NPR ended its weeklong series on the topic ‘Losing Our Religion’ on a weak note. (You can also see/hear part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) In its last part, they interviewed a Methodist minister and a Catholic priest on what they thought of the increasing numbers of people leaving the church especially among the young and what might be done to get them back. (Note that the transcript is not complete and the audio has more.) [Read more…]
You can expect the gun control debate to shift into high gear following president Obama’s recently announced proposals for gun control. I do not own a gun, have no intention of ever buying one, and have never even fired one (apart from an air rifle as a child). But I am not one who offers unqualified support for a total ban on gun ownership. I think a case can be made for the private ownership of some guns by some people who have a reasonable need of them and I have written on this topic earlier (see here and here). But what types of guns could be owned depends on what one means by ‘reasonable need’ and it is clear that there is a wide divergence of views on this. [Read more…]
I have left instructions that when I die I am to be cremated in the cheapest container allowed by law, a cardboard box if possible. Wasting money on a fancy coffin seems ridiculous. But there is a opposite trend in which people spend enormous amounts of money on the dead, which seems pointless since they are, after all, dead and won’t appreciate the gesture by their relatives. [Read more…]
Washington is a town of euphemisms. When I read that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had announced that he is leaving his cabinet post in March to “spend time with his family”, my first reaction was that he had been asked to leave for some reason or other, essentially fired from his post, and that he was being allowed to do so gracefully. [Read more…]
NPR’s week-long series on ‘Losing Our Religion’ continued today (you can read/listen to part 1, part 2, and part 3), with part 4 being a continuation of the conversation they had in part 2 with the group of six young nonbelievers from a variety of religious backgrounds. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece that reveals what is actually going on in the investigations and prosecutions of people like Aaron Swartz. He says that Aaron Swartz was a pawn in the US government’s war against one antagonist that challenges their power and that they feel they have insufficient control over – hackers. [Read more…]
Anyone paying any attention knows that news reporting on TV is being steadily replaced by groups of talking heads discussing events. It costs a lot less to invite a few people to a studio to shoot the breeze about current events than to have actual reporters going deep into stories. [Read more…]
When preacher Rick Warren was picked to give the prayer at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama, there were protests about his anti gay views but not enough to have the invitation withdrawn. This year the inaugural committee picked preacher Louie Giglio to give the benediction on January 20th but when videos surfaced that he too had preached anti-gay messages in the past and protests again erupted, he withdrew from the proceedings, likely because he would have been disinvited anyway. [Read more…]
NPR’s series ‘Losing Our Faith’ that is running all this week is turning out to be a remarkably thoughtful treatment of the reasons why people are leaving religion. I wrote about the first two parts here and here, and on the third one today they talked about how tragedy affects belief and how nonbelievers deal with them. [Read more…]
photo by Thomas Ondrey, The Plain Dealer