Today's Associated Press report on the deposition testimony a former FDA commissioner sheds further light on the FDA's extended and shameful failure to approve "Plan B," the morning after pill. According to the recent testimony: The Food and Drug Administration had intended to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B last year…
OK, now that we’ve had our tussle with a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and before the GOP brings up another proposed constitutional ban to flag burning, it’s time to take up the real threat to American values which MUST be stopped and pass a constitutional ban against…
The puzzle goes like this: young student actor Wiley Wiggins, star of the trippy, philosophical film Waking Life, walks into a bar. There he finds University of Texas Professor of Philosophy Louis Mackey, who muses on two kinds of human suffering: those that suffer from an “overabundance of life”, like…
Gays' enjoyment of drinking fountains undermines MY enjoyment of drinking fountains. Therefore, we need a "Defense of Drinking Fountains" Amendment to the United States Constitution. I'm simply extending this Administration's logic, you see. As Mr. Bush said “Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them. And changing the…
When I was a kid, I was always curious about why there were so many different kinds of Christian churches in America: Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Unitarian, Congregational, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, United Church of Christ, Reformed Church of Christ, Mormon, Quaker, Shaker, Greek Othodox, Russian Orthodox, Christian Science…the list seemed endless. It seemed like there were more different versions of Christianity in America than there were non-Christian religions around the rest of the world (Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Bahai, Shinto, Confucianism, etc.). Later, I learned that those other religions also had many different versions (Orthodox Judiasm, Ultra-orthodox Judiasm, Hasidic Judiasm, Reformed Judiasm, Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslim, etc.), so Christianity is not unique in that respect.
Meanwhile, Christians were fond of telling me that the Bible was written by God and, thus, was both perfect and complete. Naturally, this made no sense to me given the cornucopia of churches. If the Bible was perfect and complete, then why didn’t all Christians understand it the same way? Didn’t God know how to write clearly? More importantly, why were there so many different kinds of churches and what were their actual differences? To my immense frustration, churches of different denominations didn’t have signs out front explaining how they differed from the other churches down the street.
Only recently have I learned some answers to these questions. First, it turns out that the number of different versions of Christianity and other religions that I can name are only the tip of …
