Should atheists in the US encourage the establishment of religion?

Whenever I give a talk, as I did recently, on the fight over the teaching of evolution in schools, I am almost always asked why these take place mostly in the US. That is not exactly true but in many other countries, there is no equivalent of the Establishment Clause that people can appeal to to keep religion out of the affairs of the state and so there is little recourse to the courts. In other countries, religion is either so deeply entrenched that the dominance of religious views are taken for granted or religion is so weak (in most of the developed world) that it is not a serious issue or gets resolved in the political arena. [Read more…]

An interesting development

As some of you know, the US Congress actually passed a law that was signed by president Obama named the Magnitsky Act requiring the administration to impose sanctions on those people deemed to be responsible for the death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Not surprisingly, the Russian government deemed this to be interference in its internal affairs and responded by banning adoption of Russian babies by Americans. [Read more…]

Social conservatives and the GOP

It is no secret that there is considerable friction between the extreme fiscal wing of the GOP and its extreme social/religious one. The former occupy the top levels of the national party leadership and care mainly about helping the wealthy get wealthier at the expense of the rest of us, and have for long used conservative social issues mainly as a way to fire up their base and get them to vote for them. They managed to keep the nutters out of leadership positions in the party and tossed the crazies a few rhetorical crumbs now and then to keep them happy. [Read more…]

How real men behave

The Steubenville rape case highlighted the disgusting phenomenon of men who seem to think that they can do anything to women who are unconscious due to having drunk too much, and of communities who seem to condone such behavior if the perpetrators of such rapes are prominent athletes. It seems as if people think that when a woman is unconscious, she has no rights or dignity. [Read more…]

Russian blasphemy laws

As I have said before, when religions are in the minority, they tend to emphasize tolerance and acceptance of diverse views. It is only when they get political power or influence that they reveal their true intolerant natures. Even if they do not become a state religion, as long as political leaders feel they are important enough to pander to, they start to suppress anyone or anything that opposes them. [Read more…]

Guantanamo’s theater of the absurd

The trials taking place at Guantanamo are pretty much a sham, a mockery, designed to produce guilty verdicts at all costs. Scott Horton describes them as a theater of the absurd and thinks that they may on the verge of collapse.

He describes what has happened, including that conversations that defense lawyers were having with their clients were being monitored. He also says that the Obama administration and its military spokespeople have been consistently lying about what was going on, retreating only when their lies were exposed. [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 12: How the quarks and leptons acquire masses

In the previous post in this series, we saw how the Higgs mechanism gave rise to the masses of the weak interaction force particles W+, W–, and Z. We also saw how the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking that was part of that mechanism resulted in the Higgs field having a non-zero average value even in the vacuum, unlike every other field. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]

Glenda Jackson on Margaret Thatcher

Glenda Jackson was a wonderful actor, nominated four times within the space of six years for Best Actress Academy Awards and winning twice, in 1971 and 1974. She retired from acting and went into politics, and was elected as a Labour Party member of the British parliament in 1992 and has served continuously since then. She has been a strong voice for progressive causes and was a thorn in the side of the odious and unctuous Tony Blair, who was her party leader. She announced that she would retire from politics at the end of her current term, which would be 2015 unless elections are called earlier. [Read more…]

The Democrats and social security

So as expected, president Obama released his budget proposals with his offer to make cuts in Social Security (via the chained CPI) in return for some tax hikes. And as equally expected, some leading Republicans are now saying that it is the Democrats who are trying to balance the budget on the backs of seniors by cutting benefits in social services and that they are going to defend it (see here and here). [Read more…]