Stephen Prothero, a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University, lists the six things he does not want to hear in the wake of massacres like last week’s. [Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Ed Brayton is one of the founders of FreethoughtBlogs and a key person who works behind the scenes to keep things running as well as keeping together a highly opinionated group of people. That last task alone is a Herculean one that he fulfills admirably with his good humor and common sense approach. His blog is an excellent source of news and commentary on politics and religion and culture.
He had a major health scare a week or so ago that required open-heart surgery. Thanks to the skill of the medical staff, he is out of the hospital and back on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, this means that he has had unexpected expenses and loss of income.
If any of you can spare anything, please go over to his site where he has indicated how you can help out.
For all my joking around about waging war on Christmas, I actually enjoy the holiday, apart from the commercialism and the insane shopping sprees that people seem to indulge in. Despite all the attempts of Fox News, Christmas is becoming irreversibly secularized and thus gone back to its pagan roots. They may be able to intimidate come commercial establishments to have employees say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” but does “Merry Christmas” really conjure up an image of Jesus in the manger when people say or hear it? I doubt it. It has become synonymous with “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings”, drained of almost all religious significance. The war on Christmas is pretty much over. [Read more…]
The people who are nonbelievers in any religion sometimes feel like a small minority. But this is purely a local illusion. When it comes to religions, different ones dominate different parts of the world. But when it comes to nonbelievers, we are all pretty much the same everywhere. We are the true uniters, not dividers, our shared unbelief uniting us across nations, races, and ethnicities. [Read more…]
What was your reaction to the shootings last week at the elementary school? If you were like me, you probably felt a combination of shock, sadness, and anger. Shock at the scale of the carnage and the age of most of the victims, sadness at the thought of the terrible grief that the loved ones of the victims must be feeling, and anger at the person who did such an awful thing. [Read more…]
William Lane Craig is a theologian and an ardent advocate of the idea that if god commands something to be done, then that is good by definition, however appalling it may seem to those of us who do not wear the moral blinders of religion. I have discussed Craig’s views and the criticisms of it before. [Read more…]
So the Mayan ‘prophecy’ proved to be a bust. Interestingly, very few of the seven million ethnic Mayans took it seriously. But five Michigan school districts closed 33 schools on Wednesday, two days early, not because they wanted students to prepare properly for the end of the world but because of rumors of violence triggered by the Mayan doomsday. [Read more…]
The US has once again shown itself to be the enabler of Israel’s expansionist policies that have all but doomed the possibility of a two-state solution. As the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported, the threat of a veto by the US scuttled a resolution in the UN Security Council to oppose the recent decision by the Netanyahu government to expand its settlement program around Jerusalem. Even the UK abandoned its ally on this one. [Read more…]