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Free Online Movies, Including One on Atheism

Things to be found on this newfangled Internet:

535 Free Movies Online

Including this one: Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief

With the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the emotional whiplash that followed, the monotheistic religions of the West took a more stridently political turn. It was in this context that Jonathan Miller, the British theatre and opera director, felt compelled to create a three-part documentary tracing the history of religious skepticism and disbelief.

Broadcast by the BBC in 2004 under the title, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, the series wasn’t broadcast by PBS in America until 2007, and only after “Atheism” had been removed from the title and the word “rough” changed to “brief.”

The complete program is in three segments, each an hour long.

 

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Atheists at Albany Pride

My atheist Meetup group, Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics, rented a booth for Albany, New York’s Gay Pride Day.

Whew! Fantastic event! My own personal thank-you to all who organized the thing, and all who attended, and especially to the members of CRAA who made it all happen. (I’m hoping some of them will chime in here and tell me who sent all the great atheist/agnostic/humanist stuff that covered the table and caught so many eyes.)

Photos follow. In order to see these large, you have to click on a photo, then click again after it opens in its own page. (I’m sure there’s some easier/better way to do this, but I haven’t figured it out yet.)

There was an eye-catching banner donated by one of the founding members, Rick Martin, “Why Are There Atheists at Gay Pride Day?” fliers written by Mike McElroy and designed by me, and just a whole mess of people who showed up to man the booth and offer moral support. Rick, Mike, Nick, Rich, Rajesh and Dan were some of the core booth-minders and crowd-schmoozers.

I’m ashamed to say that I had a “Proud to be an Atheist” button that I didn’t put on until I got into the city park where the event was held. Old habits, I guess, grown out of the goddy Deep South swamp I grew up in. But I’m proud to say that I did wear it all the way home.

There were plenty of people who came to the booth and asked questions or voiced support. There were also a certain number who came by and looked but walked away without speaking, some with doubtful expressions. But at least while I was there, there were no strongly negative reviews.

One thing really caught my eye — the number of churches and goddy organizations in the parade, all with messages of inclusion. I noticed it for two reasons — one a criticism, one a speculation.

The criticism is that churches were definitely part of the historical problem with acceptance of gay rights, and it’s interesting and wonderful, but also sort of annoying that some of them are now so big-tent buddy-buddy. That this group once cast out of churchy society is now welcomed in makes me feel less that there’s some inclusionary goodness happening, and more that a predator running short of its natural prey has decided to accept new kinds of meat.

The speculation is in regards to that very inclusionary phenomenon: If churches can evolve to accept and welcome the LGBT community, they can evolve to accept others. Except that’s not ever going to happen with atheists, is it? Because by our very nature, we’re not a group subject to that sort of inclusion— not by a church, anyway.

Which means, again, that we have to build our own culture, our own venue of social inclusion.

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Side note to all the dog owners and dog lovers there today: MOST of the dogs I saw there weren’t having a very good time. It was a bit too hot for dog comfort (I hope you were all giving them nice cold water when I wasn’t there to see), but the music was also screamingly loud. Hey, it hurt my ears sometimes, and I have some hearing loss; can’t imagine what it must have been like for sensitive doggie ears.

I saw some dogs dragging on leashes looking like they wanted to be somewhere else fast.  I guarantee you, your dog would much rather be hiking in the woods with you, somewhere near a nice cool creek, than in a crowded city park on a hot, humid day.

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Time for Serious Outreach into Islam?

Here’s a story from the United Kingdom’s online news site Mail Online, the heated subtext of which is “OMG MUSLIMS!!!”

One country, two religions and three very telling pictures: The empty pews at churches just yards from an overcrowded mosque

It’s a story in pictures, with a small amount of text:

What they show are three acts of worship performed in the East End of London within a few hundred yards of each other at the end of last month.

Two of the photos show Sunday morning services in the churches of St George-in-the-East on Cannon Street Road, and St Mary’s on Cable Street.

The third shows worshippers gathered for Friday midday prayers outside the nearby mosque on the Brune Street Estate in Spitalfields.

The difference in numbers could hardly be more dramatic. At St George’s, some 12 people have congregated to celebrate Holy Communion.

When the church was built in the early 18th century, it was designed to seat 1,230.

