In a major statement released on November 24, 2013 titled Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis has leveled a major broadside at the current economic and political systems which he condemns as serving only the interests of the few and ignoring the needs of the many. [Read more…]
A few days ago I wrote about the surprising discovery that Tea Party darling and Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, now strongly hinting at a presidential run in 2016, was born in Canada to an American mother but a Cuban immigrant father who was not a US citizen. [Read more…]
Remember one-time Assistant Secretary of State and multiple-times Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes? He is the person responsible for the website Kung Fu Monkey creating the ‘crazification factor’, i.e., for quantifying exactly what percentage of the US population is so nuts that it will buy into any proposition, however extreme. That figure is 27%. [Read more…]
To be eligible to be president of the US, one must meet the ‘natural born citizen’ constitutional requirement of Article II, Section 1. It is accepted that if one is born in the US, then this status is automatically conferred on you. This is why the birthers are so desperate to show that Obama’s birth occurred elsewhere. [Read more…]
You would think that with Barack Obama’s re-election, those who had sought to deny his legitimacy to hold the office for the last four years would have finally given up. But you would be wrong because they are convinced that they are fighting for truth and justice and have a tenacity that defies all reason. And in this cause, lo! lawyer/dentist/real estate agent/Birther Queen Orly Taitz’s name, like Abou Ben Adhem‘s, leads all the rest. [Read more…]
Three Republican state officials have unanimously ruled that Barack Obama’s name will be on the ballot in Kansas in November after all, frustrating birthers who had been hoping for a victory. [Read more…]
There is mixed news on the birther front. On the one hand, an event that was heralded as being the largest birther gathering to date to be held on September 22 has been cancelled due to poor ticket sales. [Read more…]
Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently fall prey to the temptation to classify things in groups. I would have been in my element as a 19th century biologist implementing the Linnaean classification scheme of all living things. Recently I have been thinking that the term ‘atheist’ is associated with too narrow a meaning. In fact, I think that there are six different types of atheist.
The most common type of atheist is the explicit atheist. These are the people who say openly that they do not believe that god exists, and this is the group to whom the label is commonly believed to apply.
Then we have the covert atheists. These are people who no longer believe that god exists but do not feel that they can openly say so. The climate for atheists can be quite hostile in some parts of the world, enough to be socially ostracized or even lose one’s job, requiring such people to keep mum about their lack of belief. Others may keep quiet because they belong to religious families and may not want to upset loved ones by speaking about their lack of belief. I suspect that the ranks of elected officials in the US or those seeking such office have a large number of covert atheists.
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I was vaguely aware during the election that some people were questioning Obama’s eligibility for the presidency because of his Kenyan father, just as others were questioning McCain’s because he was born in Panama. Neither candidate made an issue out of the other’s birth and I assumed that this issue would die down after the election.
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