Killer High Heels

Today’s topic is high heeled shoes.  Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder.  Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt.

I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes.  I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses.  Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification.  I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .

I never understood high heels.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t.  To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels.  Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust.  But many other men (and women) disagree with me.  For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).

Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of …

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Pope concludes that “evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

I don't know why the Pope constantly gets such intense press coverage. I know he is the leader of a large church, but he most often speaks in platitudes, double-speak or with dark-ages insight.  Here's a good example--his recent muddled pronoucement on evolution.    According to the Associated Press, Pope Benedict…

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Gentle “Miranda Warning” cards for religious moderates

 At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates.  The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists.  Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.

This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:

Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.

This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:

  • At least I know that my dead aunt is now in heaven; or
  • I prayed that my son would get that new job and God answered my prayer; or
  • Jesus loves us. 

Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me.  The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me.  These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society.  Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually …

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New DNA evidence bolsters idea that modern birds are descendants of dinosaurs

This article from LiveScience shows what incredible things can be accomplished when scientists search hard to find even a bit of surviving soft tissue in a T-rex femur: An adolescent female Tyrannosaurus rex died 68 million years ago, but its bones still contain intact soft tissue, including the oldest preserved…

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Einstein’s God

At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.”  During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God.  Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”

The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson).  For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.”  The bottom line? 

[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.

Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.”  Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood.  While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true.  From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.” 

At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …

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