Mainstream media gets anxious about Colbert

Stephen Colbert got a lot of comedy mileage by creating his own Super PAC. Colbert is the latest in a long line of such political satirists. Older readers may recall the Youth International Party (or ‘Yippies)’ that ran a boar hog named Pigasus for president in the 1968 elections under the slogan “Pork power!” Or perennial candidate Pat Paulsen, with his woebegone [Read more…]

In politics, the concrete usually wins over the abstract

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…]

Existence and universal claims

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…]

Eliminating liberal bias in the Bible

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…]

Odd political escalations

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…]