Gallup has done a survey and found the not very surprising result that the nonreligious and moderately religious tilt Democratic while the very religious tilt Republican. This pattern holds true (though to a smaller extent) for all subgroups such as non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics, and Asians, but not for blacks who go Democratic whatever their religiosity.
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Life is a precious gift that we are lucky to have experienced. It can end at any time. We are not entitled to life at all, let alone any specific lifespan. As Richard Dawkins begins in his book Unweaving the Rainbow: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” The only rule about life and death that deserves the name of ‘natural’ is that children should not die before their parents. That statement could be interpreted wrongly as expressing the idea that one wants welcomes the death of one’s parents. But any parent will understand the intent of the sentiment because losing a child is a terrible blow.
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Mark Regev is an Israeli spokesperson whom we saw earlier being grilled by UK Channel 4’s Jon Snow as he trotted out the usual line about all the civilians deaths in Gaza due to the Israeli bombardment somehow being the fault of the victims themselves.
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The Polaris Career Center in the Cleveland area provides training for people in areas such as auto repair, cooking, operating machinery, cosmetology, etc. The usual things that such centers do. But an eagle-eyed person noticed that some of their course offerings are, to put it mildly, bizarre.
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The Obama administration and its supporters of the national security state never tire of telling us that whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should not go public with the revelations but instead go through the ‘proper channels’ since those channels supposedly have safeguards to protect them from retaliation. Apart from the fact that Snowden was a contractor and not a federal employee and thus not entitled to those protections, we saw the harsh treatment meted out to previous whistleblowers who did try to use these methods. Indeed it was seeing what happened to these earlier whistleblowers that made Snowden choose his particular path.
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Pakistan is a country that one thought was on the way to becoming a modern state but it seems to be regressing into a medieval religious one. One of the symptoms is the incorporation into its judicial code of blasphemy laws. This has emboldened Muslim extremists to take the law into their own hands to defend the honor of their god by killing those accused of blasphemy, without even waiting for these laws to be used against offenders.
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Today comes yet another report of Israel shelling a UN school where hundreds of people were sheltering from the barrage and killing at least 19 people, despite UN officials repeatedly telling Israel that civilians were sheltering there. UN officials on the ground are openly disgusted with such actions.
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In mainstream US media coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza, the attacks by Hamas are labeled ‘terrorism’ while those by Israel are labeled ‘self defense’. But as Glenn Greenwald says, the sheer statistics of the current assault on Gaza reveals how the US media uses those labels in a purely propagandist manner.
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The Onion points out that religious people often have to deal with tricky decisions that for us atheists are no-brainers.
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