Numbers are similar at St Mary’s, opened in October 1849. Then, it could boast a congregation of 1,000. Today, as shown in the picture, the worshippers total just 20.

While the two churches are nearly empty, the Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem — overcrowding.

The mosque itself is little more than a small room rented in a  community centre, and it can hold only 100.

However, on Fridays, those numbers swell to three to four times the room’s capacity, so the worshippers spill out onto the street, where they take up around the same amount of space as the size of the near-empty St Mary’s down the road.

 The overheated punchline:

What these pictures suggest is that, on current trends, Christianity in this country is becoming a religion of the past, and Islam is one of the future.

Yes! Christianity is becoming a thing of the past! But ooh, scary Islam is the one of the future.

Maybe, maybe not. Not a big fan of Islam here, definitely don’t think it’s a good thing. But … the people caught up in it are just people. And people’s minds can be changed.

The newfound visibility of atheism alone, as one of the many choices young people will be presented with, can make a difference. But making an actual effort to outreach into the community of young Muslims — that could make a BIG difference.

Seems to me we need to do a lot more atheist proselytizing.

 

 

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Helping A Tornado Survivor, Atheist-Style

There’s a rather amazing story coming out of the Oklahoma tornado-aftermath.

Moore, Oklahoma, resident and mother Rebecca Vitsmun, being interviewed by  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, responded to a spray of goddy rhetoric:

Blitzer: “Well, you’re blessed, Brian your husband is blessed, Anders is blessed. […] I guess you gotta thank the Lord, huh? Do you thank the Lord, for that split-second decision (to leave her home and get to safety)?”

Vitsmun: “I uh, I am actually an atheist.”

Amid general good feelings at finding a spectacular role model, a bright, cheerful woman standing amid the destruction of her town and her home, Doug Stanhope of Atheists Unite has created an Indiegogo fund-raiser.

What We Need & What You Get

We don’t know the exact cost of putting a family back together when you don’t even have a toothbrush anymore so we randomly chose 50,000 dollars as a goal. And that’s probably low-ball.

The Impact

The impact of getting Rebecca and her family properly housed by the atheist community will do far more good than sitting in bars or chat rooms mocking people of faith. Like religion, free-thinking will be more easily spread through compassion and decency.

Here’s the amazing part:

As of Friday 24th May we have cleared the initial $50,000 target. In truth, we had no idea how generous and giving our community would prove to be. We reached our goal within 17 hours of starting.  An Indiegogo deadline cannot be changed once it has been set. So this campaign will continue until July 22 2013. At that point the financial cogs will turn and the moneys raised will be delivered to Rebecca Vitsmun. There is no reason for us to stop raising funds. The median cost of a home in Moore, OK is $125, 250, and that was back when they had homes. More importantly, the more money we raise the better the example we set.

At the moment I write this, the campaign has raised $80, 232.

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Annnd … there’s this from Glenn Beck:  ‘Forces of spiritual darkness’ at CNN plotted Blitzer’s atheist gaffe

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 8 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

The Final Doorway

The payoff of going through the transition from the House of the Tribe to the House of Humanity is very large. If we can make it across the painful threshold from our small but formerly comfortable dwelling space into this new and grander place, we gain an entire fascinating WORLD of people.

People to learn from, to visit, to photograph, to love, to sing to, to listen to, to argue with, to trade with, even to combine talents and efforts with, so as to accomplish great and noble tasks. The United Nations, the International Space Station and the Olympics are all House of Humanity works – absolutely impossible to accomplish in any smaller House.

Part of stepping across these metaphorical thresholds is the simple fact of outgrowing our present abode. We grow through all the available rooms of our self-absorbed childhood house until we are forced by the limited space to look for something better.

Another factor, though, is the supply of friendly guides who are already there, who convince us of the benefits and serve as role models or mentors.

Still another part of it, though, can be exterior forces that push us through. This type of transition can be decidedly un-smooth. In all too many places on our planet, we engage in dreadful activities – wars and genocide – which, because of their universality, appear to be House of Humanity works. Instead, they are the expressions of a determination not to step through a door into the next larger House. Think of a war as a defensive attempt to stay in your own tribal House. To do it by subjugating others to your way of life if you have the strength or, if you don’t, to convince them to leave you alone.

