The Onion reports that a new Kansas Court decision requires public schools to teach both sides of the controversy: Christian Groups: Biblical Armageddon Must Be Taught Alongside Global Warming If you want to display your opinion that we should teach the controversy, you can also buy one of these t-shirts from Teach the Controversy.
Writing for Psychology Today, Nigel Barber asks whether modern day spectator sports function as religions. The evidence suggests that the answer is yes:
The same issue of Psychology Today features the ex-gods and the ex-goddesses of the sports/religions. Their sports careers often end with a thud."The similarities between sport fandom and organized religion are striking. Consider the vocabulary associated with both: faith, devotion, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration." . . . [S]pectators worship other human beings, their achievements, and the groups to which they belong." And . . . sports stadia and arenas resemble "cathedrals where followers gather to worship their heroes and pray for their successes."
Fans wear the team colors and carry its flags, icons, and mascots. Then there is repetitive chanting of team encouragement, hand-clapping, booing the other team, doing the wave, and so forth. The singing of an anthem at a sporting event likely has similar psychological effects as the singing of a hymn in church. . . . As a group, sports fans are fairly religious, according to research. It is also curious that as religious attendance rates have dropped off in recent decades, interest in sport spectatorship has soared. . .
[F]ans are highly committed to their favored stars and teams in a way that gives focus and meaning to their daily lives. In addition, sports spectatorship is a transformative experience through which fans escape their humdrum lives, just as religious experiences help the faithful to transcend their everyday existence.
You may have heard the news. Humans and Neanderthals, apparently, had sex with each other at some time. Shocking, yes, I know. But the newish technology of sequencing genomes is turning up all sorts of fascinating (and potentially scandalous) data. In NatureNews Online you can read more about it.
The researchers arrived at that conclusion by studying genetic data from 1,983 individuals from 99 populations in Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Sarah Joyce, a doctoral student working with Long, analyzed 614 microsatellite positions, which are sections of the genome that can be used like fingerprints. She then created an evolutionary tree to explain the observed genetic variation in microsatellites. The best way to explain that variation was if there were two periods of interbreeding between humans and an archaic species, such as Homo neanderthalensis or H. heidelbergensis.
Speculation over Neanderthal/Human interaction has been ongoing for a long time. Some of the idiosyncrasies of the Basque language have even been hypothesized to have resulted from such interaction, as that region of Europe seems to have been the last place Neanderthal was known to live. That they shared space---and perhaps much more---with humans is, to say the least, and intriguing notion. [More . . . ]This entrepreneur is offering to take care of the pets of those people who are chosen to be taken up during the Rapture.
I can't think of any way to argue with the logic of this t-shirt.