Christmas blessings for Bolivia’s poor [Blessings my Ass]

Considering that Bolivia is a Roman Catholic Country, and each family discussed in this video is burdened with feeding, caring, and rearing six to seven children one wonders where are the Catholic missions? Better yet, upon their arrival, instead of passing down another generation of religious childhood indoctrination, why don’t they instead pass out condoms? While the former leads to a false sense of hope at best, the latter leads to a significant decrease in unwanted pregnancies, and the added bonus of decreased venereal diseases, prevention of the spread of HIV-AIDS. Wait, I forgot; the Catholic Church would rather see increased venereal diseases, unwanted pregnancies, increased poverty, child malnutrition, child starvation, various sanitation diseases, etc. than see a parishioner use a condom. My bad, what the fuck was I thinking! [MSH]

Book Review: Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790

The great names one learns at school — Voltaire and Rousseau, Newton and Locke, Leibniz and Kant — turn out never to have been willing or able to think themselves through to the new. Israel’s real heroes were hard-nosed atheists, materialists and revolutionaries who brooked no compromise with the status quo.

Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and “one substance” materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body. Spinoza was certainly a radical critic of Scripture, who denied miracles and seemed to equate “God” with nature.

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Have a Godless New Year: Atheist New Year Resolutions

. . . There are good reasons to think that making a conscious effort to be open and deliberate in your godlessness would be better for you and those around you. So perhaps it’s worth considering some new year’s resolutions related to being atheist, secular, and godless today.

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Young Goethe in Love: In fact, just another love story

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), poet, novelist, dramatist, philosopher, naturalist and physicist, was a towering figure in German and world culture. . . 

In the film’s production notes, [German filmmaker Philipp] Stölzl writes: “Goethe is Germany’s most famous and important poet and philosopher, yet there has never been a relevant feature film about this extraordinary personality. There’s a reason for this, too: Goethe could do everything and was everything! He was handsome, came from a wealthy family, wrote successful novels, theater plays and poems, was an accomplished horseback rider and fencer, invented roller skates and discovered the pharyngeal bone, and he was a natural scientist, privy councilor, traveler, artist, minister, lawyer, and much, much more—all in all, a universal genius and thus a completely non-dramatic character for a feature film.”

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