two “atheist films” our favourite is the winner of the 18-27 category, Death Bed the Musical, the charming stop-motion animation musical by 25-year old Israeli Liat Har-Gil (below). [JAC: I’ve added the full version rather than the shortened one given by New Humanist. It’s still only about 6 minutes long.]

The synopsis from Vimeo:

An old man sits in a nursing home, waiting to die. A devoutly religious man, he firmly believes he will receive his due reward in the afterlife. While reflecting on his own virtues and thinking of the world to come, a woman enters. He believes her to be an angel only to realize that she is in fact a nurse, nearing the end of a long, arduous shift, brings his breakfast. The old man sees his mistake and sings to her. The nurse, too tired to play in to his song, starts to leave. The old man stops her while not realizing that he amuses her with his ideas of the afterlife and god. An argument about faith vs. atheism develops between the two, in song.

I think it’s pretty good.

And New Humanist’s report:

Accepting her prize Liat said: “I myself am not a religious person but I believe that promoting an understanding between different religions is very important and should be celebrated. I am grateful that the Foundation understood the message of my movie: the dangers of religious intolerance”.

Also worth a look is The Mirror, by 15-year-old Mudit Muraka from New Delhi, who won the Face to Faith category of the Faith Shorts film competition.

h/t: Peter

Fish vs. man

December 6, 2012 • 1:56 pm

Tweeted by Carl Zimmer, we have an amazing photo that’s one of the contenders in the 2012 National Geographic photo contest:

Photo and caption by Octavio Aburto

Together with my friend David Castro, we were diving with a large group of Bigeye travellies at Cabo Pulmo National Park, Mexico. Thousands of fish forming a ball during the reproduction courtship. In the afternoon, these fish congregate to form a large spawning aggregation around the reefs of the National Park.

Location: Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico

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The bigeye trevally (Caranx sexfasciatus) is a large fish: according to Wikipedia, it can grow up to 1.2 m and weigh 18 kg. It lives in the tropical waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

You can also rate 12 photos in the “viewers’ choice” competition.

BBC’s Science Club with Dara O Briain

December 6, 2012 • 10:51 am

I’ve always been a fan of Dara O Briain—well, at least since I’ve known of this “strident” atheistic comedian and science love, which has been about a year.  Reader Tom told me that not only did O Briain have a new show, “Science Club” on the BBC, but that the first episode was on YouTube. (Watch it now folks, because once the Beeb finds out, it’s gone).

Further, the episode is on genetics and inheritance, and the special guest my old friend Steve Jones (quite eloquent, as always), as well as several other guests and talking heads.

It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast, with some glaringly disparate bits (e.g., the interpolated history of the bicycle), and the discussion of epigenetics was muddled and overblown, but overall I liked this episode.  The science is pretty good, and the discussion of whether the Human Genome Project has lived up to its hype is something one doesn’t often see in the popular media.

Egypt is on the way to becoming Iran

December 6, 2012 • 7:58 am

Remember back in June when, in a post called “Egypt is doomed,” I predicted that the election of Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, foretold the creation of an Islamic state in Egypt?

Several commenters promptly admonished me for crying wolf. One, for instance, said this:

Jerry, calm down. The office of president in Egypt has very little real authority, and Moursi does not have a mandate from the people, so you can forget about Egypt becoming Iran-lite. The military, who are incredibly powerful, are violently anti-Muslim Brotherhood and extremely attached to secularism, so I do not expect Islamic law to be instituted there. What happened was simple: due to the way the elections work there, the two top candidates go to a run-off if no one wins an outright majority, and it happened to be Moursi against Ahmed Shafik, a former Mubarak cabinet member who promised a return to authoritarianism. Think of Moursi’s win as a blow struck against the old order rather than an endorsement of Islamism. I also think Egypt has way bigger problems right now than this mostly inconsequential election that most Egyptians seem to be fairly disgusted with.

And there were other comments of the same ilk.

I don’t want to gloat, because people are dying now in Egypt to defend secularism, but I think I was right. Egypt, it seems, is going down the road toward a theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia.

It turns out that, backed by his Muslim Brotherhood minions, Morsi has power after all, is trying to push an anti-secular constitution and, in fact, is striving to expand his own powers. This is, as you know, leading to riots and bloodshed in the streets of Cairo. Dozens have been injured, and at least four killed, in last week’s rioting.

The cause, is, of course religion: the desire of the Muslim Brotherhood to run Egypt under sharia law, and turn it into a theocracy. Of course they deny that, saying that they favor “democracy,” but that’s a lie. The whole issue is summed up in a statement reported by the New York Times reports (link above):

In a city square on the Islamist side of the battle lines, a loudspeaker on the top of a moving car blared out exhortations that the fight was about more than politics or Mr. Morsi.

