Another reason to use Google

FT reports that Google publicly opposes California Proposition 8.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html

I can’t wait to see the fundies all calling for a boycott and switching their gmail accounts.

New Ecuador constitution may open another chink in anti-abortion South America

Associated Press reports that a vote on the new constitution has passed by a strong margin in the South American republic of Ecuador, despite opposition from the Roman Catholic church.  While the constitution defines life as beginning from conception, it contains wording that opens up very wide chinks in Catholic traditionalism.  The family is recognized  “in its diverse types” and the new constitution guarantees “the right to freely make responsible and informed decisions about one’s health and reproductive life.”

Yes, it has opened the door to abortion and same-sex marriage a little wider.

About bloody time too.

Reiss fried by Nobel laureate

The Guardian website yesterday carried a blistering attack on Michael Reiss by Nobel prizewinner Harry Kroto, over Reiss’s recent advocacy of teaching creationism as a “cultural worldview” in British science lessons.  Kroto is having none of it, and says the problem is that as a church minister Reiss was in the wrong job.   “It really does not matter whether one believes a mystical entity created the universe 5,000 or 10,000 million years ago – both are equally irrational unsubstantiated claims of no fundamental validity.”  All religious people, including Reiss, “fall at the first hurdle of the main requirement for honest scientific discussion because they accept unfound dogma as having fundamental significance.”

Kroto frames it as a matter of intellectual integrity:

“An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface. Reiss cannot have his religious cake in church and eat the scientific one in the classroom. “

Reiss stepped down as Education Director of the Royal Society this month after his controversial comments.

Philip Pullman celebrates his “most challenged” book with glee

The Guardian reports that Philip Pullman felt “glee” on hearing that his novel Northern Lights, marketed as The Golden Compass in North America, is near the top of the “most challenged” list issued by the American Library Association, behind three other books.  Apparently 420 written complaints about the book’s content have been received by the Association.

He is quoted as saying: “”Firstly, I had obviously annoyed a lot of censorious people, and secondly, any ban would provoke interested readers to move from the library, where they couldn’t get hold of my novel, to the bookshops, where they could…Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good,”

He credits religious objections to the film, The Golden Compass with increasing sales of his first novel.

Meanwhile the film continues to defy expectations.  Despite a disappointing domestic performance, The Golden Compass has a worldwide gross of $372 million on production costs of $180 million.  The 2004 hit, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events made £209 million on production costs of $140 million. Both films were rated PG in the home market.