Onion Network News is reporting that President Barack Obama is already in the process of sitting down with each and every American worker to review his or her job performance. Not that there aren't some glitches in the process. Here's the Onion's report:
Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker
One obsession among fundamentalists is the question of who, exactly, qualifies for heaven. Basically, the answer comes down to "us". I.E: Christians. Not all 2Bn of them, but only those who are "true" Christians. If you question an American fundamentalist individually about who gets to go, denomination by denomination, then you learn that a fraction of a percent of those they claim as Christian (when boasting of how many they are) actually qualify. (List of Christian denominations) Catholics, the vast majority of Christians, are not eligible according to fundamentalist thought. Here's an excerpt from a recent youth Mexico Mission blog:
"Later we were sitting outside and I asked her how long she had been a Christian. She told us that when she was seven she wanted to be a Christian but her parents wouldn't let her and made her go to a Catholic church.
I guess when her parents died, she was able to actually actively follow God."
I've been to her church, and this is what they are taught: Most forms of Christianity are heretical cults. But what of, "All dogs go to heaven"? What is a cat's incentive for goodness? How about Bees? As the video implies, that any human may expect to go to a particular heaven is an artifact of the heaven having been invented by humans. If such a place existed, why would any innocent organism be kept out?I love to collect quotes. Such a high ratio of thought-provocation per word! I'd even bet that there is a the seed for a novel in most well-honed quotes. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Some of these quotes have made the rounds (the oldies-but-goodies), though I'd bet that you'll find more than a few that you've never seen before. Enjoy. In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)
Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.Robert Byrne
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.Tom Stoppard (1937 - ), Jumpers (1972) act 1
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.Douglas Adams , Last Chance to See
“It is not acceptable to have a religion where the alternative to faith is punishment — that’s how you train dogs, not develop people.”Deng Ming-Dao
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.Oscar Wilde
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.George Wald (1906 - )
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.H. H. Williams
I know it is wholly unoriginal of me to link to the comic XKCD, but today's strip was just too true to life:
Almost nothing annoys me more than the bemoaning of the future as an immoral, uneducated, unenlightened time. Many people- of both conservative and liberal ideologies- call up sunny images of a past where people were happier, smarter and "better". Usually we can point to political and technological advancements that demonstrate this is not the case.
My deeply-held belief is that the future is bright and brimming with promise, that today's youth are not hopeless or devolved, and that new fangled technology will not cause the collapse of our species. When bad things arise, we are tempted to look to the past with a fond and foggy nostalgia- as if fundamental human problems were not always the same. Bringing apocalyptic rhetoric into the discussion of modern problems is inappropriate, I think, because every generation has its big, scary troubles. As this comic advises, we should always look to the evidence and not catastrophize.
The Center for Inquiry has just announced a new campaign to help defend free speech--particularly speech critical of religion--from suppression. The Campaign for Free Expression includes a website designed as a forum to report and monitor censorship. The site also publishes the kind of religious (and political) criticism likely to find itself censored. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_launches_campaign_for_free_expression/