Once in a while I get tired of the environmental/ecological harangue. People should do such-and-such; people should not do so-n-so; we need to etc etc etc. The question that needs to be addressed--and the one which, consciously or not, drives the resistence of this or any other administration's apparent lack…
President Bush recently expressed doubt that he will be viewing Al Gore's documentary on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." In the course of this same interview (reported by the Associated Press), Mr. Bush also made two extraordinary statements: 1) "New technologies will change how we live and how we drive…
I previously posted the results of my personal investigation into the fake medical clinics that call themselves "Pregnancy Resource Centers." My earlier investigation revealed that Pregnancy Resource Centers are unwilling to plainly admit their real agenda: to keep people ignorant about birth control, to deny women access to effective birth…
I have long been confounded that otherwise intelligent people can claim, straight-faced, that the earth is only 6,000 years old or that a virgin got pregnant. Such people are utterly sincere, of course. Many of them excel at highly technical jobs and they generally embrace the results of science (they choose doctors who use high-tech medicine and they dare to fly on airplanes) and they are capable of great skepticism (they scoff at the dogma of everyone else’s religion and if one of their own unmarried daughters gets pregnant, they don’t believe her story that she didn’t have sex).
I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand this unevenness of skepticism. Though fundamentalists are generally intelligent, inquisitive, and skeptical, they are science-adverse only with regard to a limited range of topics. While in their “Believer” mode, they seem to be totally transformed people. What is grabbing their brains and making them say such things, I’ve often wondered.
The deepest, most treasured, assumptions of many religious Believers are somehow cordoned off. Once hooked on religion, they seem incapable of truly considering whether God exists. They seem psychologically and intellectually incapable of considering that the writings and history of the Bible seem flawed, self-contradictory and all-too-human.
Before you start thinking that I’m picking on religious fundamentalists . . . well, I am. But I’m also picking on anyone else who’s ever shuddered and become glassy-eyed at simple questions aimed at their most basic assumptions. I’m talking about all of us, …
In a recent post (http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166), I discussed God's attractive nuisance in His garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge. Let's take that discussion one step farther. Not only did God plant his deadly tree smack in the middle of His garden (bad garden design), not only did He fail to…