Reporter Jake Tapper to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney:
There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don’t want it in the United States.The context: The Obama Administration, which has praised aggressive reporting on regimes elsewhere in the world, has brought six prosecutions against CIA whistle-blowers using the Espionage Act to censor information about CIA torture.
Krystal Myers is a student at Lenoir City High School (in Tennessee), which has a predominantly Christian student body. She is also the editor of her public high school newspaper. She also happens to be an atheist. KnoxNews reports on a recent incident:
In a recent editorial that Myers, 18, intended for the Lenoir City High School newspaper entitled "No Rights: The Life of an Atheist," she questioned her treatment by the majority.
The article criticized the school for promoting prayer at school events, including school board meetings. Why was Krystal denied the right to publish her article?Schools Director Wayne Miller said it was the decision of the school authorities not to allow publication of Myers' editorial because of the potential for disruption in the school.
I'd like to know more about the article. If Kristal happens to read this post, I hope she'll contact me. I would certainly consider publishing her article here at DI, if she's interested.I'm in the process of watching a (Great Courses) video course titled "Understanding DNA, Genes and their Real-World Applications," taught by Professor David Sadava. In today's lecture (#5) he asked whether one's original cell still exists in each adult. Each of us came from one cell, a fertilized egg, which divided, then divided again, on and on. Sadava's question was whether our original cells might still be alive somewhere in our adult human bodies, decades later. His answer was that there is no compelling reason to assume that that original cell is not still "somewhere" inside of you, one cell among the 60 trillion cells that make up your body. Intriguing thought.
At Edge.com, V.S. Ramachandran began his talk titled "Adventures in Behavioral Neurology with this description of the brain:
Let me tell you about the problem confronting us. The brain is a 1.5 kilogram mass of jelly, the consistency of tofu, you can hold it in the palm of your hand, yet it can contemplate the vastness of space and time, the meaning of infinity and the meaning of existence. It can ask questions about who am I, where do I come from, questions about love and beauty, aesthetics, and art, and all these questions arising from this lump of jelly. It is truly the greatest of mysteries. The question is how does it come about? When you look at the structure of the brain it's made up of neurons. Of course, everybody knows that these days. There are 100 billion of these nerve cells. Each of these cells makes about 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons. From this information people have calculated that the number of possible brain states, of permutations and combinations of brain activity, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.
Why doesn't the Bible give better information and advice? Many people reading this might think, "What do you mean? The Bible is perfect." This post is not directed to people of this sort, because nothing I could say would matter to them. To everyone else the Bible is lacking in many ways, including its failure to condemn slavery, its failure to speak out on behalf of women's rights, and hundreds of other contradictions and inaccuracies. For instance, the Bible calculates pi incorrectly, based on this passage from 1 Kings
7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
Nope. Sorry, but pi is not exactly 3. If an omniscient being had actually written the Bible, a circular structure's circumference would not have been described as exactly three times its diameter. Everything written above is context for introducing Adam Lee's most recent post at Daylight Atheism at Big Think. To a hypothetical outsider (a Martian anthropologist, for example) the Bible is a very strange candidate for the alleged "greatest book in the world" based on its many stories starring a warmongering god and by the absence of advice based on accurate science, math and empathy. Adam offers many examples of the types of advice that one should have found in the Bible had it been authored by a perfect god, including the following:"I freed you from captivity in Egypt because I hate slavery. Do not hold your fellow human beings in bondage or buy and sell them as if they were property."and
"Mars and Venus are worlds of their own, worlds like the Earth is, and all of them travel in a great circuit around the sun. The moon is a smaller world that travels in a circuit around the Earth."Check out Adam's article for many more examples.