“This is not a fight for an individual, this is not a fight for President Morsi,” the speaker declared. “We are fighting for God’s law, against the secularists and liberals.”

This is what religion does when it gets power over a state. When are people going to believe that radical Muslims mean what they say about jihad?

Goodbye, Egypt. Who’s next—Turkey?

Belief in miracles increasing in U.S.

December 6, 2012 • 5:07 am

Two caveats: this report is from PuffHo, and the original study hasn’t yet been published, so I haven’t seen it; the data come from a report at a meeting. Nevertheless, I expect that data, reported by David Briggs in his piece “Belief in miracles is on the rise,” are correct. (Briggs’s PuffHo bio notes that he is “a former national writer for The Associated Press who holds a master’s degree from Yale Divinity School”).

. . . as more people appear to be turning away from organized religion, a new study finds that the number of Americans who definitely believe in religious miracles increased 22 percent in the past two decades, with 55 percent now certain of this supernatural phenomenon.

Overall, some four in five Americans believe miracles definitely or probably occur, researcher Robert Martin of Pennsylvania State University reported at the recent meeting of the American Sociological Association in Denver.

While beliefs in heaven and hell have remained steady in recent decades, the increased belief in miracles crosses all religious traditions, with the strongest gains reported by those who attend services infrequently, Martin reported.

. . . Penn State’s Martin analyzed General Social Survey data from 1991 to 2008. He found the belief in miracles is growing in recent years. Nearly 73 percent of American adults in 1991 believed that miracles definitely or probably existed, compared to 78 percent in 2008. The percentage who “definitely” believed in miracles rose from 45 percent in 1991 to 55 percent in 2008.

Well, a 5% increase isn’t that much, and better be statistically significant if the results are to mean anything (the 10% increase in the “definite” is more credible). But what’s disturbing is that 78% of Americans believe in miracles at all, and more than half “definitely” do.  And this in an age of science, with no miracle ever substantiated!

But the observation that strongest gains occur in those who go to church less frequently gives a clue to this puzzling result, which doesn’t seem to comport with the increase in “nones” (people with no religious affiliation) over the U.S. in the last decade. What’s the cause? According to Briggs, it may be the rise of “spirituality”:

One potential explanation, according to Martin, is the cultural preoccupation with miracles promoted in non-dogmatic ways by a series of popular television programs such as “Touched by an Angel” and best-selling books such as the “Left Behind” and “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series.

No one, Martin and other researchers point out, may have done more for this spiritual phenomenon than Oprah Winfrey, who with her extraordinarily popular television show and other ventures made accounts of the miraculous a regular part of the lives of millions of Americans.

Whatever the cause, what the evidence on miracles and other research on personal spirituality also indicates to researchers is the persistence of transcendent beliefs even as fewer Americans identify with a particular religious group.

To me this explanation isn’t credible (and we must assume the trend is real, though I’m dubious). Why would Americans who either flee the church to become “nones,” or those who simply grow up lacking faith, show more belief in miracles than people 17 years ago? Yes, being a “none” is no guarantee that you don’t believe in woo; that’s a fallacy. But certainly some of the “nones” are skeptics and would be expected to abjure miracles.

Anyway, it’s still dispiriting, and a reminder that lack of religion doesn’t mean lack of belief in woo or an increase in criticality. We still need ways to teach children critical thinking, and some way to discourage religious brainwashing of kids, so that we can avoid outcomes like this:

In the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey, 23 percent of respondents said they witnessed a miraculous physical healing and 16 percent said they received a miraculous healing.

And in the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey, three-quarters of respondents said they prayed to God to receive healing from an illness or injury; more than five in six respondents prayed for someone else’s healing.

What is most telling about this unceasing belief in miracles, Dougherty said, is that it is another indicator that “as a society, as Americans in general. [We] are not in this uniform march toward secularism.”

One in six people say they received a miraculous healing! Do they not consider spontaneous remission or cure of disease that doesn’t have a goddy cause? And, of course, why don’t those praying amputees get their legs, or the eyeless their eyes?

In the end, though, I am convinced that Americans are on a uniform march toward secularism. It will just be a slow march.

The Pope’s first tweet!

December 6, 2012 • 4:16 am

The Pope finally made his first tweet, including a picture of himself—with God, no less.

MIAMI—In his first post since joining social networking site Twitter early this week, Pope Benedict XVI has tweeted a picture of himself spending time with the Lord Our God, Divine Creator of the Universe. “Feelin real blessed today to be hangin out wit @therealHeavenlyFather today!” the pope wrote to his nearly 500,000 Twitter followers, attaching a link to a Twitpic photo of himself in which he is seen relaxing on his papal yacht with God. “Just gettin some sun and sippin cocktails. #loveit.” At press time, the picture had been retweeted by Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Oprah Winfrey, and Jesus Christ

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h/t: Diane G