I was curious about what happened to all those people who believed in Harold Camping’s prediction that the rapture would occur in 2011. Tom Bartlett followed and interviewed a group of Camping followers before the predicted date and one year later. He found that “you don’t have to be nuts to believe something crazy” and that they had an incredible level of certainty that the world was going to end. [Read more…]
We hear a lot from politicians about how we must protect traditional, Bible-based marriage against those who would change its definition to allow same-sex couples. Oddly enough, very few seem to be willing to fully embrace traditional marriage in its most comprehensive form, opting instead for such limited legal actions as restricting it to between one man and one woman. [Read more…]
There are a lot of people out in the world saying stupid and hateful things. I don’t waste much time on them since they are too easy a target. But what surprises me is when major media sources interview ordinary people who really should not be on TV because they are not going to do or say anything useful but will simply embarrass themselves. [Read more…]
The film The Avengers is doing boffo box office, breaking all kinds of records. I have not seen it. I am not a fan of action films in general and did not grow up in Sri Lanka reading any of the superhero comics that were popular in the US, so the characters do not resonate with me. [Read more…]
The Tea Party is looking at the wrong place for Obama’s shadowy death panels. They do not exist in the Affordable Care Act but do exist in the way that individuals are selected for summary execution by drones and other means. We now learn that John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and chief counterterrorism advisor to president Barack Obama, and a person who brazenly lies, is the person who has been put in charge of recommending to Obama who should live and who should die. [Read more…]
In a post yesterday I discussed a paper by philosopher Stephen Law of the University of London where he used a thought experiment and something that he called ‘the contamination principle’ (P2) to cast doubt on the claims of whether a historical Jesus existed. [Read more…]
I recently wrote a post about the practice of short selling. Commenter Gregory in Seattle added some valuable insights (see here and here) on how it works, based on his knowledge as licensed broker. [Read more…]
Readers may recall an earlier post on the question of whether the Jesus of the Bible is based, however loosely, on an actual historical figure living in that region of the world at that time (as claimed by the historicists) or whether he is an entirely fictional character based on myths and legends (as asserted by those labeled as mythicists). It should be noted that this particular debate does not involve religious people and has nothing to do with whether Jesus did miracles, rose from the dead, and all the other things that signaled that he was divine, which both sides are willing to dismiss as fictional. [Read more…]
I have shown this before but thought I would repeat it in light of the post about gambling earlier today.