17 year old Pakistani boy faces death

Repost from NYTimes:

The police have arrested a 17-year-old boy accused of writing a blasphemous remark in an examination paper, an officer said Tuesday. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have come under scrutiny since the killing last month of a prominent politician who had campaigned to change them. They allow for the death penalty for anyone found guilty of insulting Islam. The school authorities lodged a complaint against the boy, identified as Sami Ullah, in January after reading a paper he wrote for an exam in Karachi, said the officer, Qudrat Shah Lodhi. Officer Lodhi said he could not repeat what Sami, who is a Muslim, had written because he would be committing blasphemy. He said the boy told the police that he had written the remark out of frustration when he was not able to answer the exam question. The boy was arrested Saturday.

Public Learns of Changing Zodiac, Thinks It Matters

From an article in the New York Times:

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis innocuously reported Monday that a naturally occurring wobble in the direction of the Earth’s axis — technically known as a “precession” — had altered the alignment of stars’ overhead from their traditional star signs …

This changes the dates of the signs and adds a new, 13th sign. On the possibility of using the ominous number, the New York Times writer places his tongue in cheek:

… a 13th, sign — Ophiuchus, the snake holder — which ancient Babylonians dumped. (Maybe they were superstitious?). Its cycle runs from Nov. 29 to Dec. 17, making it the unofficial sign of Holiday Shoppers …

I just don’t know what we’ll do with ourselves now.

Breaking news: prayer does not work

An interesting prayer study was released a while ago, and reported upon by the New York Times. See this Wikipedia article for some good background information on these prayer studies.

A wide ranging study on the effects of intercessory prayer (not to be confused with the more violent “imprecatory” prayer), was conducted on over 1,800 heart patients. There was a “blind” group of patients that was not told someone was praying for them, and a second group that was told someone was praying for them. The blind group did no better or worse than the average heart patient, and the group that was told they were prayed for did slightly worse.

My first reaction to this study was dismay that the Templeton foundation found another $2.4 million to waste on studying prayer that could have been spent on studying real remedies. More alarming, our United States government has spent $2.3 Million on studying prayer, according to the article. Continue reading…

I Won’t Tell You There’s an App for That

But it’s true. The New York Times reports of the rise of argument-assisting smartphone apps for those bar-time religious arguments we all find ourselves participating in on occasion. Apps include such gems as BibleThumper, your one tap stop for all the knowledge you probably should have already had in your head anyway.

Perhaps what’s more remarkable than the fact such things exist (because, as some contest, bizarre things do exist) is the culture of our debate we’ve sunk to: one-liners, hacked speech and talking points; both sides have built a platform upon which to lob intellectual zingers at one another. It wouldn’t be so objectionable if not for the fact that atheism arose exactly from critical, original thought, and not such groupthink.

Still, at $1.99, who can argue?