botany, shoes, books, and justice
Father most certainly does NOT know best.
Some men go to strip clubs at least in part because they don’t know how to tell their guy friends they like them.
The link above explains that women are glue. This also suggests that women most certainly aren’t people.
Jimmy Carter publicly denounces Southern Baptists because of their misogyny.
Who’s lying about climate change?
Money is the only good reason to get married.
Conservatives haven’t changed much at all since the New Deal.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
God created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world; similarly to save a life was to redeem the whole world. This was not just a lofty sentiment but a basic legal principle…. To humiliate anybody … was one of the most serious offenses, because it was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious denial of God’s image. The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. … Jews were not to think of a God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dealings with others became sacred encounters.
Matilda Oxford by Frye
Climate change is a big, big problem made worse by population pressure on scarce resources and strong, worldwide interdependence. This recent article in the Guardian does a good job of connecting problems in one part of the world to those elsewhere and outlining the very large scope and scale of the disaster we’re facing.
There are many, many things we can do to make our future better and reducing our birthrate is one of the best. Luckily, discussing this strategy is becoming less taboo. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a topic in Copenhagen and is violently opposed by major religious groups who can’t bear to give up the idea that women are baby making machines.
I was hopeful that Copenhagen would lead to real progress. Unfortunately, our world’s leaders couldn’t pass a binding agreement on limiting emissions and temperature increases, even to levels that are still far too high. Goodbye, Tuvalu.
I’m not much of a gamer, but when I was a kid, I played a lot of computer games. I really liked text adventure games, but was blown away in 3rd grade when I discovered Dinosaur Safari. The goal of Dinosaur Safari is to find and photograph as many dinosaurs as possible. You have to sneak up on them because they might run away before you can take the picture. Sometimes you have to wait a long time for them to show up at a site. Five minutes is a long time when you’re 8.
At the time, I thought the game seemed very real – my memories of the game involve sneaking through actual grass. Looking back, the graphics aren’t so impressive.
I loved playing Dinosaur Safari. I could hardly wait for school to be over and was pretty heartbroken if I didn’t find a new dinosaur every day. If I don’t show up to work for the next week, it’s because I downloaded this game.
From Karen Armstrong’s A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam:
In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews. They believed that the whole of Israel was called to be a holy nation of priests. God could be present in the humblest home as well as in the Temple. Consequently they lived like the official priestly caste, observing the special laws of purity that applied only to the Temple in their own homes. … They cultivated a sense of God’s presence in the smallest detail of daily life. Jews could now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and elaborate ritual.
In the church I grew up in, Pharisee was an insult. However, a set-apart way of life and purposeful attempts to bring God into every aspect of life is what my church taught. Unfortunately, most Christians are far more like the Pharisees that were mocked by Jesus in Luke.