Here's another shining beacon of evangelicals gone wild. Shirley Phelps Roper picketer of American soldier funerals and hater of all things pink - does a great job of illuminating her intellectual and religious prowess here on Hannity and Colmes. She makes FOX look sane and that's no easy task.
"Stars No. 1207," 1996 by David Stephenson/Julie Saul Gallery
The article below from the New York Times discusses evolution and religion and why we may be hard-wired to believe what we believe. This nexus of spirt and science - and all the controversy it generates was the original inspiration to the Godfight.com online video debate.
NEW YORK TIMES, March 6th, 2007
God has always been a puzzle for Scott Atran. When he was 10 years old, he scrawled a plaintive message on the wall of his bedroom in Baltimore. “God exists,” he wrote in black and orange paint, “or if he doesn’t, we’re in trouble.” Atran has been struggling with questions about religion ever since — why he himself no longer believes in God and why so many other people, everywhere in the world, apparently do.
Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.
