In addition to studying questions like what causes diseases and what is the origin or life and the universe, science also on occasion investigates important questions like why is it that the cord of your earphones get tangled up if you lay them down for even a second? It is easy to dismiss this as just one’s imagination but physicists find that this is a real effect and that the spontaneous formation of knots has an explanation.
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If there is one Christian doctrine that I think is deeply pernicious, it is that of original sin. For those unfamiliar with it, it essentially says that the first sin was committed by Adam and Eve when they disobeyed god and ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. This act resulted in them being banished from the Garden of Eden and became the ultimate cause of all the suffering in the world today. Thanks, Adam and Eve!
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The Cleveland Plain Dealer had an article promoting my debate with Joe Puckett tomorrow (Saturday) at 6:00 pm at the Northwest Church of Christ located at 3904 38th Street NW in Canton, Ohio. It appeared on their website yesterday and in the print edition today. I have no idea if the local TV news stations will now pick it up and cover the event.
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The trouble with research in the medical sciences is that much initial work is based on correlations and it is often hard to pin down definitively the causal relations between them. This can lead to health recommendations that later get nullified or even reversed when some hitherto unsuspected third factor is discovered to play a role in creating the correlation. This problem is especially prevalent when it comes to preventive health treatments designed to head off some future problem, where reversals of recommendations can happen frequently. This can be very disconcerting for health-conscious people who may well feel confused by the conflicting advice.
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In the US, crooks are drawn to religion like flies to honey. The combination of not having to pay taxes or even open up their books for close scrutiny, combined with a population that is both needy and highly gullible, provides an irresistible attraction for frauds and conmen.
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Most people have likely heard of Google Glass, a device that looks like a pair of glasses that apparently enables the wearer to be connected to the internet all the time. It also allows them to record what is going on around them but because the glasses are unobtrusive, the people in their vicinity may not know they are being recorded and this has apparently led to angry confrontations with those who feel their privacy is being invaded.
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There has been a lot of angst in the US, generated by those who want to discredit anything that president Obama does, about whether exchanging US serviceman Bowe Bergdahl for five prisoners being held in Guantanamo was a good trade for the US. Cartoonist Ted Rall suggests that we should not ignore the possibility that a similar debate may be going on amongst the people in Afghanistan as to whether they were the ones who got a raw deal.
New research suggests domesticated camels arrived in the region now known as Israel between 930 and 900 BCE. What interested me about this result were two things: how the researchers narrowed the range of dates to just 30 years and the implications of this finding for people who treat the Bible as history book.
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If I had to choose one person from the world of film to spend an evening talking to, it would be no contest. Director John Waters would win by a mile. I can easily see myself spending hours talking to him. This is despite the fact that I had seen only one of his films before (Pecker (1998)) and didn’t think much of it. I had tended to steer clear of his films because I had heard that they sometimes devolved into gross-out humor which I avoid.
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In a post yesterday, I listed some of the people who have been so wrong about the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that they should be completely shunned, even if they were not tried for crimes. But of course, I was dreaming. They are back all over the media, shifting blame away from their own culpability. Back in 2008, the Center for Public Integrity put out a report listing at least 935 false statements about the national security threat that members of the Bush administration made about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001.
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