The mainstream media drops the ball again
Sometimes, you just need a good catharsis. See this post by Chris Durang. Once again, my topic is the media's non-coverage of Valerie Plame's lawsuit, this time by CNN.
Sam Harris on problems with religious moderates and agnostics
In the 2004 New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that
…120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.
Harris, author of the Atheist manifesto, was interviewed by Truthdig.com. Despite the above-described unsubstantiated beliefs of many theists, it is somehow the atheists who have become “America’s least trusted minority group, “trusted less than Muslims, recent immigrants and homosexuals.”
Harris lays much of the blame for the success of fundamentalists on religious moderates, whose “political correctness” serves to protect long-overdue criticism of the fundamentalists:
religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.
Harris also takes aim at those who call themselves “agnostic,” because they are not “intellectually honest.” Per Harris, agnostics refuse to disavow claims for which there isn’t a drop of evidence.
The last abortion clinic in Mississippi
"Operation Save America" recently posted this epiphany on its website: Little did any of us know, as we ran to the roar to help those devastated by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana, that God was preparing us to return to Mississippi to deal with an even more deadly foe—Abortion!…
ABC and CBS ignore Wilson-Plame lawsuit
MediaMatters reports that these two major news networks failed to report that ex-CIA officer Valerie Plame had filed a lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Scotter Libby and Karl Rove. Plame's lawsuit accuses the threesome of leaking her identity as a CIA operative, thus ending her career. This leak of Plame's career…
Did Adam have a belly-button?
Until yesterday I didn’t realize that there was a serious debate about whether Adam had a navel. But, alas, the debate has been a serious one in the minds of some people.
According to both versions of creation in Genesis (there are two substantially conflicting versions in the Bible), neither Adam nor Eve was ever in a woman’s uterus. So neither Adam nor Eve needed a navel. This doesn’t answer the question of whether they had navels, though.
We don’t have the remains of Adam and Eve. We don’t have their photos. How would one resolve this debate, then? Many believers are undeterred. Here is one analysis that Adam and Eve had no navels. Raptureready.com also weighs in with a “no.” Ditto for Christiananswers.net. It’s not always seen as a serious debate. Here is a tongue in cheek account by posted by a Baptist Church. The terminology can get a bit daunting. For instance, there is mention of the “Post-Umbilisists,” those “learned theologians and scholars believe that Adam’s navel was formed after the Fall.”
This issue occurred to me only because a friend (thanks, Deb!) recently mentioned to me that her friend was a “Navelite.” I’d never heard of this religion. Well, turns out that there is a small offshoot of Christianity that distinguishes itself by its belief that Adam did not have a navel. It was a big enough issue at one point to cause a schism. I have this one word of mouth only; Deb’s friend was …