Okay, ladies too. But I was going for a "Sunday, Sun-nday Sunda-ay" feel with the headline. I've always liked this Watterson throwaway reply to Karl Marx from 1987-ish. But, after reading some of the firestorm of responses to Erich's post about Misquoting Jesus, maybe religion hasn't really lost any ground.…
The Bible version of God doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t believe in any traditional sort of God. I am not that sort of person who finds any purpose in worshipping or asking favors from invisible Beings. I don’t ascribe any emotions or sentience (certainly, no vindictiveness) to any Person or Thing that might have created our universe. How the universe came into being is beyond what I can know.
I do cherish my universe, though, and I realize that I am an incredibly tiny and incredibly ignorant part of it. Many fervent believers (though not all) would characterize my beliefs as “atheism” although that word, as commonly construed, would characterize me in a misleadingly cartoonish way.
Given my beliefs, most people would be surprised to hear that I sometimes go to church to be inspired and energized. What’s my secret? I go to church when no one else is there—I like to go to empty churches. When nothing else is going on other than one’s own breathing, meditating, thinking and writing, going to church can even be exhilarating.
With a pad of paper and a pen in my hands, in search of solitude, I walked to church twice this week. I had previously noticed a huge church a few blocks from a courthouse where I sometimes work. Only after walking to this church on Monday did I learn that it was called “Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Cathedral” in Belleville, Illinois. Here’s a photo I took on Wednesday …
What kinds of voters are we? It’s hard to tell by looking what kind of candidates we elect. After all, we usually only have two viable choices; we often hold our noses and vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Many potential candidates never appear on the ballot, thanks to our horrifically corrupt political system, a system that requires a candidate to have corporate money in order to seen as viable by the corporate-owned media. It is a ludicrous and vicious circle.
Even acknowledging the severely limited choices we have at the polls, how well do we vote? Do we prepare ourselves carefully before entering the voting booth? Do we work hard to expose ourselves to a wide range of perspectives before voting or do we fall prey to the availability heuristic, voting on the basis of highly suspect political ads and intellectually vapid local “news”? Do most voters take time to carefully deliberate on the long-term risks and benefits of the political positions touted by the candidates? Apparently not, based upon the ubiquity misleading attack ads that invite unreflective scorn rather than a deliberate consideration of the issues.
Another bit of evidence suggesting that many of us vote without enough preparation occurs whenever citizens vote for lesser known candidates and issues. On numerous occasions, people have admitted to me that they voted for or against a particular candidate (or issue) about whom (which) they knew nothing at all. In Missouri, this happens all the time when circuit judges seeking …
You can learn the following things and much more in this article by New York Magazine: He’s the eleventh of eleven children. Every night, he would listen to “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” before going to bed and it would make him cry. He studied philosophy in college. His favorite…
My government’s violent occupation of Iraq has not flustered me nearly as much as the nonchalance of half of America. Why are so many Americans utterly complacent about the wretched and rampant killing going on in our names? Is it possible that we have become confused and seduced by the magnitude of the killings and by the music? Allow me to explain.
First, the magnitude. Stalin’s well-cited quote comes to mind: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Perhaps the immoral nature of Bush’s aggression would be clearer had Bush caused the death of only one man. Imagine this hypothetical:
…President Bush looks out the window of the oval office and sees a man wearing a backpack walking down the sidewalk. In a dry-drunkish paranoid moment, Bush tells his security officers that the man walking down the sidewalk has nuclear weapons grade aluminum tubes in his backpack and orders his guards to capture “that terrorist.” While capturing the man with the backpack (it turns out to be empty), a U.S soldier is accidentally shot by friendly fire of a fellow soldier.
It is later disclosed that, one minute before giving his order to capture the man, a former ambassador had advised Bush the man wearing the backpack had just been searched and that he was not carrying anything dangerous. Then it came out that Bush and his highest advisers had intentionally blown the cover of a CIA agent to discredit the former