Marty Kaplan describes the symptoms and gives a name to "the very real nausea that culture (to use a kind word for it) can cause": Attention Sickness. First the BIG THING was ANNA NICOLE. Then it was WAR FUNDING. Then it was SANJAYA, and vote-for-the-worst sadism. Then it was CANCER, and…
Summary: A scathing, informative chronicle of the Bush administration's failures in Iraq, yet one that speaks with compelling plausibility of all the missed opportunities to turn things around. Former U.S. diplomat and ambassador Peter Galbraith has been deeply and personally involved with the affairs of Iraq for over twenty years.…
American culture celebrates the quick fix. Diet pills like Trimspa and Ephedra enjoyed massive popularity despite their health risks because many people want to look healthy without actually living healthfully. Take a diet pill, pop a multivitamin instead of getting nutrients through food, starve yourself- it doesn’t matter how you…
A Jesuit college in St. Louis just won a Missouri Supreme Court case allowing them to get public money, $8 million of it, for their college. Not being one that believes public money should be spent in support of religion, I was aghast. "How could that possibly happen?" you might say. The answer…
A friend called me recently. The doctor just found a “suspicious” lump and scheduled a biopsy. As you can imagine, she is anxious that she might have cancer.
What can a good agnostic say to such a person? Consider these options:
Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):
Promising to pray makes it appear that one is really doing something. It would certainly be much more satisfying to both me and to my friend I I could honestly tell her that I was doing something rather than settling for the agnostic version of prayer (i.e., “I hope it isn’t cancer” or “Would you like to talk about your upcoming biopsy over dinner?”).
The false efficacy of prayer plays into one of the great fallacies of our time, …