Politician’s preemptive apology
This preemptive apology is brought to you by Onion News Network . . . Congressman Offers Preemptive Apology For Extramarital Affair
All that talk about life after death . . .
Highly religious people should be more willing to say goodbye to the material world, right? It turns out that devout believers cling ferociously to Earthly life. That's the finding of a new study reported by the Center for Inquiry:
[T]erminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.
The difference between religious and non-religious was not trivial:Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.
Running in your sleep
Did you ever wake up suddenly because while you were having a dream because your body actually moved a bit? This poor dog was apparently having a running dream when his body kicked in . . . such a rude awakening! What protects us from physically acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves? The body functions to paralyze itself during REM sleep to protect us from self-damage that would occur if we acted out scenes from our dreams. [Via hahahaimontheinternet]
Where the non-believers tend to live
Where do American non-believers live? On the West Coast, of course. Based on new data, however, even greater percentages of them live in New England. Here's the interactive American map. Here's an excerpt from the article by the LAT:
Since 1990, the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled, growing to 15% last year. That was the overall conclusion. But tucked inside the report are figures offering portraits of various regions.
Nonbelievers, skeptics and the unaffiliated are clustered in New England and along the Pacific, even as all 48 states surveyed have become less religious, the American Religious Identification Survey found.Richard Dawkins discusses The God Delusion on Minnesota Public Radio
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, has spent countless hours defending his positions before lay audiences. What’s really impressive about Dawkins is the way he keeps his cool under fire (I was first impressed with Dawkins' composure when I viewed this episode, involving Dawkins' interview of the gay-bashing hypocrite, Ted Haggard). Consider this condescending interview conducted 3/4/09 by Kerri Miller of Minnesota Public Radio. You can listen to the entire one-hour interview here. At the beginning of this interview, Miller could barely hide her disdain for Dawkins. Many of the people calling the show to ask questions were much more open-minded than the host--they certainly didn't pick up the host's mocking tone. Miller began the interview by branding Dawkins a failure because people weren’t running to convert to atheism, despite Dawkins’ hope (expressed in The God Delusion) that people reading his book would be caused to rethink their beliefs in religion. Dawkins explained that he did hope that people would rethink their beliefs, but that his book didn’t fail merely because people didn’t abruptly quit their religious affiliations. Here's the hope Dawkins expressed when he wrote The God Delusion:
I hope to persuade . . . a substantial number of middle of the road people that there’s nothing wrong with a disbelief in God … there’s nothing outlandish about it. It’s probably what they’re like anyway, whether or not they admit it to themselves.
Miller then worked to corner Dawkins with a belief expressed by theist John Polkinghorne that there are no hard and fasts truths. Dawkins agreed with Polkinghorne on this general point, but advised Miller that this doesn’t mean that we have no understanding of anything.