Atheism, Humanism, or Other

There was a time in this country that an open admission of atheism could get a person severely hurt in any given community. Ostracism, mainly, which over time can be very damaging. But like so many other "out of the mainstream" life choices, this too is no longer the case. According to this article in the New York Times, "No Religion" has more than doubled on surveys in the past ten to twenty years. Now, that does not mean all these folks are atheists or agnostics. It means, quite specifically, that they align themselves with no organized religion. Some folks might wonder at the difference. What is having faith if not in the context of a religious umbrella? When I was fifteen I left the church. I'd been educated in a Lutheran school and received a healthy indocrination in that faith. After entering public high school, I found myself growing less and less involved or interested. There was in this no profound personal insight or revelation. It was adolescent laziness. I'd never been a consistent Sunday church-goer, and although there had been a year or two when I actually practiced Testifying, born out of a powerful belief in Christianity, other factors managed to draw my interest away.

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ANZAC Day – lest we forget

Today, April 25, is ANZAC Day in Australia & New Zealand. A most reverent & sacred day in this part of the world, it commemorates the day in 1915 when Australia and New Zealand Army Corp troops (the nominal ANZACs) made a landing at Gallipoli on the coast of Turkey (a place now called ANZAC Cove). The day certainly isn't a celebration of a great victory - the Gallipoli campaign (the brainchild of a young Winston Churchill, then chief of the navy) was an abject failure and cost tens of thousands of ANZACs their lives before their eventual withdrawal by British high command after having gained mere yards. A mistake by the planners meant that instead of landing at a lightly defended beach, the ANZACs landed at a steep, mountainous cove peppered with Turkish machine-gun positions. With the advantage of height and numbers, the Turkish guns made a complete mess of the troops storming the beach. The ANZACs were tenacious, made small gains, dug in and held on as they were ordered to for months, but made no appreciable ground and were pulled out months later, their ranks decimated by superior numbers and by the privations of trench warfare. But why remember such horror? Our troops had certainly been involved in military action before and with more success, in places like the Crimea and during the Boer War. Well, despite having first been colonised by the British in 1788, Australia didn't become a federated nation until 1901. ANZAC Day marks the first time Australian troops went into battle representing their own nation and not just a colony of Imperial Britain. It is considered by some an important step in the building of our national character - the baptism by fire of our fledgling democratic nation in international conflict. Others see it as a warning not to simply do the military bidding of another nation (a warning that's rarely been heeded). These days it has chiefly become a day of rememberance and for thanksgiving for the sacrifices of all our fallen soldiers, sailors & airmen and a day to spare a thought for those currently serving around the world. Today, Australians & New Zealanders will be attending parades or watching them on TV, having barbecues (thought it is autumn and getting chilly), playing two-up, going to church services, many will be in Turkey at ANZAC Cove itself for a dawn service, or just taking a minute whenever they can to remember Australians that risked or gave their lives for our country. Far from glorifying war or violence, ANZAC Day is a day of quiet reflection, of appreciation of sacrifice ... and to remember how those bastard Brits shafted us at Gallipoli.

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Olbermann offers Hannity $1,000 per second to be waterboarded.

Hannity mouthed off and Olberman called him on it. Now we'll watch as Hannity tries to figure out how to get out of keeping his promise. Consider that Christopher Hitchens actually subjected himself to the process, giving him credibility when commenting on waterboarding. Unlike the detainees, Hitchens knew the entire time that he had the power to immediately stop the process . He lasted about 15 seconds.

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Gay Marriage = Religious Freedom

One of the more ludicrous statements made in the recent NOM Gathering Storm ad was the claim that legalizing gay marriage somehow takes away freedom from those who oppose it. Here is an eloquent response to that claim. This clear and well made video exposes some of the myths and mis-information about the threat that gay marriage poses to religious freedom. In fact, the host makes the argument that only WITH gay marriage can we have religious freedom!

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Who needs a tea-bag? – The truth about income, taxes, and the past 30 years

I got involved in a discussion on Ed Brayton's blog earlier today, which referenced yesterday's Tea-bag 'protests'. As a result, I ended up doing some research on pre/post tax income from 1979 to 2006. Taxes in this case is defined as 'effective' tax rates according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) guidelines, not some 'subset', or arbitrary, or marginal rates. These are the taxes actually paid, and the income actually retained. Based on the data presented by the CBO, with all dollars equalized to the 2006 value, the richest 1% of Americans saw their incomes after taxes increase by 256% since 1979. By comparison, the poorest 20% of Americans saw their income increase by only 11% after taxes over the same time period. Putting this another way - in 1979 the wealthiest 1% earned, on average, 22.6 times the poorest 20% ($337,100 -v- $14,900). By 2006, the wealthiest 1% had extended their lead to a staggering multiple of 72.75 times the poorest 20% ($1,200,300 -v- $16,500).

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