Thoughts of a Freethinker

I'm so old I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. It was the Vietnam War period and Earth Day was sort of anti-war as well as a way to show the younger generation understood reality better than our parents. What a heady time it was for the environment movement.  All of us have different conclusions on what has happened to concern about the environment since 1970. Cars exhaust is much cleaner. On todays TV I see there were events in this metro area planting trees. So many things about the environment have gotten worse since 1970. Where I live, animal waste and crop herbicides have made the surface water worse. Air quality is worse in some areas but better in some areas of California.  The warming climate was not apparent in 1970. Today we know the impact of man on the planet is not some liberal power scheme but is reality. Even though it is now recognized around the world that the temperature is rising, there still is not an adequate appreciation of how urgent environmental pr...

It started under Clinton. Then W. Bush went all in. It was to off-load humanitarian work from government employees to the private sector. Faith based and non profits contracted with government to do this work and it appeared cheaper. Now we are now seeing it might have been better to leave it with government employees.  In Minneapolis there was a large theft. There was a contract that paid for providing meals. The meals never happened. That has increased interest and study of non profits taking over from public employees. In jail and prison across the U.S. evangelical groups provide Chaplains. Local sheriffs say this calms down inmates and makes the sheriff's job easier. Mixed in is the widely known conclusion inmates have made that buttering up the Chaplain may increase odds of an early out. Pretending to be in the faith is the key. The link tells of efforts by non profits in get new projects. These non profits or religious groups are not interested in making life better for down ...

A new college has started that combines the liberal arts with the trades. My wife, a sociologist, wrote an article decades ago about the prospect of this. She wrote that many kinds of "work" will be eliminated by technology, but the life of the mine could flourish. Discussing the classics over lunchbox sandwiches is not a bad life.  In our culture we have come to see intellectual life as living and working amongst books. Intellectuals become writers, teachers, academics, etc. The truth is intellectual life also lives among those who do not make a living in those professions. I remember a preacher saying his best church was in a rural area. Farmers thought about his sermons on the tractor. Later churches had white collar people who never gave such topics a thought after the Sunday sermon. One of the most famous sociologists was Eric Hoffer. He was a self-educated longshoreman who unloaded ships. He wrote about what he observed in people and his writing became textbooks. Perhap...

Quite often we see some Christian declaring he/she has finally found proof the founding fathers intended the faith called Christianity was to be the national religion in the U.S. Now a speech delivered by President John Quincy Adams is being pushed down the runway.  The speech is 65 pages long and must have taken a long time to write--and was long to listen to. It was delivered in the 1840's when Adams was 71 years old. Speeches and letters by politicians may have their own self-interest in mind. While in office, it might be getting reelected. After office, it might be justifying whatever they did. In any event, from the parts I read of Quincy Adams, it was the same old song and dance. The same old is not that we "know" there is a God and Jesus. It's that we should all agree on something so we can move forward. When we are all going in different directions things don't get done. What's handy to reach for is religion. Let's all grab onto that and we'll ...

Abortion politics follows a predictable cycle. In the U.S. several decades ago Roe was passed making abortion legal in all states. I don't recall much discussion about how many abortions went on before that but we know there were a lot of them. From what we can tell, abortions, even though illegal, were about as common as they became when they were made legal by Roe v Wade.  As soon as Roe made abortions legal religious political operatives, including the U.S. Catholic Bishops, began lying by saying there were no abortions before Roe. Before Roe made abortions legal there were wings of Catholic hospitals devoted to young women with infections from amateur abortions. Those records could be located today. Conservative branches of Protestantism joined in on the hoax. The lie was exposed after Roe was overturned and abortion was left up to the states. We have seen the numbers rise as the number of women in the fertility age cohort increased. Neither making abortion legal or not legal c...

Already the false history that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation" has started. Recently a prominent Christian pundit falsely quoted Benjamin Franklin. The quote and its context is almost humorous because no one claims to have recorded the remarks. The link "quotes" Benjamen Franklin talking about the virtue of a country following Christianity. It seems to refer to remarks and a motion made by Franklin toward the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1789. The groups had been meeting all summer and was cranky. Franklin made a motion to start each day's business with a prayer. Instead of agreeing to this simple request, the motion set off a big argument. Ultimately it was voted down. So much for a group of pious Christian fathers founding a Christian nation.   No doubt we will see a lot of inaccurate history in the coming year claiming the U.S. was founded to have prayer in schools and preaching by its Presidents. That the founders purp...