Moving out into the House of Family, we look back and discover that the House of Self is a tiny dollhouse. The House of the Tribe sheds the same sort of light on the House of Family. As we continue to grow, taking each transition in turn through these one-way doors, we look back and always find another dollhouse – a place too small for us to live in anymore.

Once we get to the House of Humanity, though, it’s hard to imagine it as a just another dollhouse. Learning to live in it is the job of lifetimes. The place is simply too big, too changeable, for us to ever really absorb it all. Surely this House must be the final one, the ultimate possibility we were born to experience. How could there be anything beyond a bustling, turbulent, creative seven-billion-member brotherhood?

I have reason to believe there is at least one more door, though.

There’s a great deal missing, even in this grandest of Houses. Having lived for all my adult years with the enormous mass of mankind around me, I’ve come to see that we in the House of Humanity are just as self-involved and self-absorbed as any of the occupants of those smaller houses. We are inward-looking and largely ignorant of what might lie outside.

More than that, nothing in the House of Humanity can account for the connection that clicked into place with Molly.

Molly was my key to this next door, but it took me more than a decade to figure out how to step through it. Even with plenty of people gone before me – through portals of compassion or ecological concern – making the transition was no small chore.

In the midst of all the wonderful things I’m discovering here in this new House, I look back and see, to my dismay, that the apparently boundless dwelling place of most of the people on the planet really is just another dollhouse. Busily engaged in the inbred affairs of the House of Humanity, most of us are unaware there is a larger space in which to adventure and learn, a place wider and more interesting than anything we’ve had – a place that will welcome us as the larger selves we could become, a place that has a real need for our human talents.

This is a House that can’t be complete without us, but that needs an “us” as we’ve never been.

The discomforts of this particular transition are stronger than any before, and the main one, as ever, is leaving behind the old. Old toys, old culture, old ways of thought. But as we take our place AMONG the other creatures of Earth rather than over them or apart from them, one of the many payoffs is a kinship, a sense of belonging, off the scale of anything we’ve ever known.

Someday I WILL write that book I spoke of earlier. I’ll tell what I’ve learned about the Big Picture, and lay out clear directions for how to get to this bigger place beyond that final door.

It will be a collection of conceptual highlights, the way-points and directional signs  that facilitated my own escape from the last dollhouse, and out into the House of Earth.

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 7 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

The Houses of Man (cont.)

As you’ve probably already figured out, there are other steps in this bigger-house progression. At some point we discover the door to yet another Outside, and find that our original family home is only a small part of a bigger place – our neighborhood or culture. For want of a better name, call this dwelling place the House of the Tribe.

Again, there’s an uncomfortable period of adaptation in settling-in to this larger space. To become a full member of our tribe, we have to learn to say the right things at the right times, to sing the right songs and make the right pledges. We have to wear the right clothes – the right boots, pants, shirts, hats and belt buckles. We have to learn the right secret handshake – and so many more things. We may even have to have the right parts of our bodies ritually scarred, or tattooed, or cut off.

Historically speaking, this is about as far as most of us get. Throughout history, this tribal house, the house of our people, was almost always plenty big enough, providing us with friends, family, jobs, pleasant recreations (such as badminton, or hunting the heads of the tribesmen in the next valley) and challenges (all the Scouting merit badges, a Phi Beta Kappa pin, a lion skin of our very own), and a ceiling high enough to fulfill all our aspirations.

Every transition out of our currently-familiar place is attended by severe discomfort. That next door always opens out into a much, much larger place, and we have to learn a bunch of new things – the serious and difficult and sometimes frightening work of which can be forced on us long before the advantages become obvious. And again, we have to unlearn some things – we have to go against some of our earlier training.

One of the stumbling blocks to growth beyond the House of the Tribe is the nature of culture itself. Your culture buoys you up in many ways, providing the comfortable support of predictability. On the other hand, it also chops off your wild flights of fancy and drags you back from uncommon insights. Cultures endure because they actively oppose their members growing beyond them, from coming up with anything new. I remember showing up at a friend’s spread in Texas one time, wearing some loose comfortable shoes instead of the cowboy boots we all usually wore. In less than ten seconds, he’d fixed me with an incredulous eye and asked “Where’d yew git them pimpy shoes?”

