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Monthly Archives: March 2010
Making music using iPhone apps
Somebody had to do it.
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Tagged art, life, mental health break, music, technology, the future
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Rhetorical Honey v. Rhetorical Vinegar: Jerry Coyne in the Light of Thomas Paine and Martha Nussbaum
Rhetorical honey v. rhetorical vinegar? Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne thinks that atheists shouldn’t be shy about what they believe, guarding the feelings of religious believers. As an agnostic, do I think that he is he right? I think that he is. … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, atheists, free speech, Islam, jerry coyne, Jesus, martha nussbaum, nay bears, Socrates, the Bible, Thomas Paine
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Reverse Super-Size Me: Kenda Swartz Pepper Feels Like 1.02 Billion
People, that is. Kenda Swartz Pepper, on March 20, started an experiment: to spend 21 days experiencing what it’s like to join the one billion people on the planet who go to bed hungry. Here’s Kenda today: 1.02 billion people in … Continue reading
A Fresco Painting from Pompeii Paired with Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom Window (and One of Her Poems)
A bedroom fresco? Whose bedroom? Source: Spiegel And here’s Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window: Dickinson’s bedroom was at her family’s Amherst homestead. Emily’s room was on the second story of their home. Here’s one of her poems: I felt a Cleaving in my … Continue reading
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Tagged bedrooms, defamiliarization, Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson's bedroom, Emily Dickinson's bedroom window, Italy, love, poetry, Pompeii, Rome
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I think that Henry David Thoreau would have liked Dr. Michael de Ridder
In Spiegel this weekend, Dr. Michael de Ridder advocates a return to simplicity in human death: no frantic rushing about, no elaborate rescue measures: Dying a simple death is no longer an option in our society, even in places where one might … Continue reading
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Tagged assisted suicide, bleeding, Camus, cancer, death, illness, life, stroke, suicide, terminal illness, Tolstoy
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David Frum’s Wife on the American Conservative Movement: “I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate”
Danielle Crittenden, the wife of conservative David Frum, sees a serious narrowing of the intellectual range of opinion that you can safely express within contemporary American conservatism (and still remain in the fold): We have both been part of the … Continue reading
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Tagged America, conservatism, cults, David Frum, glenn beck, Jesus, Red State, religion, rush limbaugh, social psychology, tea partiers, tea party
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Photo for a Sunday: Christianity Militant? Whatever Happened to “Pray for your enemies”?
Didn’t Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, say to pray for your enemies? In Lancaster, California recently, I noticed this message outside a Presbyterian church, and it put me in mind of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer“: . … Continue reading
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Tagged America, Christianity, church signs, God, Jesus, mark twain, military, prayer, prebyterian, religion, the war prayer, war
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Turn or burn? Among the young, is Evangelical Christianity losing its hell bite?
Is human imaginative sympathy and love slowly conquering fundamentalist dogma? Perhaps, and it might be because the world is getting smaller, making it more difficult to live an insular existence and project dehumanizing traits onto others. This yesterday at NPR (in … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, Christianity, cruelty, evangelicalism, God, Jesus, love, orthodoxy, reason, religion, the Bible, the politics of humanity
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Agnostic and Atheist Values: How I Ground Morality Absent Religion
I am not responsible for bringing consciousness, happiness, or the sense of freedom into the universe, but now that they are here—and however they got here—I appraise them as very good things, and want them for myself and, by imaginative sympathy, for others. … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, Ayn Rand, God, Jesus, morality, philosophy, the Bible, values
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Henry David Thoreau on not reacting to every insistent demand
This Henry David Thoreau quote comes from the second chapter of Walden (1854): If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind … Continue reading
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Tagged Allen Ginsberg, anxiety reduction, Buddhism, calm, Henry David Thoreau, meditation, transcendentalism, yoga
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In Case You Missed It: Welcome to Laredo, Texas! 250,000 People, Zero Bookstores!
This was in the Los Angeles Times a couple of months back: Laredo, Texas, is set to become the largest U.S. city without a bookstore. The B. Dalton in the Mall del Norte, owned by parent company Barnes & Noble, is … Continue reading
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Tagged America, book stores, books, culture, intellectual life, laredo, literacy, priorities, religion, texas
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Conservative Brick Throwers and Tim Pawlenty: Did Tim Pawlenty Call on Republicans to Smash Federal Government Building Windows?
“Conservative” paired with “brick thrower” would appear to be an oxymoron. But not among contemporary American conservatives. And at CPAC recently, Tim Pawlenty seems to have called on conservatives to engage in acts of violence against the federal government’s buildings that eerily anticipated … Continue reading
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Tagged America, authoritarianism, Ayn Rand, brick throwers, conservatism, fundamentalism, health care reform, right wing, terrorism, tim pawlenty
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Sherry Marquez Bait: a Man from Catholic Brazil Decapitates His Mother
This today from a Latin American news service: Police in the northeastern state of Bahia are looking for a 22-year-old man accused of decapitating his mother and fleeing with her head, the news Web site G1 said Tuesday. I await … Continue reading
Move over Adam and Eve? With the recent fossil discovery at the Denisova cave, there is evidence of a fifth human species (now extinct) that inhabited the Earth just 30,000 years ago
Denisova cave poses yet another big problem for biblical literalists, for as recently as 30,000 years ago it appears that homo sapiens were very, very far from alone, but had at least five non-extinct and closely related human cousin species that we shared … Continue reading
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Tagged Adam and Eve, atheism, atheist, biology, Charles Darwin, creationism, denisova cave, evolution, Genesis, genetics, intelligent design, young earth creationism
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