This morning, I was watching one of the local religious television stations, listening to a preacher describe his beliefs about what heaven will be like. He described "walking hand-in-hand with Jesus and having Jesus answer all of my questions about how he created the Universe." I was dumbfounded. Walking hand-in-hand…
Boy, am I out of the loop. I don't work in an office, have no kids in school, don't watch TV or pay to have ads delivered to my house in a daily paper. I didn't know it was Columbus Day until I noticed that my outgoing mail failed to…
Many years ago, a fellow employee and I got into political and philosophic discourse weekly, sometimes daily. One of our basic disagreements had to do with abortion. She was Irish Catholic, and a very bright woman. Her position was consistent with her church. But she was not so dogmatic as to be incapable of engaging the debate without getting so defensive as to shut off her brain.
One day we both heard a news report about a statutory rape case in England. The girl–14–was pregnant. The judge ordered her to have an abortion. The circumstances were bizarre and extreme. Naturally, though, the debate at work that day was about abortion.
“I suppose,” she said to me, “you agree with the judge’s order.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. She blinked, dismayed, and asked why. “Because it’s supposed to be a matter of choice, for Pete’s sake. Choice. Why is it so hard for you to get that? It’s not the court’s decision, it’s her decision, whether to keep it or get rid of it.”
She had a hard time with that–with both aspects. The idea of abortion and my support of a woman’s right to keep her fetus.
An earlier post elicited some responses dealing with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, one of which asserted that there is no explicit statement in the Constitution separating church and state. As far as it goes, no, there isn’t, but the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment lays a logical basis for first …
The NewsHour is allegedly a “low-key, evenhanded [newscast], inclusive of all perspectives. FAIR studied NewsHour’s guestlist from October 2005 through March 2006 (six months) To evaluate NewsHour's claim to evenhandedness and commitment to the public interest. Here’s what Extra found: At a time when a large proportion of the U.S. public…
For a short time, I watched a few of the “forensic science” shows like CSI, mostly for a laugh at the junk science. I was particularly amused at the tool used to analyze metal. The actor put a hub cap in a plexiglass box, the box was filled with smoke or mist, and the printer spewed out paper. On that paper were the exact components of the metal, so much of this, so much of that. Then the formulation was compared to their list of hub cap manufacturers, and lo and behold, there were two retail distributors of that brand hub cap in the city. It was hilarious, like Lucy stuffing her shirt with chocolates from the speeding assembly line and about as likely.
I’ve stopped watching those shows, partly because they can only create so many magic plexiglass boxes, and because they’re so gory (regurgitated by a large snake was the end for me). I also read a (true) story of a lawsuit involving lost ashes of a loved one (cremains) and the two got me thinking about our funeral customs.
There are really some odd customs, and chief among them for me, since I have to face them repeatedly (one bad thing about getting old is that your friends and family are old, too, and you lose a lot of them), is our ‘dress up’ custom. That is where we take a body, dress it up in special clothes (sometimes bought new for the occasion, sometimes picked out …