Anyone who has ever been to a church has probably wondered what the letter IHS on the crosses and other icons stand for. I know I did but never bothered to actually find out, limiting myself to making guesses during the times when my mind wandered during the ceremony. I remember thinking that maybe it stood for ‘In His Service’ or, as I got older and more sophisticated in my wild guesses, for ‘Jesus of Nazareth, Savior’ in some other language, say Greek, with I standing for the J sound and the H for the N sound. [Read more…]
Celebrity chef Paula Deen is being sued by a former employee for sexual harassment and the use of the N-word. In a deposition, Deen freely admitted that she did use the word and added: “It’s just what they are — they’re jokes…most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks…I can’t determine what offends another person.” [Read more…]
You may recall Navenna Shine, a ‘breatharian’ who had decided to forego all nourishment and live on light alone. Fortunately she has decided to stop her ‘experiment’ today. She gives her reasons in a long statement. It consists partly of practical reasons (she seems to be running out of money and her phone and internet services will be cut off today) and partly because she says that the world may not be ready for this dramatic way of living and people may try to copy her without the careful preparation necessary and die as a consequence. [Read more…]
Republicans are torn between wanting to criticize Edward Snowden for undermining the national security state that they love so much and did so much to create and wanting to praise him for embarrassing president Obama. But I thought the real test of what they felt about this story would come from the six people that clearly have set their eyes on the Republican nomination for 2016. How they react would be indicative of where they felt their party’s base was. [Read more…]
Sometimes we nonbelievers forget how difficult times have become for Christians who can no longer make bigoted statements without experiencing pushback. They are being bullied and called meanies and worse. They are simply not used to it and are suffering deeply. Samantha Bee of The Daily Show lends a sympathetic ear to their plight. [Read more…]
One of the arguments being used against Edward Snowden is that instead of going public, he should have informed his superiors or Congress and taken it through the proper channels. But USA Today had interviews with four whistleblowers (three of whom Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe used to work the NSA, and the fourth Jesselyn Radack who used to work for the Justice Department and now serves as their lawyer) explain that when they tried to do just that, not only were they stonewalled, their efforts were actually used against them. [Read more…]
… how would we tell? (From the film The Dictator.)
I said that I would wait for evidence before believing the Obama administration’s claims last week that the Syrian government had used sarin. Given the US government’s past history of blatantly lying in order to win public support for its warlike intentions, that seems to be the obviously prudent thing to do. And sure enough, Matthew Schofield of the McClatchy news service writes that chemical weapons experts are casting doubts on US claims. [Read more…]
I am a hardline materialist. I think the material world is all that there is and I have no reason to believe in the existence ofany nonmaterial entities. I did not start out with this view as an a priori philosophical premise. Rather I have arrived at it over time as the only way that I can make sense of the world as I see experience it. [Read more…]