Jon Stewart comes back from just one week’s break to find that America has been wrecked within that short time, with Rick Santorum becoming the frontrunner for the Republican nomination and a war on contraception already in progress. [Read more…]
An interesting discussion has broken out in the comments section of the post The weak historical evidence for Jesus that is related to the question of where the burden of proof lies when promoting or refuting a claim.
Those who started reading my blogs only after I moved to Freethought Blogs have been (so far at least) mercifully spared the many multi-part series on some topics that those [Read more…]
Who amongst us hasn’t said at some point, “Dang! Somebody should do something about the fact that the Bible is way too liberal“? If you are one, then your prayers have been answered.
There has come into being something called the Conservative Bible Project, an open-source endeavor by those who feel that all prior translations of the Bible suffer from serious distortions due to liberal infiltration, and [Read more…]
A peculiar feature of contemporary politics is the strange rapid escalation that occurs. Take for example the recent issue over the Obama administration saying that all employers need to provide free contraceptive benefits to their employees. This applied to even religious institutions as long as they served the general public and employed nonbelievers. This practice had already been the law in some states and had been instituted in some Catholic universities and [Read more…]
The US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice threw a fit and let loose a furious tirade against Russia and China for their veto of a resolution aimed at Syria. Rami G. Khouri points out how hypocritical her reaction is.
Rice said that she was “disgusted” by the double veto, and [Read more…]
Stephen Walt has an excellent article pointing out that a Martian visiting Earth would be completely baffled by the current debate in the west about Iran.
In fact, given the various threats now facing Tehran, our Martian friend might have trouble explaining why [Read more…]
One can make the case that the US is a far too litigious a society.
But going to court does have one big advantage when it comes to highly charged issues. Its structure of rules requiring facts and evidence and arguments in support of a claim, and the requirement that people have to tell the truth and directly address questions that are posed to them by opponents, can be remarkably effective in brushing away a lot of the obfuscation that accompanies debates in other less formal venues.
This happened in the case of so-called intelligent design. As I discuss [Read more…]
The one-percenters and their lackeys often indignantly make the claim that since they are the ones who pay most of the taxes, they should be praised rather than vilified, since it is largely their tax dollars that enable the state to function. They point to the roughly 47% of the population who do not pay any federal income taxes as being essentially moochers, as if being so poor that you do not even qualify to pay income tax is somehow an ingenious dodge to live off the wealthy.
But this situation arises not because the current tax rates are [Read more…]
The fuss over the rule that religious institutions that employ and serve the general public do not qualify for an exemption to providing free birth control services to their employees seems likely to go away, now that the Obama administration seems to have outmaneuvered opponents on this issue by saying that while the religious institutions do not have to pay for the cost of birth control, the health insurers must absorb the cost. While this can arguably be said to be a mere accounting trick, it does undermine the religious freedom argument considerably.
If they are smart, the Catholic Church and [Read more…]