Killer High Heels

Today’s topic is high heeled shoes.  Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder.  Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt.

I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes.  I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses.  Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification.  I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .

I never understood high heels.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t.  To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels.  Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust.  But many other men (and women) disagree with me.  For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).

Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of …

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Attention Sickness

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…

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Prayer: a great cure for impotence

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:

  • I’m worried about you.
  • Rest assured that I’m hoping for the best.
  • I’ll be thinking about you every hour . . .
  • Well, maybe you don’t have cancer, so you might be OK.
  • I’m glad you have a good doctor who will give you excellent medical care.

Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):

  • I will pray long and often to almighty God to ask Him to intervene to protect you from anything harmful.
  • I will ask God to see that you are healed promptly.
  • [or even this!] Keep in mind that this life on Earth is temporary for all of us.  But we will be together in heaven forever and I will keep praying for you.

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, …

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Selective empathy

We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States.   Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded. Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should.  But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians…

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Gentle “Miranda Warning” cards for religious moderates

 At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates.  The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists.  Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.

This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:

Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.

This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:

  • At least I know that my dead aunt is now in heaven; or
  • I prayed that my son would get that new job and God answered my prayer; or
  • Jesus loves us. 

Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me.  The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me.  These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society.  Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually …

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