It has been commented on by many people that the Republican party seems to have gone off in a weird direction, adopting so many extreme positions that the breed known as ‘moderate Republicans’ is in danger of becoming extinct. The Onion reports on a promising new program [Read more…]
The Catholic hierarchy and the Republican party are digging in their heels in their opposition to health insurance companies being required to provide contraception coverage to all their employees, and even extending their stand to opposing insurers providing employees with anything the employer finds morally objectionable.
They think they can win this by framing it as an issue [Read more…]
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…]