One Utah

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 - [...]