According to this article, Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is being reissued. Timely reading? Depends on what audience at which this is aimed. I seriously doubt conservatives of the Rove/Norquist stripe will have much sympathy with Goldwater, who now seems admirable and even iconic compared to the…
As Eliott Spitzer writes: SCHIP is a program that provides health care to children whose families make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private health insurance. It's a program that provides medical care, including preventive medical care, to innocent children. According to the Bush Administration, we…
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller. Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew. He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.
But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor? When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements. When people are good, they are not really good because of religion. To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” (Page 167). Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:
It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”
When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.
…Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves. We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under
In an article recently published on BldgBlog (HT: Boing Boing), there's an absolutely fascinating interview with Michael Cook, a Canadian writer and photographer who devotes himself to exploring the subterranean infrastructure - that is to say, the storm sewers, spillways, abandoned hydroelectric complexes, dams, and all manner of tunnels and…
Here's what Edwards had to say on August 23 in New Hampshire: Real change starts with being honest -- the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It's rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It's rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become…