Thinking to Believe

That is the finding of the Public Religion Research Institute.  Not only do Catholics support same-sex marriage in higher numbers than other religious groups, but they even support same-sex marriage in higher numbers than the non-religious (even though the percentage of support for SSM is higher among the non-religious than Catholics–56% vs. 42%–since there are more Catholics than non-religious Americans, the actual number of Catholics who support SSM is higher than the number of non-religious citizens who support SSM).

According to PRRI: (more…)

Here’s another example of liberal “tolerance” at its best.  Apple has been “forced” to remove an app created by Exodus International that is intended to help people with a homosexual orientation overcome that orientation.  How did this happen?  A small pro-homosexual crowd expressed their displeasure with having an application available with such content.  And presto…Apple buckles and removes it.

According to Apple they removed it “because it violates the developer guidelines by being offensive to large groups of people.”  Do they really consider 146,000 people a large group?  What would they do if 1,000,000 people signed a petition saying they find the removal of the app offensive?  Would they put it back up again?  I doubt it.  (more…)

Those aren’t my words (although I concur with them).  Those are the words of John Horgan, a science journalist and former editor of Scientific American.  Horgan recently published an article in Scientific American discussing the dismal state of origin-of-life research.  He describes the research as being at an “impasse,” and resorting to “far out…speculation” as exemplified by the theory of panspermia (life originated in outer space and was brought to earth).

Just one week prior to the publication of Horgan’s article, science writer Dennis Overbye published an article in the New York Times on the same subject.  He reported on an origin-of-life conference at Arizona State University in which two dozen top-ranking scientists from a variety of disciplines converged to discuss the problem.  While Overbye touted the RNA World hypothesis, he noted that “one lesson of the meeting was how finicky are the chemical reactions needed for carrying out these simple-sounding functions,” and “even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small.”

It’s not often that the public is made aware of the fact that scientists have no adequate naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, so it’s refreshing to see this being discussed by ideological opponents in venues as important as the New York Times.