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…
Remember all of the 2002 beltway sniper killings committed by John Muhammad and Lee Malvo? Each one of those deaths garnered loads of front page media attention. That is because human life was sacred and because every preventable death needed to be publicized to prevent further deaths. I remember the…
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud recognized the many benefits of civilization, including beauty, cleanliness, order and the regulation of social relationships. For Freud, however, nothing better characterized civilization than "its esteem and encouragement of man's higher mental activities-his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements-and the leading role that assigns…
In the United States, we often hear that the U.S. is the world’s greatest place to live. There is still much good to be said about the United States, but there is also increasing dysfunction.
In his 2004 article, “The European Dream,” Jeremy Rifkin dared to compare the U.S. way of life to that of the European Union. He wrote “[I]t saddens me to say that America is no longer a great country. Yes, it’s still the most powerful economy in the world, with a military presence unmatched in all of history. But to be a great country, it is necessary to be a good country.”
Many other people have expressed concerns with the direction of the U.S., of course. Rifkin’s article goes further by letting the objective facts do most of the talking:
…[The European Union’s] $10.5 trillion gross domestic product now eclipses the U.S. GDP, making it the world’s largest economy. The European Union is already the world’s leading exporter and largest internal trading market. Sixty-one of the 140 biggest companies on the Global Fortune 500 rankings are European, while only 50 are U.S. companies.
[I]n the European Union, there are approximately 322 physicians per 100,000 people, whereas in the United States there are only 279. The United States ranks 26th among the industrial nations in infant mortality, well below the EU average. The average life span in the 15 most developed EU countries is now 78.01 years, compared to 76.9 years in the United States.
Children in
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 …