A dollar bill is approximately 0.0035" thick. So, a stack of one billion dollar bills would be 55.24 miles high. A stack of 224 billion dollar bills (the approximate cost so far of invading Iraq) would be 12,373.76 miles high. That's halfway around the earth's equator (the earth's circumference is 24,900…
One thing I still don't understand about Iraq is why nobody in the Bush Administration apparently anticipated this long-running insurgency. Wasn't it reasonably foreseeable that some of Iraq's tens of thousands of Republican Guard troops, and hundreds of thousands of regulars, could simply hide their weapons and melt back into the…
People who don’t believe in God are constantly disparaged as immoral by those who do. Many conservatives believe that most of what they perceive to be wrong with the world can be traced to secular humanism, a phrase they can barely utter without spitting. For them, secular humanism is a…
When my friend Doug wrote that “God loves us like an abusive parent,” it sounded so very harsh, but it then reminded me of that most troublesome of concepts: hell.
I was raised Catholic, where hell was portrayed to be a very bad place to go. Many Catholics, however, and many liberal Christians, don’t believe that hell is a place where people are literally tortured. Check out today’s conservative Christians, however, on your local AM radio station. You’ll hear them fervently arguing that the version of hell taught by moderate Christians is way off the mark. Hell is not a metaphor or a mere figure of speech. Here’s what it is:
The reality of hell is the most horrifying, terror striking, fearful truth known to man. It encompasses the worst possible fear and the meanest conceivable existence, continual never-ending torture. “And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever (Revelation 20:10).”
Therefore, many fundamentalists believe that someone sent to hell will be (literally) tortured (literally) forever. It will be like being forced to go to Dachau, the Rape of Nanking, Abu Ghraib or worse, for eternity.…
When did careful planning and execution become un-cool in real life? Probably about the same time it became un-cool in Hollywood.
Think how the American hero has evolved. He used to be smart, principled and disciplined. Not anymore. Where we used to have student-of-the-game Ted Williams, we now have Barry Bonds. Where we used to have Atticus Finch, Rick Blaine and Jefferson Smith we have hot-headed Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise). Planners and careful executers include heroes as diverse as Rocky Bilboa and Gandhi. Heroes-who-plan include soldiers from starkly different backgrounds, such as the soldiers in The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen.
Modern television and movies don’t offer heroes who intelligently plan and collaborate with others to save the day. A television show offering this in the 60’s was Mission Impossible. The Impossible Mission Force was a group of specialists who actually sat down to plan their mission at the beginning of each show.
Modern heroes rarely sit down to plan their missions. They bristle at the thought of collaborating. Modern protagonists are reactive, not planners. Think of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Terminator II. These are individualistic hot headed rejecters of collaboration. When they succeed in the end it is because they got lucky at that last desperate moment, not because they pondered contingencies before setting out. Interestingly, if you want planning and execution, look to Hollywood’s villains, people such as Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader or Batman’s Joker.…