Fighting religious indoctrination in South African schools

I have been hearing from Christopher, a reader of this blog and is a secular activist in South Africa, about a court case that being waged in that country to remove religious bias in their public schools. The group that has brought the case is called OGOD which is an acronym for the Afrikaans Organisasie vir Godsdienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie. The group challenged the practices of six schools that are explicitly teaching Christian doctrine.
[Read more…]

Film review: Lion (2016)

I was quite disappointed with this highly acclaimed film, based on a true story, that was nominated for six Academy Awards (though it did not win any) including for best film and for best supporting actors for Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.

The first half of it is about a five-year old boy Saroo in India who lives in a remote town with his mother, older brother Guddu whom Saroo idolizes, and sister Shekila. His family is extremely poor and his mother works as a laborer gathering rocks in the heat of the day. Guddu and Saroo engage in petty thievery to buy food for the family and help out their mother. But one day while he and Guddu are out on another such mission, Saroo gets separated from his brother and, after falling asleep on a train, ends up in Kolkatta, a teeming city over a thousand miles away. After wandering the streets fending for himself and fending off people who seem friendly initially but have darker motives, he ends up in an orphanage with a large number of other street children. A kindly official, after failing to locate his mother, arranges for him to be adopted by an Australian couple (mother played by Kidman) living in Tasmania.
[Read more…]

Why Buddhism can be as violent as any other religion

The country of Myanmar provides a good example of my view that the true nature of a religion becomes visible when that religious group is in the majority and enjoys state support. Myanmar is a country that is almost 90% Buddhist but in the southern part of the country that borders Muslim-majority Malaysia, Muslims are in the majority. So what do we see? We see Muslims in the southern part attacking Buddhists and Buddhists in the northern part attacking Muslims.
[Read more…]

Trump predicted the appointment of a special prosecutor

Seth Meyers has the videotape of Trump’s prediction during the campaign and also tells us of the preparations being made for the five-nation trip by White House officials and foreign leaders because of Trump’s ignorance, unwillingness and/or inability to learn, and short attention span. The whole process reminds me of the perpetual nervousness of parents of an uncontrollable, bad-tempered toddler, wondering when he will throw a tantrum or otherwise embarrass them.
[Read more…]

Sweden drops rape investigation of Julian Assange

Sweden has dropped their preliminary investigation into the 2010 rape charges made against Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald reports that this does not mean that he is free to leave the Ecuadoran embassy in London because there is still the fact that the US seeks to bring him to the US for the ‘crime’ of WikiLeaks publishing US government documents. He reminds us that this is why Ecuador granted Assange asylum in their embassy in 2012 in the first place, not to prevent him facing trial on rape charges.
[Read more…]

Good riddance, Roger Ailes

Matt Taibbi gives a fitting farewell to a truly horrible human being.

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, “Say that you hope he’s reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia.”

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.
[Read more…]

Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia should be interesting

So Donald Trump is going on his first visit overseas and the choice of countries is interesting. Starting with Saudi Arabia on Saturday, he then goes to Israel, the Vatican, Belgium to meet with EU and NATO leaders, and then to Sicily for a G7 meeting. One thing you can be sure of is that Trump will use these occasions to talk about how great he is. He may also give other leaders a map of his Electoral College win.
[Read more…]

Trump is learning how bureaucratic warfare works

People who analyze politics through the lens of political parties can suffer whiplash because of the sudden changes in direction that events can take. Rather than focus on just the actions themselves and whether those are good or bad, they tend to take good and bad actions as indicative of whether the person doing is basically good or bad or, conversely, decide if things are good or bad depending on whether the person doing them is on their team.
[Read more…]