The Walt Disney Studios, and its divisions and subsidiaries, have always upheld a very loose relationship between well-established historical fact, and their productions. One case in point would be The Prince of Egypt, a delightful tale of Moses growing up. It clearly shows Moses playing around the slaves building the…
Here's the definition of "reaction formation" from Wikipedia: In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defense mechanism in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions are replaced by their direct opposites. This mechanism is often characteristic of obsessional neuroses. Here's the example given on Wikipedia: A man who is overly aroused by…
I know who Mrs. Cain was. We don't talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn't have been paradise without her or them. She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden--you know, the hoeing,…
The Bill passed by congress on the detainee and interrogation issue is one of the more frustrating examples of Democratic cowardice and political expedience. It does not substantively change anything. Personally, I feel the only utility in having a law in the first place is to use as a cudgel…
A Young Earth Creationist with whom I often discourse pities me my small view of the universe. You see, I apparently cannot see the vast immensity and perfection of a 7,000 year old universe created and micromanaged by a spoiled-child-like deity. He is sure that I cannot conceive of how time might mean different things to God than to man. Or how mutually exclusive states of being (God and Man) might have existed simultaneously and yet separately in a single organism here on Earth about 2,000 years ago, and never anywhere else.
My tiny universe is about 15,000,000,000 years old, and I watch it unfurl from a curdled cloud of mesons and quarks to chill and congeal into lumpy proton soup in a quark broth. As it cools it further clumps into first generation stars that are huge, bright, and short-lived: On the order of 10 million years from ignition (when fusion begins) until explosion (when the Hydrogen-Helium cycle breaks down, and gravity collapses it into a mild nova that creates more Helium, and a few of the other light elements. Much of the residue clouds of these stars collect into clusters of smaller stars , galaxies. When they burn out and die, they form and expel the whole periodic table in the hotter, tighter crucibles of their bright supernovae. Then these clouds condense and we get third generation stars, like our sun. The remnants around it also cluster into smaller chunks that are not heavy enough to sustain fusion, …
