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- 55%: The Number of Americans Who Say That a Guardian Angel Has Protected Them from Harm (Source: USA Today)
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Woman in an American Field Hospital in Czechoslavakia, May 1945
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- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Anne Frank and Margo Frank in a Purim Holiday Photo with Other Jewish Children, February, 1934, and an Image from Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Where Anne and Margo Died
- Near Death Experience (NDE) Watch: Waiting for Dr. Sam Parnia
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Children Lined up with Heads Shaved in a Croatian Concentration Camp
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Stacked Corpses
- Negative Capability Defined: Walking in Mysteries---and the Shoes of Others---with Keats, Shakespeare, Whitman---and Barack Obama!
- In Evolution We Trust?: England Puts Charles Darwin on the Back of Its Ten Pound Bank Note
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Image from the Concentration Camp at Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria, 1945
- Emily Dickinson, Lesbian?: Her Letter to Susan Gilbert, in June of 1852, Might Tell Us Less Than You Think
- Bearing Witness to the Holocaust: Children Experimented upon at Auschwitz
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Recent Posts
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Gay Execution in Uganda: Pastor Rick Warren Tries to Walk His Fellow Evangelicals Back from a Precipice
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Christianity, evangelicals, fundamentalism, gay, gay equality, gay rights, James Dobson, John Macarthur, lesbian, the Bible
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Abraham Lincoln: Atheist and Darwinist?
Not quite, but Lincoln seems to have flirted with Deism, entertained evolution, and had a decidedly ambivalent, sometimes even hostile, relationship to conservative Christian religion. Lincoln biographer Richard Lawrence Miller, writing in Free Inquiry earlier this year, says the following: For an isolated … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Abraham Lincoln, atheism, atheist, Christianity, Darwin, deism, evolution, Genesis, God, philosophy, science, the Bible
11 Comments
Senior Vatican Priest, Reginald Foster, Talks to Bill Maher
What a wonderful, beautiful person Father Foster is! My favorite scene from Religulous: Oops. It doesn’t embed. See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LJKigLT_D8
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Tagged Catholic, Catholicism, Christianity, faith, God, gospel, Jesus, life, reason, science, sell all you have, wealth gospel
1 Comment
The CERN Large Hadron Collider: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?
The New York Times today provides an interesting “history-in-a-nutshell” perspective on the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Particle colliders get their magic from Einstein’s equation of mass and energy. The more energy that these machines can pack into their little … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged alan watts, apocalypse, einstein, higgs boson, history, large hadron collider, meaning, physics, reason, science, Shakespeare
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Paul Kurtz Gives an Answer to This Question: Is There Such a Thing as an Atheist Fundamentalist?
Curiously, in the most recent dead tree edition of Free Inquiry (Dec. 2009/Jan. 2010), the 84 year old Paul Kurtz, the kindly rational father of Prometheus Books and the Center for Inquiry in Buffalo, doesn’t exactly say no to the … Continue reading
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Tagged agnosticism, atheism, atheist, fundamentalism, God, Paul Kurtz, philosophy, religion, william butler yeats
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Unhappy New Year? The Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program Looms over 2010
Noah Pollak, at Commentary today, on how the tensions over the Iranian nuclear weapons program might play out over the next year: David Ignatius’s account of a war game involving the United States, Israel, the Europeans, and Iran (and Gary … Continue reading
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2 Comments
The Present is Where Isaac Newton and Niels Bohr Meet? An Intriguing New Theory of the Block Universe!
And it might even preserve free will. Technology Review (published by MIT) reports today that two physicists have a new idea about what it means to live in a block universe: Today, Ellis and Rothman introduce a significant new type of block … Continue reading
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Tagged free will, freedom, Isaac Newton, niels bohr, philosophy, physics, science, the block universe, Zen
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Robert Wright on New Atheism’s Real World Impact
A piece on the New Atheist movement, written by Robert Wright, appeared this past week at Foreign Policy’s website: [T]he New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, evolution, foreign policy, glenn beck, Islam, jerry coyne, Muslims, philosophy, psychology, religion, robert wright, rush limbaugh
3 Comments
A Moderate Muslim Interviews a Suicide Bomber
This Pakistani television interview, with English subtitles, I think emphasizes the importance of Westerners not to make blanket and stereotyped observations about ”what Muslims believe” as a group. As with the majority of Christians and Jews, the majority of Muslims are … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism, Muslims, Pakistan, Politics, psychology, suicide bombers, taliban
20 Comments
Richard Dawkins: Atheist, Evolutionist, Sexist?
In Richard Dawkins’s recent editing of an anthology of modern science writing, a female scientist notices something: Got myself an early yule present today; “The Oxford book of modern science writing” . . . Of 83 texts Professor D has … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, atheist, biological determinism, Daniel Dennett, evolution, feminism, freedom, religion, Richard Dawkins, science, women's equality, women's rights
6 Comments
Qualia and the Ontological Mystery for Beginners
The difference between a problem and the experience of a mystery:
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Tagged being, earth, elementals, fire, life, love, ontological mystery, qualia, sky, wind
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Why I’m an Agnostic (and Not an Atheist or Theist)
I would liken my agnosticism about God and the afterlife to someone who is agnostic about life on Mars. At this point in the 21st century, we have enticing Martian clues about methane on the planet, but nothing definitive (it could be … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, doubt, epistemology, God, Hamlet, life on mars, Mel Gibson, Shakespeare
9 Comments
Diane Savino is Great Here
The vote for marriage equality in the New York legislature lost last week, but Diane Savino’s speech was a moving moment prior to the vote:
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Tagged gay, gay equality, gay marriage, gay rights, LDS, lesbian, marriage, marriage equality, Mormon, new york, women's rights
2 Comments
The New Atheists’ Thomas Nagel Pile-On Continues
Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel continues to get sassed by his fellow atheists for reviewing favorably, in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Meyer’s Intelligent Design book, Signature in the Cell (2009). Philosopher and legal scholar, Brian Leiter, at the University of Chicago, … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, biology, brian leiter, evolution, Genesis, intelligent design, jerry coyne, origin of life, philosophy, science, stephen meyer, thomas nagel
2 Comments
The Greek God Pan
Then: Now:
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Tagged flute, gods, Greek mythology, life, music, mythology, pipes, seduction, the god pan
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