Thoughts of a Freethinker

Anyone who watches the Supreme Court, including the Stare decisions made outside of court sessions, can see the term "religious liberty" means there are good versions of Christianity and not-so-good. The good versions, as conservatives see it, need favorable treatment. The long-standing ability of religions to get away with things that establish certain religious views as law has accelerated in this court. This court majority was appointed around the time of Covid. Attending church services had the obvious risk of spreading disease. Religions kept pounding on the church attendance. One can read on the web the series of decisions that favor religion. This included overturning Roe which as we know backfired. The New Yorker recently published a long profile of Chief Justice John Roberts. Its conclusion is that Roberts sees his mission as returning the Court to what it was in the 1950's. That is a court whose decisions reflect traditional views of religion and family. He some...

Readers know Moses came down from his personal chat with God somehow carrying stones upon which God had chiseled the Ten Commandments. He saw that his followers were worshipping and celebrating a calf made of gold. For reasons not explained in the Bible, Moses in his anger smashed the stones God had so carefully given him. If God carefully engraved stones with his wishes and gave them to me, I would treat them with great care, knowing they were rules that must be followed for eternal salvation. But not Moses, he just tossed them as if, "Yeah, God gave them to me, but you guys made me so mad I smashed them. It's your fault we don't know what God wrote." A more peculiar part of the story is the "golden calf." It says in the Bible  the gold for the golden calf came from gold earrings worm by the women Jews who had escaped slavery in Egypt. This got me to wondering how bad the slavery was for the Jews in Egypt if they could afford so many golden earrings that on...

The denomination called Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints former was known as the Mormons. They formally changed their name and scolded anyone calling them "Mormons." I'll use the name Mormon anyway.  While Mormons have many local churches that are doing well and have secretly squirreled away an amount guesstimated at as much as $100 Billion, things do not seem to be going the way its leaders want them to go. While the denomination has more money that it can find uses for, it is failing in the ways its leaders most want to succeed. We need to review the organization. It is run by 12 "Apostles". The head functions much like a Pope but is called The Prophet. The Prophet is the one who hears from God and whatever he "hears" is ordered as the denomination's position. This, of course, changes when a new Prophet comes on board which happened recently. The new Prophet and the 12 Apostles seem to see the denomination as in a point of crisis. Its offici...

If watching political theater is entertainment rather than frustration, watching Trump's Republican Party is as good as it gets. In many aspects, Trump and his Republican Congress have decided government needs to run the economy, as least the parts where there are lots of votes, and this old business of Capitalism needs to be buried in the sands of time.  This is happening in so many places it's hard to recall them all. We can start with the Federal Government buying a huge stake in Intel, the U. S. chip maker. According to something I read, the Federal Government is buying up shares in many companies each week. Does Trump, or others who do his bidding, think they are so brilliant they will be able to make these companies profit powerhouses? Or, do they think they can make manufacturing companies so successful they will hurt China?  A faction of the GOP is opposed to this expansion of "socialism" but of course they don't use that word. Socialism and "Communis...

The original film was called "The Passion of the Christ" cost $30 million to produce and grossed $300 million at the box office. Gibson, whose estimated net worth is $425 million, is making a sequel which should be named "The Passion of Profit." In the link , Gibson says dead people coming back to life is not all that unusual. He said 17 events of this have been "verified by historians." His task, he says, is making this one believable to skeptics. This will be all the more difficult if there are historians, like New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman who don't think the coming back to life story ever happened.  Believeability would be higher if one person had seen Jesus come back to life and wrote the he or she had seen this happen. No one, even in the Bible, claimed to have seen Jesus come back to life. Many religions have stories of the hero dying and coming back to life. Bill Moyers' several hours of interviews with the famous author Professor Josep...

Years ago on this blog I made up what I call the "Sin Leader Board." The "Leader Board", as many readers know, is used in golf events to list those golfers who are ahead. I thought of the "Sin Leader Board" as a metaphor for the way Christian leaders, especially conservative ones, exploit the fictitious idea of sin to build support for their particular churches and pastor celebrities. Whatever "sin" seems most egregious, most outside contemporary thinking at any particular moment in history, is moved up on the "Sin Leader Board" and becomes the sin that brings in more money than former sins that now are ignored.  Around 1918 a group was able to blame bars and consumption of alcohol as the cause of all societal problems at the time. Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933. Husbands who drank at taverns after work ruined families. Men who missed work were automatically men who drank alcohol. Taverns were evil places and a few were physically...