When wars and famines and floods and earthquakes strike a region and threaten large numbers of people with starvation, food is often the most urgent need of the affected people. While the amount of food aid promised is often impressive, the reality is somewhat different. [Read more…]
Philosopher A. C. Grayling has a new book out titled The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism that I have not read yet but looks interesting. He appeared on The Colbert Report and it was pretty interesting. Despite the brevity of these interviews, he made some cogent points and provided a succinct definition of humanism, which he says is “an attitude about how we live the moral life… We human beings are responsible for thinking about our ethical outlook, not a set of laws or a code which comes from outside us but we have to take responsibility for ourselves, not just about how we are going to live good and flourishing lives but how we are going to relate well to other people.” [Read more…]
Sanal Edamaruku, a prominent rationalist from India was forced to leave the country because of blasphemy charges brought against him by the Catholic Church there because he showed how a ‘miracle’ of a Jesus statue dripping water from its feet was caused by a leaky connection to a plumbing system. It was and is a crazy case and shows the danger of blasphemy laws and how they can be used to protect religious beliefs that are used to fool believers. [Read more…]
In discussing the issue of how the US Supreme Court may dismiss one or both of the same-sex marriage cases that it heard last week because of the lack of standing of the parties to sue even though the lower courts had granted them that right, I was reminded of an earlier case that had similar issues and decided to look into what had happened subsequently, to see if the issue had been resolved. [Read more…]
I have said before that the emerging modern consensus is that there are no particles or waves in the classical sense of those terms, although those concepts are still useful to us in visualizing physical processes. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
Listen to this Catholic priest who argues on Fox that opponents of gay marriage are now the victimized ones, the oppressed ones. What is amazing is that he thinks it is unfair and outside the bounds of civilized debate to characterize certain views as bigotry while at the same time he thinks nothing of referring to people as sinners. And even though many religious people believe that sinners go to hell where they face everlasting torment, that is supposed to perfectly acceptable to say. [Read more…]
In February, I wrote about a story that reader Ahcuah sent me about a public school in the southeastern Ohio town of Jackson that had a huge portrait of Jesus in the entrance hallway. The school board rejected requests to have it removed, saying that the portrait was hung in a space reserved for students to use and thus they had no involvement in it and it could not be construed as an official endorsement of religion by the school district. [Read more…]
My university is a secular private one and has for a long time not done anything explicitly religious. Then a couple of years ago, president Obama invited colleges across the country to join in an Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge and our university decided to take part, recognizing that students came to college having some yearning to find meaning in their lives and that we were not really addressing that need. [Read more…]
Apart from the substance of the issues involved, the two same-sex marriage cases argued before the US Supreme Court last week provided an interesting legal twist.
In the adversarial system that exists in the US, the two parties involved must have a direct vested interest in the issue in order to have ‘standing’ to argue their side. For example, if the public school system in the district that I live in decides to teach religious ideas in science classes, I cannot take them to court simply because I, as a concerned citizen, think it violates the constitution. But if my child is in one of the classes that is doing this, then I can claim that I, as the legal custodian of the child and responsible for her welfare, am experiencing direct harm and can sue to stop the practice. [Read more…]
Larry Wilmore and Jon Stewart have one of their entertaining and insightful discussions on race in America on The Daily Show, this time dealing with the recent Republican efforts at improving their message to court minorities. [Read more…]