Our culture also actively discourages the “us” from mixing in any way with the  “them.” To move beyond our Tribal House, we have to unlearn the “us-them” lesson. We have to learn that other people, the ones who have before now been the not-Us, are somehow related to us and worthy of equal treatment.

Talk about culture shock! They speak the wrong language, they eat weird, smelly foods, they’re different colors … and as far as we can tell, they don’t know a darned thing about the appropriate way to act. Even worse, they act as if they have a RIGHT to be all different. They don’t seem to have any desire to learn the correct ways to act and talk and eat. They sometimes even treat us as if WE are supposed to learn THEIR ways.

They have no idea that their women should be covered head to toe, or that there is a specific little hat to wear on Saturday, or that you eat hot dogs and beer (and not noodles, for chrissake!) at baseball games, or that you have to read this book and not that one, and you have to believe in this mystical superbeing – the real one – and not all those silly others.

The process holds an uncomfortable mirror up to our own lives. It can never be easy to learn, in stepping out into this next larger house, that our clothes are no better than theirs. To discover that our secret handshake, which gave us the intense inner feeling of belonging, is no better or worse than any other secret handshake; it is simply ours. The cosmetic and surgical alterations that we so laboriously prepared for and painfully endured – the nose-bone, the ivory ear plugs, the giant stainless steel earrings, the circumcision, the Harley tattoos, the nipple-rings – are (at best) simple curiosities or (at worst) objects of disgusted fascination to most of those other people. Worst of all, the universe seems to falter in its course as we learn that the God of Everything is only a garden-variety myth, one among many, and completely unknown just over the hill.

If we’re lucky enough, though, and persistent enough, and perhaps if we live in a society where enough adventurous rogues have found the next door and learned the advantages of stepping through it, we can move out into what has to be the biggest house of all – the House of Humanity.

— CONTINUED —

 

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Shoving Orphans Away From the Table

How many times have you seen it? Someone convenes a panel of talking heads to discuss morals, justice, or any of the other “goodness” issues, and the speaker’s table is filled with a priest, a minister and a rabbi (and here lately, to prove our generous and inclusionary nature, an imam).

As far as the organizer is concerned, and large swaths of the audience, atheists don’t exist. Because we don’t know anything about morals, you see, or deep human convictions, or even feelings. We can’t speak with any authority.

Such an event just happened. It was last Thursday’s Interfaith Memorial Service to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, held at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Grief Beyond Belief on Facebook brought it to my attention, but the subject is all over the atheist blogosphere.

Hemant Mehta
JT Eberhard
James Croft
Ophelia Benson
Boston Atheists
Harvard Atheists

The Harvard Humanist Community was shocked Thursday when their members were, in the carefully-chosen words of New York Times best-selling author Greg M. Epstein, “blown off” and excluded from an inter-faith memorial ceremony for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

“We have friends and family who are in the hospital in critical condition, who nearly died,” he told Raw Story. “It wouldn’t have been so difficult for those who organized the vigil today to make some kind of nod to us, and that’s all we would have wanted.”

The Harvard humanist chaplain and author of “Good Without God” explained that the exclusion of non-religious Bostonians was particularly shocking because someone dear to the Harvard Humanist Community was gravely wounded in the bombings.

Celeste Corcoran, who was caught in the blast with her daughter and subsequently lost both of her legs to amputation, was a volunteer for the Harvard Humanist Community, Epstein said. She was also something of an “aunt” to Sarah Chandonnet, the group’s outreach and development manager and “second senior-most member,” he added.

It even made it into Psychology Today.

This event, the bombing in Boston, is one of those bring-us-together events that helps us understand the fragility and brevity of life. The response SHOULD be a grand coming-together to make the point that … well, that we are all in this together, that the greatest safety lies in understanding the power of unity.

And for many Americans, I suppose that happened.

Unbelievers, though, were made to feel like the fat kid at the prom.

The request to be included, which WAS made, was ignored. Nope, can’t have atheists standing in front of the cameras in front of God and everybody.

Besides, this is about faith. You atheists don’t have any. Why, it’s almost like you’re not real Americans. Buzz off.

