Freethinker Sermonettes
revere | December 27, 2009In our Freethinker Sermonette two weeks ago about all the other stuff in Leviticus that seems to get forgotten when the passage about homosexuality being an abomination is highlighted, some readers thought it was unfair to take this stuff out of its historical context. Atheism has no severer critic than Mr. Edward Current, and he directly addresses this anti-Christian practice in this YouTube video, "Bible out of context":
Mea culpa, Mr. Current.
revere | December 20, 2009At least one correct answer to the question "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?" is "There is no God." Some of you may object. What's the evidence for Santa Claus, Mr. Big Shot Atheist!?
Just ask my daughter. OK, I admit she is now faithless. The scales have fallen from her eyes. She realizes there really isn't a Santa Claus. The only excuse I can make for her is that she is exhibiting what most people would call age appropriate behavior. After all, she's 30 and has two children of her own. But we believe the arrival of the little ones (the oldest isn't 3 years old yet) will…
revere | December 13, 2009It would take us too far afield to describe how the following reached me (far afield but entertaining; sorry, no dice, just a hat tip to SR). Whatever its provenance, it concerns matters of medical importance as framed by one of the better known doctors in the country, Dr. Laura Schlesinger (or as her mother refers to her, "My daughter the doctor"). Dr. Laura is an observant Orthodox Jew who believes everything she reads in the Torah. The Torah is what Jews call the first five books of the Old Testament. The third of those books is Leviticus, wherein Dr. Laura read and then preached from her…
revere | December 6, 2009Whether religion is related to survival or not is obviously highly context dependent. It's negatively correlated with survival for minorities in intolerant societies. So why do religious identities persist? I would claim there is evidence they aren't persisting, but the basic question is not something of much interest to me. However it seems to be a preoccupation of many people, because atheists are frequently confronted with the alleged universality of religion, as if that were some argument for its worth or truth.
Richard Dawkins seems to agree to the claim that religion is a cultural…
revere | November 29, 2009When the singer-songwriter Phil Ochs took his own life in 1976 he was a year and a half older than me. It's hard for some of us to believe he's been gone 33 years. His music and the ideals he fought for are still so strong. Phil was best known for his anti-war songs. Yet he wrote a different kind of song that continues to grow in importance to me as I near the end of my own life. Like many people my age I'm losing a lot of friends, colleagues and family of late -- two in the last month and word that yet another is near the end of her life and entering hospice care. While I remain relatively…
revere | November 15, 2009You all know this song, but it is unusually affecting when sung by a child:
revere | November 8, 2009Richard Dawkins has taken a lot of abuse himself for having the temerity to suggest that some kinds of religious upbringings can be considered abusive even if no physical harm is involved. We know that Catholic children suffered abuse at the hands of priests and nuns, and that some fundamentalist Christians have also engaged in extremely abusive practices. We don't usually think of Jews as routinely engaging in this, but there is something non-sectarian about the fundamentalist mindset. You could do a 'global search and replace' and this sad tale of escape from orthodox Judaism could be…
revere | November 1, 2009So what about the good things we owe to religion? Architecture. Painting. Atheism. But especially music. I happen to be especially partial to Bach's B-minor Mass, but what follows isn't exactly chopped liver. Rory Gallagher was an Irish blues guitarist who lived hard and died hard, at age 47 of methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Here he is, age 24, at The Marquee Club in London, April 1972:
revere | October 25, 2009R. Crumb has an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis out in graphic novel format. It's gotten rave reviews from both the skeptic and non-skeptic sides of the house. Consider this, from Greta Christina at Alternet:
Crumb's Genesis emphasizes biblical accuracy -- he's a non-believer, but he has a deep respect for the book's historical and cultural importance. So he created this graphic novel as a straight, word- for- word illustration job.
And so, when it came to illustrating the freakier and more unsettling aspects of the narrative, he pulled no punches. The multiple marriages, the…
revere | October 18, 2009I will be the first to concede that religion can be extremely interesting (although not to me). My general rule of thumb is that virtually any topic is interesting once you really get into it, and religion is no exception. One can study it from within its own logic and set of doctrines (theology or Talmudic scholarship), from outside (anthropology) or through many other lenses (political, economic, etc.).
The same is true about special topics in the subject of religion, like God or gods or The Gods or however you want to express it. Now there's a quick and easy way to get into the subject:…
revere | October 11, 2009The Reveres finally knew the blog had become an established site on the internet when we started getting regular publicity emails from commercial sites and people with products they thought "our readers would be especially interested in." We get quite a few, now, and we almost never yield. Almost. But this particular product seemed like it might interest our you, so we're putting the commercial up. It runs on Edward Current, which is direct:
revere | October 4, 2009When life is hard, you need to get a grip on it:
Bonus: Watch Bill Maher interview a Senator. This man is not an idiot Republican. He's an idiot Democrat. The video isn't embeddable but you can watch it here.
revere | September 20, 2009A few weeks ago we posted about a bunch of crazy rabbis flying over Israel and blowing horns to save their countrymen (and the women, as long as they stayed segregated) from swine flu. We got a few comments, mostly respectful but with the common theme that we were being culturally insensitive, if not intolerant. As someone brought up as a Jew, I recognized the syndrome. It may be crazy, but it's our craziness. Hands off. It put me in mind of a really fine piece by Natalie Angier, one of our best science reporters (and New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner), author of The Canon: A Whirligig…
revere | September 13, 2009This week we've got a substantive story and a video (also substantive). No snark in either. The first has to do with a school principal who censored the student newspaper because it ran a story that the company contracted to provide its food service was on a "mission to serve God":
Orange County High School of the Arts hired a cafeteria provider whose “mission” is to “serve God.”
You would have heard about it yesterday, too, were you a student at the school, had it not been for the intervention of the principal.
Sue Vaughn, the school’s principal, says she halted the student paper’s…
revere | September 6, 2009Bill Donohue is a demented, mean (evil?) and bat shit crazy head of a nasty coven called the Catholic League. Donohue's organization claims to represent 350,000 Catholics (yeah, right; and we're the Andrews Sisters), but since there are an estimated 67 million Catholics in the US and Canada, even by his own inflated estimate this is only 0.5%. You wouldn't think there would be much we would agree on. But I just found one. We atheists -- and it turns out, lots of Christians -- are out to get him and his mob of crazies:
Catholic League President Bill Donohue presented a paranoid side of his…
revere | August 30, 2009I only met Ted Kennedy once, many years ago. I was working with parents whose children had been stricken with leukemia in Woburn, Massachusetts. We were trying to answer the simplest of questions: why their children? These were wonderful and extraordinary people, supported by their local minister, himself an ordinary extraordinary man. They were a handful of ordinary citizens, not a huge voting bloc and they were extremely respectful but determined. Their inquiries were turning up facts that were inconvenient for some of the state's most powerful economic interests. But Ted Kennedy asked them…
revere | August 23, 2009A pandemic is an outbreak that's world wide. Usually it's a single strain of some pathogen. But it doesn't have to be. There can be multiple strains, each intent on reproducing itself but adapted to its own niche:
revere | August 16, 2009We may be on vacation, but flying Rabbis with trumpets deserve a day of their own and because it's swine flu related there is no escaping this delectable item. PZ over at Pharyngula even had a link to a video which is something to behold. But first, for those of you who haven't heard the latest in public health measures against SWINE flu (which the ultra orthodox Israeli Health Minister won't permit to be called swine flu because pigs are unclean, which is why we shouted it in caps for emphasis), we present you with the death defying show from Kabbalah Airlines:
Dozens of rabbis and Kabbalah…