I have a friend that is sometimes frustrating to converse with, because he always wants me to define the terms I use. Our conversation is filled with his requests to explain just what I mean. He says, with justification, that people may use the same word but often have different…
Watching the furor generated over Erich's post about Bart Erhman's book has been awesome. I mean that in the strict meaning of the word. It is awe-illiciting. After watching the average responses to our posts rise and fall around five to ten each, with a few fetching somewhere in the…
I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing. Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to…
Everyone knows that the United States was first settled in 1620. Everyone is wrong.
We celebrate a wildly distorted history of Thanksgiving year after year. On Thanksgiving, we solemnly give thanks that we have enough food to allow our families to overeat. For the sake of holiday decorum, we avoid the thought that we could actually be doing something to help millions of people starving to death elsewhere in the world. We could splurge a bit less on the big holiday meal, for instance, then send life-saving donations to relief agency to save some real lives. But that would be such a downer on the holiday. Instead, let’s spend time with those people we love and think happy thoughts about Thanksgiving.
After all, we celebrate holidays to be happy, to bond family and friends. And it is a good thing to keep in touch with family and friends. To keep the room happy, though, we need to focus mostly on happy things and to avoid thinking about facts, memories or courses of conduct that might interfere with that happiness. Other than watching our favorite football team lose the big game, what could possibly interfere with the flow of happiness on Thanksgiving? Here’s one thing: the truth about Thanksgiving.
With Thanksgiving approaching, I decided that it would be good medicine to re-read the chapter on Thanksgiving in James Loewen’s iconoclastic classic, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). It was well worth the …
According to this site maintained by Dr. Martin Seligman, you can "develop insights into yourself and the world around you through these scientifically tested questionnaires, surveys, and scales." I took a few of these tests (some only a few minutes) and might have learned a thing or two. The site…