Anybody who’s ever worked with hand tools will recognize what I’m about to say:
You can buy shitty tools.
I mean, there are companies out there who actually make and sell shitty tools. Tools deliberately MADE to break, or perform badly during use.
It’s a price-point thing, of course. Continue reading “Our Lady of the Shitty Tools”
Say you’re a country full of people and you have a lot of vital business to conduct to keep everybody fed and housed and healthy and safe. What do you do?
Well, you reach first for this immense tool you have, the most flexible and creative problem-solving device on the planet — the intelligent, educated human brain.
Unless you’re Iran, in which case you forbid HALF your population — half of those problem-solving brains — from getting a full education:
Iranian women banned from 77 university courses
It’s like you take the massed brainpower of an entire country, and with one stroke you lower the total of usable I.Q. by half. That’s like the difference between an I.Q. of 150 and one of 75. Between genius and borderline mentally challenged.
Ha! Think that has no side effects?
Any society that does such a thing, I can’t imagine it has much of a future.
I’m including the horrifically bad movie trailer for “Innocence of Muslims” at the bottom of this post.
There are deeper issues in the Middle East, and even deeper issues in this latest flap over the “anti-Muslim” video. But some obvious things spring to mind:
1) Freedom of speech is damned important. No, you don’t get to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but if you shout “Fire!” on the Internet, and people have to actually make an effort to find and watch the video of you shouting, that’s not the same thing at all. Continue reading “Top 10 Important Points About Pushing Islamic Buttons”
In his post “Value-free atheism,” Justin Vacula focuses on the meaning of the word “atheism” — making the point, as do so many others, that it means only one thing. The argument seems to be coming often these days following the appearance of Atheism-Plus. Vacula says: Continue reading “A Basic Motivation for Atheism+ … and for Beta Culture”
[ First read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ]
All the civilizations I ever heard of had this in common: Somewhere right near each one’s heart was religion.
It seems impossible to get away from. And yet it shouldn’t be. After all, it’s never been true that religion is ALL people do.
And it’s not as if religion is food, or water, or air. It’s just this … idea. Hideously embroidered, massively wrapped in confusing, fanciful language, aggressively forced upon people in their vulnerable years and moments … but still just an idea. If it’s possible for one person to be free of it, it’s possible for anyone – maybe even a majority of us – to be free of it. And yet, it seems, we’ve never really tried.
This may be the moment in which that begins to change. This is the “maybe” revolution I spoke of in Part 1. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 4”
The fatal flaw of atheism? Actually, it’s a challenge atheism shares with religion. The difference between the two is that religion has found a solution.
So let’s talk about religion:
The weedy form of religion, superstition, arises automatically in each mind all on its own, simply by virtue of our need to create private theories – often wildly personified due to our ability to detect “person-ness” in everything from smiley faces to wind in the trees – about how the world around us works. But the fully-developed form of religion, that complex mess represented by, for instance, the Catholic Church … Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 3”
[ Read Part 1 first. ]
Atheism (more broadly, freethought) isn’t new, of course. Just in this country alone, it’s as old as Thomas Paine (although Paine was a deist, he was widely accused of being an atheist, and I’m confident he would’ve been one of us if he lived in a society in which it was possible to actually think about such things), and has had its bright sparks all along the way, right up to Carl Sagan, who published The Demon Haunted World only 15 years ago. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 2”
Ever think about the revolutions in your life? The things that change, and change greatly, and then affect everything that comes after?
Boy, I do.
I’ll tell you a little one first, and then a big one, and then a maybe one.
The Little One
The little one – well, it might be a big one to you – is about music. Continue reading “First Person Revolutionary — Part 1”
Well, it’s a crippling mental illness if you’re a religious authority. Otherwise, it’s Freedom.
America’s “Nones” — the nonreligious — are at an all-time high, now comprising nearly one in five Americans (19%), according to a new study by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. The 19% count is based on aggregated surveys of 19,377 people conducted by the Pew Research Center throughout 2011 and reported by USA Today. Continue reading “One in Five Americans Stricken With Crippling Mental Illness”
Oooh. A German court has ruled that not even deeply religious parents have the right to circumcise young boys on religious grounds, calling it “grievous bodily harm.”
The regional court in Cologne, western Germany, ruled that the ‘fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents.’
‘The religious freedom of the parents and their right to educate their child would not be unacceptably compromised, if they were obliged to wait until the child could himself decide to be circumcised,’ the court added. Continue reading “German Court Grabs Parents by the Foreskin”