Zachary Bos and the SCA of Massachusetts put out a statement about efforts made before the event:

“It won’t be for lack of trying that we aren’t represented in the collective response to this tragedy,” said Zachary Bos, co-chair of the Secular Coalition for Massachusetts, and State Director for American Atheists. “We know that historically it’s been a easier to engage with people who are religiously-identifying and more likely to be organized. That is why we’ve been pro-active in calling elected officials and reaching out to religious colleagues, to find a way to be involved. If anything, the events of the past week tell us that we should be cultivating these relationships anyway, so that when tragedy does strike we are ready to respond immediately, a community of different philosophies united in common cause.”

We still have a way to go.

 

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Drum Roll, Cymbal Clash, Fanfare of Vuvuzelas!

picture of red fox

Hey there! Say hello to another FreethoughtBlogs alumnus, moving over to further infiltrate Patheos with steely determination, pointed wit, and violent, wanton godlessness.

For those of you discovering Hank Fox (me) for the first time, an intro:

I’m the author of Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith. I’ve blogged as the Blue Collar Atheist at Freethought Blogs and elsewhere for a couple of years, but I recently changed my blog banner to A Citizen of Earth to reflect some new conceptual territory I’m venturing into.

[ Shameless self-promotion: I have two other books upcoming – and hopefully even a third one I’ll mention later in this same post. The first should be out in late May, early June: “BrainDrops: The One and Only Ungodly Bathroom Reader – An Astounding Compendium of Wit, Wisdom & Complete Goddam Nonsense from a Complete Goddam Atheist.” The second, “Saying Goodbye To Dan: An Atheist Deals With Death,” should be out sometime in early 2014. ]

In case it escapes you, yes, I’m an atheist. More than that, I’m an antitheist. I started calling myself that way back in the last century, before I’d ever heard anyone else use the term. I still pronounce it in my own peculiar way: An-TITH-ee-ist, rather than the upstart modern an-tee-THEE-ist.  To me it means “Not only do I not believe in gods, I don’t think you should either.”

As the book title and former blog name indicate, I got into atheism from a slightly different direction than most: I grew up in Texas with rodeo cowboys and hard-core religious types, working as a truck driver, roofer, carpenter and a lot of other blue-collary and outdoorsy jobs. The cover of my book sports a picture of me riding a bull (my brief dalliance with rodeo included getting on – and coming off! – eight of them) but cowboying was also one of my formal professions: For years I worked with riding horses, draft horses and mules in the wilderness of California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

Later I got to be a newspaper and magazine editor, but I have golden memories of my days in the saddle, and still think of myself as more blue-collar and red-neck than white-collar and citified.

Growing up in an East Texas home with a Southern Baptist mother, a Jehovah’s Witness father and later, a Born-Again Christian stepfather, I also had something of an unusual home life. From about the age of 13, I started having my doubts about gods and the supernatural, but after one slip with my stepfather that resulted in years of low-key torment, I kept it wholly to myself for years and years.

Completely on my own, I gradually became a full nonbeliever. Watching myself change, observing my own thoughts on the matter of gods and such, and eventually blogging about it, I realized there was an unfilled niche in the atheist library, a book that spoke not just to the Why of atheism, but the How. So I wrote Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist, a sort of handbook on how to think as an atheist – the kinds of things that do, or maybe should, go through one’s mind as you make the Atheist Journey.

As to the question of the logical defensibility of atheism, I am comfortably and absolutely certain there are no such things as supernatural superbeings – no gods or devils, no heavens or hells for them to inhabit – but also no ghosts, spirit mediums, telepaths, garden fairies, or zombies (although I’m still watching John McCain and Dick Cheney with interest, and would not be surprised to see shambling, lurching brain-tropism at any moment).

For me, the questions don’t even arise. Because I realized some time back that a great deal of each of our lives consists of thought experiments – the proffering of one concept or another as a guiding principle, and then living that idea to see what sort of fruit it bears.

The simple fact is the thought experiment of god-free reality and reason has, in the fields of science and technology, produced true miracles. I’m communicating with you, across an entire world, with a number of them right now. Computers, the Internet, lasers, fiber optics, satellites, microwaves, so many real things working together to produce this seamless technological feat of me writing this blog, and you reading it.

