Thoughts of a Freethinker

There is an old saying in economics, tax something and you will end up with a shortage but subsidize something and you will end up with a surplus. That may be the future in religion. We all know churches are not required to pay property taxes. Churches compete with every other use of people's money so this keeps their costs lower than other businesses. As mega churches have grown, their need for parking has grown. This has increased their subsidies. While there are churches that close every week there are also some new ones in new or old buildings. There are also new religions. The Church of Satan is an example.  Local governments turn down, or try to turn down, religions they do not like. This cancels the property tax break for the newcomers. Then off to court they go. Courts have shown a pattern in approving new faiths and not approving others. The link says courts have dabbled in the "sincerity" of religions to decide if the qualify for no property taxes. A common reas...

I wonder if Trump has been taken and lost money in deals as often in his private business dealings as he has done as President. As President, he has cost us a bundle. Trump has met with Xi various times. They met a few months ago, yesterday and two more meetings are schedules in the coming year. Nothing comes happens or changes at these meetings. Perhaps the meetings crowd out Russia a bit or help each of them be famous. Nothing happens that is in the interests of the U.S. The U.S. would be helped by offering lower, instead of higher, tariffs. Hopefully, China would lower its tariffs on U.S. goods. This would help grain prices among other things. Trump said he would alter trade relations making the Balance of Trade favor the U.S. Instead, China's balance of trade has gained. Trump is obsessessed with the Balance of Trade and does not understand it is mostly meaningless. Republicans in Congress need to understand the person at the head of their party and who is President is not up t...

A movie about women and spiritual forces opened earlier this month and is so far the highest grossing movie of the month. The link is a Christian post alarmed at this interest in the occult. According to this review the movie focuses on women's grievances and on the enemies of women.  For several years I have read about the growing industry of making and selling items of what can be called the occult. Now, perhaps, we are seeing the size of this phenomenon in a movie. While I don't know much about the items of the occult, I think of them as beads and the great one that made Superman, kryptonite. Kryptonite is a fictional material that was a creation of a story author who knew of an actual element in space called Krypton.  Learning about the growth of a new version of witchcraft which I will use interchangeably with Paganism is especially entertaining because it reflects the long history of what goes on in humans' heads. Paganism thrived when every community was quite isolat...

The part of the world is obsessed against trans people cannot keep their views to themselves. They feel the need to put their views into law and even into the United Nations.  A group in the United Nations wants to list crimes against humanity. This would allow international knowledge of countries which practice horrific acts against minorities. To do this, the practices hate groups use and the populations they target need to be named. There is support to name trans people as a group targeted by hate groups. The hate groups, of course, do not want this, they want to target trans people. The link reports over 100K signatures have been gathered opposing naming trans as a targeted group. Those opposed want the freedom to demonize those they dislike. After all, the hate groups say, God created only two genders and did allow switching. Every informed person knows there have been people not identified as either male or female. Ancient writing referred to such people. Those in the U.N. wa...

We're now a couple of decades past the best seller by Richard Dawkins. Its sales have fallen, new writers emerged and time has gone on. Now it is popular to claim Dawkins has been defeated. That is, conservative pundits, making a living selling to conservative readers, are claiming the existence of an invisible super-natural force is not a delusion but backed by science-based information.  One can see a pattern in the critics of Dawson. It is the same pattern that we have seen of evolution since day one. Someone, usually only one, person with science credentials will write somewhere the creation including humans is too complex to have happened without a "designer" or "creator."  Usually the critic has some way to justify the amount of time it would take for something like fish becoming bird or the human hand to develop and decide it could not have happened by evolution. There wasn't enough time, it the bogus theory.  Then there are comments made by prominent...

  Add together those who poll atheist, agnostic and None in New Hampshire and one gets the most secular state in the U.S. Surrounding states in New England seem to be a little under 40%. The average age of believers is higher than the general population so one could conclude the secular trend will creep higher in coming years. California falls roughly into this category but the New England states poll more secular. The population of New Hampshire is only 1.3 million.  The nearby states in New England have secular populations a bit smaller than New Hampshire. It seems like the liberal Christianity and secular populations are joining together. That makes is fun to speculate on how this will affect politics in that region and across the country. Beginning in the early 1990's New Hampshire swung from Republican to Democrat in Presidential elections. Nearby states have done the same.  A majority which polls non Christian would be a milestone in polling. Of course, the importan...