Archive for the 'Religion' Category

The Extent and Limits of Religious Freedom

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

PZ Myers reports receiving:
somewhere well above 12,000 hate mail messages from religious people, mostly Catholic; two reasonable messages from Catholics who said that while they are unshaken in their faith, they approve of my opposition to cracker idolatry; and zero comments of any kind from admitted Muslims.

Sam Harris, in The End of Faith [...]

So What’s Wrong with Superiority?

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Responding to my previous post, On Two-Year Olds Walking to Church, one reader dismissed my conservation ethic as “a concept of superiority [that] serves only your ego.” In truth anyone who believes anything would have to admit to a certain amount of holier-than-thou-ness. It’s part of the payback for having to give up ten percent [...]

Ozzie and Harriet Take a Hard Left, Towards The Center

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Anybody who is over a hundred years old, and as bewildered as I am about why a cover for “The New Yorker” has caused a controversy among Barack Obama supporters and even evades a decent comment from Obama himself, might get a kick out of this post. This cover, which portrays Obama dressed in Muslim [...]

The Enlightenment Changed Everything

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Ed Brayton has a great post The Athiests are Coming, the Atheists are Coming! up at his place. In it, he points out a tendency among at least some conservative Christian writes for:
vaguely hysterical writings that get his credulous followers without ever actually identifying what they should feel threatened by, as brilliantly displayed in [...]

What we have to learn from the Cracker

Monday, July 14th, 2008

The Cracker Kerfuffle has drawn some very interesting discussion in the blogosphere. A friend explained to me that many Catholic communities believe that people will steal the consecrated communion wafers to use them in Devil worship. Now, I realize I’m not exactly orthodox in my faith but . . . well, if [...]

Win an AR-15 Assault Rifle for Going to Church!

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Thanks Scalia. This is what happens when gun nuts are allowed out. The FACT is, this kind of thing happens everyday in America. What does NOT happen everyday is that someone’s life is saved as the result of individual hand gun ownership (Alan Korwin thinks it happens at least 547 times per [...]

Is Christianity Nothing More than a Howling Medievalism?

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

PZ Myers was righteously and correctly offended at a nonsense nonissue kerfuffle over a student “stealing” and “holding hostage” a communion wafer. The story goes something like this: the student went to Catholic communion service, didn’t eat the wafer immediately, was physically assaulted by someone trying to force him to eat the wafer [...]

Faith is bunk. Church might not be.

Monday, June 30th, 2008

It’s easy to be impressed by the bible if you’ve never read Shakespeare or Milton. It’s easy to be impressed by the bible if you’ve never read Spenser or Whitman. Hell, compare the majority of the Psalms to Dickinson or Shelley or Tennyson and you can’t help but wonder why God was such [...]

Obama and Trinity UCC: Covenant Broken

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets has a great post about the issues involved.
The weird thing about the UCC is membership occurs at the local church level; you are a member of a UCC congregation which makes you a member of the denomination. Its safe to say there is no uniformity in the [...]

If you think things can’t get any worse in Iraq…

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

If you think things can’t get any worse in Iraq, think again. The Associated Press reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has issued fatwas encouraging armed resistance against the U.S. occupation. Assuming this is true (and it fits what we know of Sistani and the current situation), at the very least it ends [...]

Community, Leadership and the Limits of Individualism

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

The Bush administration’s myriad failures are connected to long term trends in social organizing and the loss of social capital.  In adopting a “go it alone” policy, the Bush administration and its neo-con theorists have taken an ideology of radical individualism and applied it at the level of national policy.
Radical individualism -beloved by Americans - holds that a person acting [...]

Texas’ Actions Not An Infringement on Religious Freedom

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

This morning’s Trib contained an op-ed from Maggie Jessop, that began with the not so provocative opening line:
So, you want to hear from the FLDS women, huh? OK, you asked for it.
Normally, “You asked for it” is followed by a good rant. Not in this case. The op-ed itself is semi-coherent - [...]

US Soldiers in Iraq
killed
wounded