One of religion’s weakest points is that of prayer. People are urged to pray to their gods and invariably these prayers end up at least partly being requests for things or other forms of divine intervention. Naturally, prayers are not answered (except by sheer coincidence) so it becomes the task of religious leaders to rationalize away this seeming lack of responsiveness on god’s part. [Read more…]
Bill Maher is puzzled by it.
New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, “Why do they hate us?” Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we’re always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we’re starting to look not so much like the world’s policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it’s because we had no choice. [Read more…]
It looks like a workable deal has been reached on what to do about Syrian chemical weapons.
The United States and Russia agreed Saturday on an outline for the identification and seizure of Syrian chemical weapons and said Syria must turn over an accounting of its arsenal within a week. [Read more…]
In setting standards for their science curricula, state and local boards of education invariably have to deal with the question of the nature of science because having students understand it is usually one of the mandates given to the drafting committees. This becomes especially necessary in order to know how to best respond when efforts are made to insert religious ideas into the science curriculum or to undermine those scientific ideas (like evolution) that are viewed by religious people as being opposed to religion. [Read more…]
Can anyone harbor even the slightest illusion that the US Senate is the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’, as it frequently boasts itself to be, after this latest episode. It happened when Louisiana senator David Vitter decided that he would block senate business until he got his way. [Read more…]
The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is the name given to the geologically short time period of about 20 million years that occurred around 500 million years ago in which there seemed to be a surge of new kinds of organisms that appeared in the fossil record. Critics of evolutionary theory, always on the look out for what they see as possible signs of divine intervention, seized on it as something that seemed unlikely to have happened due to the slow processes of natural selection and thus a signal that god may have intervened to speed things up a bit. [Read more…]
ProPublica had a disturbing report about an attempt to censor a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green, an expert on cryptography, who blogged about the NSA’s efforts at breaking encryptions. The university, which is physically located very close to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, does a lot of work for the NSA, especially in its Applied Physics Laboratory. [Read more…]
Thanks to a link provided by commenter rdmcpeek43 in response to my post on Billie Jean King , I watched the American Masters program on Billie Jean King last night. It was very good. I am not sure how much longer it will be freely available on the web. The film was a biography of her but was less about her tennis as such and more about her pivotal role in advancing equality for women on the tennis circuit, all taking place at a time when women were vocal about the need for equality and justice in all areas of life. [Read more…]
Bill Di Blasio won the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City and will likely be elected mayor in the general election. He is reputedly a progressive who has opposed things like the random ‘stop and frisk’ tactic by police that targeted young men of color and was favored by outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. [Read more…]
It is quite astonishing how when it comes to diplomacy, the US finds it so hard to take yes for an answer.
Take for example Syria. Whether or not chemical weapons were used and by whom, I think all reasonable people would agree that getting rid of those weapons anywhere is a good thing. And that is what we seem to be moving towards in Syria as a result of the Russian/Syrian plan triggered by John Kerry’s remark. It is going to take some time. After all, the US is far behind schedule on its own promises to reduce its chemical weapons stockpile. [Read more…]