Many of you would have heard or read about the incredible rescue of people who had been caught in a rip tide off the coast of Florida. Two young boys Noah and Stephen Ursrey were initially caught up by the tide and when other people became aware of their distress and tried to help them, they too got caught in the strong tide so that in the end 10 people were in danger of drowning. There was no lifeguard on duty.
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Ben Norton writes that Sam Harris, the self-styled ‘centrist liberal’, moves further and further into the warm embrace of the xenophobes.
In language eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric of the fascist far right, New Atheist pundit Sam Harris has called for reducing the number of Muslims in society, warning on the January episode of his popular podcast, “You can’t have too many Muslims in your culture if you want it to remain enlightened.”
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The crafts company Hobby Lobby has been fined $3 million and asked to return over 5,000 stolen artifacts to Iraq. The name of the company may be familiar to some because they were behind a victorious lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court because they argued that the religious beliefs of the owners of the company should allow them to not provide contraceptive coverage in the employees’ health insurance policies. Yes, the family that owns the company consists of religious zealots.
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Here is a video that shows original unappetizing forms of vegetables and fruits before human beings cultivated and bred them to be the forms that we now eat. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Teesta Setulvadi writes about the Hindu vigilante mobs who are unleashing violence against mostly Muslims and but also Christians as part of their goal of trying to create a Hindu state in what is still an officially secular country. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has a history of Hindu chauvinism and remained silent about these atrocious acts until a sudden spate of public protests forced him to issue a somewhat grudging condemnation of the latest killing of a young Muslim man by so-called cow-protection vigilantes for the ‘crime’ of allegedly carrying some beef. Cows are considered sacred by Hindus.
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Last month I wrote about a legal challenge brought by a of South African secularist group OGOD (Organisasie vir Godsdienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie that translates as Organisation for Religious Education and Democracy) challenging the practice of many public schools that promoted Christianity, thus subverting the neutral official religious instruction policy as outlined in the government’s National Policy on Religion and Education. They took aim at six schools that were accused of promoting Christianity and suppressing the teaching of evolution.
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Yesterday, a 6,000 pound monument to the Ten Commandments was installed on the grounds of the Arkansas state capital building. Then that very night, someone drove into the monument and destroyed it. The driver has been arrested and it is not clear what his motives were. Maybe he was trying to emulate Moses who also smashed up the tablets on which the commandments were written (Exodus 32:19). Not many people recall that bit of the story.
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I am not sure how many people read the comments to my posts but quite often the commenters are very knowledge and their comments are more informative than the posts themselves. My post yesterday on questions about the soul is one such case. If anyone is interested in learning about the origins of the various concepts concerning the soul, I strongly urge you to read the comments to that post.
When I came across this article by Candida Moss and Jessica Baron with the title Where in your body is your soul? I groaned, expecting yet another mushy spiritual mess. (I am sure that many readers of this blog had a similar reaction when seeing the post title.) But it is actually quite an interesting article, tracing the origins of the concept of the soul and how people have addressed the numerous problems associated with it.
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It is really not surprising how fundamentalism is the same irrespective of the religion because at root it requires the putting on of blinkers on young people so that they believe dogma and not question anything. A draft of the new science curriculum for Turkish students has deferred the teaching of evolution until students enter college because it is too ‘controversial’ and students may bot be able to understand the scientific issues involved. Actually, of pretty much all the major ideas in science, evolution is the easiest to explain and understand.
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