It's that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy…
I received the following from a friend of mine, who sent it to his local paper as well. I’ve asked his permission to post it here, in its entirety. It concerns an issue which, while we may hope represents an unfortunate part of our history long outgrown, still rears its…
Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?
Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our civilization but our coins) know that we were a Christian nation. It was thus briefly seen on the U.S. 2-cent piece at the end of the civil war. And then retired, not to be seen again for over a generation.
Then came the morality movement backlash from “The Gay 90’s”. Picture a disco era for your great-great-grandparents. This post-Victorian backlash eventually led to the 18th and 21st amendments (prohibition and its repeal). Meanwhile, this slogan started appearing on coins in 1908. There is nothing like the fear of pleasure to get politicians who need to appear churchy to move on a moral issue.
I just read an article “IN GOD WE TRUST” — STAMPING OUT RELIGION ON NATIONAL CURRENCY that suggests protest in the form of marking out the offending theist sentiment on any folding money that passes through our hands. Although it is petty vandalism, it is not a federal offense. As long as an alteration you make to money does not change its value in any way, it isn’t illegal.
Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace. When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter. This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.
I never once thought it was her fault.
How could you? She’d been deceived. Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.
History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality. Especially among adolescents. We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain. The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development. It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely …
Writer John Scalzi recently visited the Creation Museum. He has written his report, assessed his impressions, and concluded...well, you should read his conclusions for yourself, here. I do not have Mr. Scalzi's flare for describing expensive nonsense in such finely satirical, subversive, and somewhat detached a manner. There is also a…