NONE of those things were possible through the thought experiment of religion. As to actual technology that arose from religious mindsets, it consists, unflatteringly, of torture devices that flourished during the Inquisition and the witch hunts of Colonial America. Speaking of Colonial America, even something so apparently primitive as the Native American birchbark canoe comes into being only through a technology undergirded by a mercilessly real-world mindset; faith plays no part in its invention or construction.

The thought experiment of reality and reason bears equally useful results in individual lives, and I’ll tell you some of my own experience of that as we blog along together.

My stock in trade is commentary on current events, ventures into amateur philosophy, and my own doofus-level survey of the state of the world. But it is also very much this new idea I have – that there’s a next step for the atheist community

That next step is probably already being taken without us being aware of it. Which means it is undirected, largely accidental, and probably hugely less effective than it could be.

One of our underlying atheist assumptions is that when you get religion out of your head and out of your life, reasonableness and goodness somehow flows in and fills the hole. But as I know from watching the atheist community, and those on the cusp of abandoning their home religion for something else, that process is never a given. One craziness can all too easily be replaced by another; witness the number of people who become uncomfortable with their sedate hometown church but who think the solution is to join a born-again evangelical megachurch.

I’ve even met a few atheists – not a lot, but some – who have seemed nutty as hell. And certainly the reasonableness we seem to think ourselves blessed with doesn’t make us unfailingly capable of calm communication, even with each other. I’ve seen people who self-identify as godless uber-rationals spit out ad hominem insults like a machine gun, and never notice.

But hey, we’re young. A young movement, a young community and, as I’ve realized, a young culture.

It’s that last I want to focus on in the coming years. I’m convinced that something special is happening right now, something never-before-seen on Earth, and something probably necessary to human survival.

It’s just this: Us. We atheists. Not as individuals, but as this community, and beyond it, this new culture. Something to fill the hole left by dying organized religion.

While speaking in Ottawa at Eschaton in November, 2011, I was on a panel that was asked if we were optimists or pessimists about the future. All the other panelists said they were optimists. In my own answer (which I worded badly, and still flinch when I recall it) I tried to express that the question necessitates a more nuanced answer. Optimism can be misused, I said, because … well, because bad things happen all by themselves, but to have good things happen, you have to MAKE them happen.

Which means a negative future may well be a greased-chute certainty in a very few years, whereas a positive future demands a shit-ton of very hard work and some damned difficult decisions. The optimistic idea that “something good is going to happen” – whether we lay it at the feet of miracle-working Jesus or of miracle-working Science – can be poison to the understanding that we have to put on our big-boy boots and DO things.

I started exploring the idea of an atheistic culture back in 2010. I’ve blogged about it briefly and infrequently, but I’ve done a LOT of conceptual work on it. I have something like 500 pages of notes I want to turn into blog posts, public talks and eventually – after I get input from a great number of people – a book.

More than that, I want to see progress toward that culture. As I say in my first book:

There is a saner, more reasonable future awaiting us, a time and place where a majority of people aspire to see things for what they are and then choose to deal with them realistically. It will replace what we have now, where too many of us can’t get over believing that some eternity-spanning fantasy makes our own lives cosmically important and everything else – distant stars, a broad universe, and even the civil rights of our neighbors – totally insignificant.

More than anything, I’d like to live in that sane future. Failing that, I’d like to think I can help make it happen.

Anyway, here I am. If you’re new to me, welcome, and I hope you’ll enjoy my writing and my ideas. If you’re a reader following me over from FTB, double welcome.

And away we go.

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Connecticut Shooting: Warm Lies, Cold Truth, Free Minds

This is a reaction to some of the goddy rhetoric surrounding the shooting in Connecticut:

Even as an atheist good with words, I can barely express how repulsive I find the claim that those children are in Heaven, skipping along beside Jesus as he gives them a tour of Heaven. Yet we’ve heard exactly that, and more than once.

When I posted on Facebook a day or so ago about a mental image related to the tragedy, one of my readers told me she almost threw up when that same image came to her: the picture of 20 lonely Christmas trees standing in 20 silent homes, decorated and flashing with lights and warmth, already surrounded by presents bright with colorful wrapping paper, gilt cards and shining ribbons.

And no children to unwrap them. Continue reading “Connecticut Shooting: Warm Lies, Cold Truth, Free Minds”