Thoughts of a Freethinker

Where is the line that gives a each divorced parent the same right to child's religious instruction? This case is fascinating .  The mother is a devout member of a Calvery Christian church. The couple has a daughter who is now either a teenager or nearly so. While the article does not reveal much about the charges and counter charges a commenter writes that the father says the mother has taken the girl to church for services several hours a week. The child complained of being frightened by threats of fire and hell for non believers and had physical problems because of that. The father's lawyer had retained a sociologist who studied religions. The sociologist labeled that church a cult. The court's decision was that since the mother's religion is a cult, the father's decisions about the girl's religious instruction must prevail. That is, the court ruled in favor of the father and against the mother. Of the thousands of divorces that happen every year, there must ...

I suppose since the first imaginary god was invented someone advised another person, "I believe in a god. See how happy I am. If you believed in a god, no make that my god, you would be happy too." That advice never stops and I suppose never will. The link provides us with the most recent of a gazillion surveys which show religious people are happier than those without religion. We have to ask about the old correlation versus causation question: If two things happen at the same time, does this mean one caused the other." Maybe happy people are prone to like religion. Or maybe religious people learn they are supposed to say they are happy. I've heard it said, not true so far as I know, that the less one knows the happier he is. Old people like me tend to get a little cranky. One thing I have less and less tolerance for is advice that our country would be better off if more people were Christians. A person cannot be a Christian, Hindu or Jew unless the person believes ...

Tons of stuff is written about "higher education." I put the term in quotes because what it actually refers to is quite imprecise. Changes are killing institutions. Why so many are closing and/or contracting can be explained somewhat by demographics and but even more by economics. Most days, an article is published in a conservative source blaming the problem higher ed is having on "woke." This is the myth that liberals run universities and their goal is to convert students to be liberals in social and economic policies. Since parents and their children are not attending university as much as they did in the past. The example cited often is a recent article about Syracuse University which, while well known, is struggling to survive.  The conservative link should be versed in a conservative understanding of reality. That reality is the marketplace. Buyers of higher ed want the best deal they can find. Sellers of higher ed want to maximize their profit, both the profi...

  We have almost no information about humans from our first existence about 300,000 years ago. Because of this hole in our knowledge, religions fill in with their own self-serving history. They want us to give money and bow down to the history they have invented about the origin of the universe and of humans. The spoken and written word only came along only in the recent part of our 300,000 year history so religions can play their game. Readers know there are some bits of writing that survived or later authors discussed what they had read. But the trail about what humans thought, what they talked about or their intellectual life in general gets thin 10,000 years ago. That is why there is a group of scholars from around the world who have a passion to find and study cave art. Whatever is drawn in a cave, of course, came from the mind of the artist. A drawing is a form of writing and reveals something about the artist and the people he/she hung out with. When I started this blog the ...

  One tends to forget there are a few members of Congress who are open about not being religious. Their  numbers are growing. Back home people must not be upset about this. On the national stage it's the biggest thing there.   Christian sites lament this and assume it is some kind of temporary mistake and are certain such heretics will be soon defeated. That remains to be seen. I don't recall seeing a tally of the bills that make it for a vote in the House which have Christianity as their central focus. We know the big ones, abortion, gender and those related to "freedom of religion." The latter, of course, are not freedom of all religion, just Christianity. And the political time spent on religion seems even greater in state legislatures. Maybe it's just the way the news is covered, but it seems like religion is a big preoccupation in the two state legislatures I follow, Iowa and North Dakota. The winter sessions drone on with God-talk when everyone should have b...

Trump  sent his cabinet member across the country to sell the Administration and thus help Republicans in races for governor, House and Senate. It backfired. According to a review of these visits, Cabinet members were greeted by hostile crowds. Agricultural areas have low farm prices and energy consuming areas have high gasoline/diesel prices.  My former student, Secretary of the Interior Doug Bergum, was not sent out. He has worked to dig oil wells on federally owned land. Maybe some areas don't want the oil wells and others don't want more competition in selling their oil so he may not be a plus out on the hustings.  The obvious and often repeated conclusion about the state of affairs with Iran is that it is a stalemate. Neither side can stop the other from doing some damage but cannot put the other out of business. The group running Iran know how to stay in power and the society has been under attack for so much of its history it knows how to keep going. That situation...