Religion vs IQ, The Numbers Don’t Look Good
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Category Archives: Politics
Outrageous: Catholic School Fires Teacher, Five Months Pregnant, for Choosing Artificial Insemination
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati requires all employees to sign contracts stating that they’ll adhere to Catholic social teachings, including the assertion that being pregnant sans husband is a gravely immoral act. Someone tell that to the Virgin Mary.
Perhaps appropriately, the man who fired Dias, Rev. James Kiffermeyer, was himself suspended in 2002 after allegations arose that he engaged in sexual misconduct with two male high school students. He was reinstated in 2006.
Pope says: Be stupid
The pope said more in his homily than “look behind the pretty sparkly glitter.” He said . . .
Anyone wishing to enter the place of Jesus’ birth has to bend down. It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our “enlightened” reason. . .
There’s the voice of the cleric telling you to ditch the best thing about you so that you can be stupid and ignorant so that he can go on wearing expensive robes.
No we must not, you evil bastard.
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.
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.
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.”
Quote: Al Stefanelli
Al Stefanelli
Author, Journalist, Outspoken Atheist,
Blog, “A Voice Of Reason In An Unreasonable World”
Reason is to examine a statement, ponder the validity of it, consider the source of it, question the authority of it, search for the truth behind it and make an intelligent assessment of it.
Christopher Hitchens: Forced Merriment: The True Spirit of Christmas
One of my many reasons for not being a Christian is my objection to compulsory love. How much less appealing is the notion of obligatory generosity. To feel pressed to give a present is also to feel oneself passively exerting the equivalent unwelcome pressure upon other people. . .
But the Christmas cycle imposes a deadening routine and predictability. This is why the accidental genius of Charles Dickens is to have made, of Ebenezer Scrooge, the only character in the story who has any personality to him—and the one whose stoic attempt at a futile resistance is invoked under the breath more than most people care to admit. . .
It also offends—by being so much in my face, without my having requested it and in spite of polite entreaties to desist—another celebrated precept about the right to be let alone. A manger on your lawn makes me yawn. A reindeer that strays from your lawn to mine is a nuisance at any time of year. Angels and menorahs on the White House lawn are an infraction of the Establishment Clause, which is as much designed to prevent religion from being corrupted by the state as it is to protect the public square from clerical encroachment.
The “wall of separation” has to be patrolled in small things as well as big ones.
Never Forget!
Source: new deal 2.0
When Lives Are Changed, There Is No Going Back!
Cesar Chavez was a civil rights activist, labor leader, and co-founder of what would become the United Farm Workers.
Source: MoveOn.org
Always Question Authority 