Who amongst us hasn’t said at some point, “Dang! Somebody should do something about the fact that the Bible is way too liberal“? If you are one, then your prayers have been answered.
There has come into being something called the Conservative Bible Project, an open-source endeavor by those who feel that all prior translations of the Bible suffer from serious distortions due to liberal infiltration, and [Read more…]
A peculiar feature of contemporary politics is the strange rapid escalation that occurs. Take for example the recent issue over the Obama administration saying that all employers need to provide free contraceptive benefits to their employees. This applied to even religious institutions as long as they served the general public and employed nonbelievers. This practice had already been the law in some states and had been instituted in some Catholic universities and [Read more…]
The US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice threw a fit and let loose a furious tirade against Russia and China for their veto of a resolution aimed at Syria. Rami G. Khouri points out how hypocritical her reaction is.
Rice said that she was “disgusted” by the double veto, and [Read more…]
In a comment to a previous post Jared A suggested that I would benefit, especially in my posts on religion and atheism, from using words more precisely in order to make my points clearer. In particular, he said that the word ‘myths’ usually refer to sacred narratives, while ‘scriptures’ refer to sacred writings. The beliefs in the scriptures, if codified, are referred to as ‘doctrine’ and [Read more…]
Stephen Walt has an excellent article pointing out that a Martian visiting Earth would be completely baffled by the current debate in the west about Iran.
In fact, given the various threats now facing Tehran, our Martian friend might have trouble explaining why [Read more…]
Some time ago I listed some phrases that had become such clichés that whenever I heard them, the annoyance they produced was sufficient to distract me from what the speaker was saying. Readers then added their own peeves.
Here is the current list of the phrases I hate and [Read more…]
One can make the case that the US is a far too litigious a society.
But going to court does have one big advantage when it comes to highly charged issues. Its structure of rules requiring facts and evidence and arguments in support of a claim, and the requirement that people have to tell the truth and directly address questions that are posed to them by opponents, can be remarkably effective in brushing away a lot of the obfuscation that accompanies debates in other less formal venues.
This happened in the case of so-called intelligent design. As I discuss [Read more…]