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…
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…
See them floundering after their cherished possessions, like fish flopping in a river starved of water.
Sutta Nipata 777 (From What Would Buddha Do? (1999)).
A friend of mine recently returned from an extended trip to Egypt. He found it striking that the 18 million residents of Cairo lived in tightly packed conditions and that they owned so very few possessions. Based on his own observations, the average resident of Cairo owned about 10% of the property owned by the average American family. My friend’s estimate was about on the mark. Most Americans would certainly describe most residents of Cairo to be “poor.”
Amidst this material “poverty,” though, my friend noticed numerous signs of family togetherness and harmony that he doesn’t often see in the U.S. Parents and children were spending time with each other, smiling at each other, playing together and apparently enjoying each others’ company. How could this be, that people appeared to be so happy when they owned so little? As my friend described what he saw, I couldn’t imagine Americans getting along that well if someone took away 90% of our possessions. In fact, we’d become embittered and we’d be at each other’s throats.
My friend’s comments caused me to think of the enormous amount of material possessions that Americans have and crave. We have shameful amounts of material possessions. We have many times more stuff than we need. Yet we work very hard to have ever more.
We are afflicted with the all-consuming epidemic “affluenza,” …
In a post entitled “A Seriously Warped Moral Compass,” Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism relates a discussion he had with an evangelical fellow. The topic? Hosea, chapter 13, a Bible passage in which God promises that for the crime of disbelief, the city of Samaria’s “infants shall be dashed in pieces,…