The unending thread drifted onto the topic of cooking…but as usual, all the threads here always revolve around arguments. Then I realized that every thread is just another Abbott and Costello routine.
(Current totals: 10,234 entries with 996,226 comments)
I’m glad someone occasionally looks into the other side of the net to see what they’re talking about — I can’t bear to read religious forums, myself. Here’s why: take a look at what they’re saying on BaptistBoard.
I believe women in politics have done a great disservice to the sovereignty and resolve of a our great Republic. Many issues that face our nation, from without and within, need to be decided from a place of strength instead of weakness. Women are gifted from God with a lot of skills that are good in the home, but not in the Government. They tend to base their decisions from a security standpoint and believe that they have the ability to rehabilitate and nurse others to mental and social health. Men are more pragmatic and can make the tough calls that have to be made in matters of war, also in domestic and international policy. Maybe I should have said men used to be able to make the tough calls. Women in politics have been in position so long now that men are not the men they once were. They have to take into account how their decisions and policies will be viewed by the ladies. Being weak, pathetic, and a bunch of pansies being entrusted with positions of power are all the result of this great error.
Even the loons there who disagree with this nonsense are saying it’s because God gave men and women complementary abilities!
I’m also greatly offended. One consequence of that attitude is that, in order to be True Men™, we have to be ignorant, brutal, and ready to go off to war whenever our testicles tingle…and if you aren’t, you’re a “pansy”. It’s a bias that is as demeaning to men as it is to women.
In 2002, 15 young girls burned to death in a school fire because firemen were not allowed by their religion to enter and rescue females who might not be covered head-to-toe in concealing clothing. In fact, religious police had actively hindered the escape of the girls, with reports that they were hitting them and pushing them back into the building, because they were trying to run out without putting their head coverings on first.
Now, in 2010, the religious ministry has given orders to the religious police to allow even male rescue workers to enter girls’ schools in an emergency.
Wow. So it only took them 8 years to figure out that maybe lives are more important than modesty.
This is terrible news: one of the very best blogs on Scienceblogs, or anywhere, Effect Measure, is shutting down. It’s a sad day; it was one of the blogs I turned to every day, and especially on Sundays for the Freethinker Sermonette. Revere has made a personal decision to move on to other ventures, which is good for him but deprives me of some good writing.
He has passed the public health torch to another blog, The Pump Handle, which is good…and also cruel. He set the bar very high with good writing, humanity, and progressive values, and now this new blog on Sb will have to try to meet those high standards. Ouch. It’s good to have goals, but they should be reachable, you know.
I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on The Pump Handle and hope they can fill the gap Revere has left here.
A pregnant woman in a Phoenix hospital was in a dire state: she was suffering from severe pulmonary hypertension, a condition made much worse by the pregnancy, and was at risk of heart failure. The hospital did what had to be done, with the approval of the family: the 11-week-old fetus was aborted, and the life of the mother saved. This was routine, and I think there was no moral ambiguity at all in this situation: either the mother’s life was saved and the fetus was destroyed, or both mother and fetus would die.
Except that this was in a Catholic hospital. One of the people on the ethics committee that reviewed the case before the abortion was a nun, who agreed that this was the right thing to do. Predictably, Thomas Olmsted, bishop, has deplored the procedure and declared that the nun is automatically excommunicated.
“I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese,” Olmsted said in a statement sent to The Arizona Republic. “I am further concerned by the hospital’s statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother’s underlying medical condition.
“An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means.”
So, inhuman monster and non-doctor Olmsted thinks they should have just stood by and watched the woman go into cardiac arrest and die? This is insane and unethical.
If this is to be standard operating procedure for Catholic hospitals, I think it’s time for the government to step in and remove doctrinaire Catholics from all roles in hospital administration — they are an ongoing danger to the health of innocent patients. Do not go to Catholic hospitals: you never know when the local witch doctor will pop up by your bedside, go “ooga booga” (in Latin, of course!), and tell you that your treatment makes god angry so the staff has decided to let you suffer and die. It’ll be good for you…in imaginary Heaven.
Oh, but let the nun who realized that reality has priority over dogma stay on the job.
Just in case you’re nearby, I’ll be speaking at the Southdale Public Library in Edina at 2:00 on how religion is always wrong. Come on by!
If you can’t make that, we’ll also be going to Q Cumber’s restaurant at 4 for dinner. Everyone is welcome to join in.
A very nice statement by Dawkins: the virtue of the New Atheist is clarity, not shrillness, not certainty, not militancy, and the problem is our opponents all have to be obscurantists to make excuses for folly.
Half the people in the world commit this sin against god: they are born women.
Have you heard about the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act?
Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It’s basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla — arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges.
If this bill passes, may I suggest that, since it does undermine the rule of law and does great damage to the republic, that the first persons charged under its provisions be the despicable McCain and Lieberman? Won’t they be surprised!
Of course, since we do respect the rule of law, I suggest that everyone write to their congresspeople and tell them that you oppose this bill. Save McCain and Lieberman from the fate of Danton and Robespierre!
