Over at Flickr, I ran across a photo by Jimmy O’Donnell featuring a beautiful woman in lingerie walking in a church. Maybe O'Donnell didn’t take this photo for any of the reasons I find it interesting—maybe he took it for the mere shock value, or because he simply liked the…
Excellent work by Stephen Colbert:
Lee Camp has been on a roll for a long time:
When they don't like you, media outlets can crucify you with irrelevant personal attacks. This means that there is always an out for those who don't really want to report a story. That's what happened regarding Edward Snowden. He didn't graduate from high school, though he did pick up a GED. Nonetheless, he has repeatedly been smeared as a "dropout." FAIR reports on this hatchet job. It turns out that Snowden is in fine company. Consider this excerpt:
Consider these high-school dropouts: Founding father and genius inventor Benjamin Franklin. Founding Father and First President George Washington. The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. American aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The first lady of civil rights, Rosa Parks, who refused a Montgomery Alabama bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. The man who gave the world its most popular chocolate bar, Milton Hershey. Before he would become America's most beloved author, Mark Twain left school at the age of 12 to become a printer's apprentice. The great man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln.There are many others, including Bill Cosby, and presumably Jesus. But as we've seen, calling someone a "dropout" is a selectively used weapon, not a truly relevant aspect to most stories. To compound things, many of the smartest people I know do not have college diplomas, yet they too are treated miserably by a society that seeks quick, easy and often wrong answers to the question of who is "smart" or worthy of respect. This is a travesty for all of us, credentialed or otherwise.
Non-believers have been villainized for so long by religious leaders that it leaves us flummoxed when a religious leader fails to take an unfair swipe at us. The religious leader I'm referring to is Pope Francis, and what he said was resoundingly refreshingly ordinary, though it sounded so good coming from the leader of the Catholic Church:
"Atheists should be seen as good people if they do good, Pope Francis has said in his latest urging that people of all religions, and none, work together. "Just do good, and we'll find a meeting point," the pope said in a hypothetical reply to the hypothetical comment: "But I don't believe. I'm an atheist."The new Pope has thus jumped over a very low bar. One small step for a man--one giant leap for a religious leader.