Everyone hates robocalls, those computer generated phone calls that interrupt you to sell you stuff. They are almost immediately recognizable and so you can hang up at once unless you are feeling lonely and want to hear the sound of a voice. [Read more…]
If there is one thing that religions absolutely must believe in, it is the existence of the soul, although not all religions give it the same name. Without the belief that there is some entity that is part of us and yet somehow independent of the body and can interact freely with an external deity, much of religious doctrine becomes even more vacuous than it currently is. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert gives his own take on the Coca Cola commercial that was aired during the Super Bowl that has caused some controversy in right-wing xenophobic circles. He also provided a little known fact about the writer of the song America the Beautiful. [Read more…]
Long time readers of this blog know that I despise the editorial columnists at the New York Times, especially David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman and long ago stopped reading them. Only Paul Krugman has anything useful to say. I thought that my views were not shared by mainstream media people because after all, they are all part of the same system of which these columnists are at the pinnacle. [Read more…]
You may recall that following the erection of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol in Oklahoma, a Hindu group proposed putting up a statue to their god Hanuman and a Satanic group has proposed one too. Gideon Resnick joined the New York—based Satanic Temple to learn more people behind the latter effort. This group of Satanists seems closer in outlook to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster than to anything occult. [Read more…]
As children, many of us believed crazy things, such as the existence of ghosts and fairies and other manifestations of the magical or supernatural. As we grew up, we abandoned many of those absurd beliefs, mainly due to our growing realization that they did not make any sense. But in addition, as we got older our families did not actively seek to have us continue to believe them and, in the case of things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, actively sought to dissuade us from doing so. Society at large also does not have a vested interest in propagating a lot of magical thinking. [Read more…]
I have written before about my hopes that educational institutions at the K-12 and collegiate level will abandon football. My argument then was that subjecting students to the high likelihood of head trauma was unethical and in addition that football was an expensive money sink with no upside except for a few colleges that made money from it. [Read more…]
In the previous post in this series, I set up the problem facing the Supreme Court as it discusses the Greece case. Can the Court come up with guidelines for prayers that meet the earlier high standard of requiring strict neutrality between religions and between religion and non-religion or even the later lower standard set by the 1983 Marsh case that the prayers do not ‘proselytize, advance, or disparage’ any religion? If such guidelines can be drawn, then how can government agencies at any level see to it that they are followed without running afoul of the other constitutional requirement that the government not censor or otherwise parse the content of prayers or, even worse, dictate the content of the prayers? [Read more…]
I recently watched this documentary about the anonymous vocalists who sing backup for the featured musical stars, providing harmonies and visual excitement by dancing and swaying along with the music. In the 1950s and earlier, most of the backup singers were white women who sang more sedately and tended to follow the written music score. [Read more…]
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin is an American journalist of Palestinian origin who has worked at a range of news organizations in the US and abroad and often has to go on overseas assignments. He says that he dreads coming back because of the appalling way he is treated every time by US immigration officials. He recounts his experiences, including the latest one when he was returning from covering the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. [Read more…]