Thoughts of a Freethinker

Why is it some people see or sense a literal god while others are unable to find it? The way a computer works gives us a way of considering this though the way it works is different. Anyone on Face Book is a little taken aback the first time someone posts a picture of you without your name but Face Book identifies the face as you. An image of you has been recorded electronically and every time it shows up your are identified. According to what I have read, the human mind accomplishes something similar but through some mechanism different than the computer. We, for example, often form an image in our mind of what some radio personality looks like even though we have never seen him/her. Something in our past produces an image. If you are like me, the person usually looks far different than I expected. People paint pictures of God though they have never seen this god nor any other. Something from their culture or experience makes them think they know what God looks like. The m

The history of Christianity shows that women and men were equals for most of its history. That had to stop. Men gained the upper hand and will not let go. If we are to treat the Bible as evidence about historical aspect of Christianity, Jesus seemed to involve women in prominent roles. Oh, yes, his disciples were all men. We don't really know this is true nor do we know the positions of the women who were supposedly around Jesus. Maybe the disciples took their orders from the women when Jesus was on vacation. Then we go to Paul. Some of the writing attributed to him made light of women. But he also gave important responsibilities to them in his letters. The only explanation I have heard from readers here on my blog is that men and women are different. Women can have children and men cannot. That means men are supposed to run the church and women are not. I challenge any other readers to make sense of that. The excuses the Pope and some of my readers here give for women

Christians who post  tips for converting atheists, in my experience, give useless advice. They attribute to atheists what Christians want  to believe about atheists. Once they think they have mastered the mind of the atheists they are ready to close the sale. Here are some of the attributes assigned to atheists and advice on how to convert them: Atheists are unreasonable. Show them the reasonable basis for our faith, the Bible, and they will convert.   The atheist does not find it reasonable to believe in invisible gods and miracles. If you can persuade the atheists to experiment with prayer, they often will convert.  As with all of these statements, I have never heard of an atheist converting after experimenting with prayer. I've wondered what will convert the atheists if he/she prays and nothing happens. Persuade the atheist by historical study of the Gospels. Atheists usually know the Gospels are not considered good sources of history. They are religion, not history.

Franklin Graham has declared a date in June as the day Christians should join him in prayer to protect Trump from his enemies. I suppose that means praying that Trump be protected from press and politicians who point to his paying off Stormy Daniels to keep her from talking about having sex with him. Maybe that includes praying against Daniels herself for telling everyone about their tryst. I'm not sure what is God is expected to do about those who truthfully report the President's moral failures. We're told God works in mysterious ways. I'd suggest Graham include prayers for the Presidents friends, Kim Jong Il of North Korea and Putin of Russia. No doubt they also need God's protection from their enemies. Political enemies have brought up Trump's personal profits from being President. Visiting foreign dignitaries make it a practice of staying at Trump's Washington hotel and telling him about it. Certainly, God would want to punish any politician who

There have been a few cases in the past decade where a Bishop will not serve communion to a prominent politician who favors abortion rights. Currently there is discussion about New York's Governor Cuomo. Most everyday someone writes that Cuomo and all other politicians who support abortion rights should be banned from traditional Catholic rituals. I don't recall reading an anti abortion article or hearing an anti abortion speech that addressed the rights of women. Yes, there might be some reference to rape and life threatening illnesses, but not to the overall issue of the rights of women who are pregnant. Ignoring that topic is to ignore the largest issued involved in abortion. Politics is about negotiating competing interests.  Religion is about gods, spirits and supernatural phenomena. Leaders in religion may not feel they are required to address competing interests. They may find out, however, that if the interests of a significant percentage of their members is not

An Atlanta church has added a Pastor who is referred to as a Psychic. This Pastor says she has a gift  of this skill and it was passed down from her African heritage. Talking to the dead no doubt will make many contemporary Christians roll their eyes. Yet, most probably believe Paul in the Bible actually talked to a dead Jesus. It's impossible for me the believe this lady communicates with the dead. I do not think anyone should believe Paul did either. If we had a third party that we could verify such things we might consider them to be something other than myth. This pastor alluded to her African heritage. I read a long article about African rituals at death. Of course they vary from place to place but in a least some areas there is not a clear distinction between life and death. The dead person may come back into his/her home and cause trouble. Sometimes the dead are removed through a hole in a wall instead of through a door. The hole in the wall is then repaired there is

I wish there were a law that required corroborating evidence that God told politicians and preachers something. If God is all powerful one would think he could write his orders and provide a notarized signature. And, it would be even more helpful if the ruling applied retroactively. That way claims that God told Jesus something when no one else was present would either be abandoned or confirmed. I can't remember a Democrat claiming he/she was told to do something by God--surely there must be some. The solid and religious South used to be all Democrats. Some probably said God told them to be against integration. Today it is most common for Republicans to claim they heard directly from God and uncommon for Democrats.  Every Presidential cycle there are Republicans claiming God wants each one to be President. The most outrageous of claims was this week when a Republican State House from Florida, Mike Hill, said God told him to write a bill banning all abortions when the embr

It's curious to me that Mayans and Christians, originating on far distant continents, thought human blood has some connection with a god or gods . Even more curious is Christian people still pay homage to a god through ritualized drinking of blood. I've read that to enter the old world of the mafia one had to summit to a small cut and the exchange of blood with another member. This mystic about blood even extends, I think, to the heart. We refer to the heart as if it holds some kind of emotion or intellect. It's not just the songs about hearts or hearts on Valentine's Day, the new mental trick in anti abortion politics talks about a heartbeat. It's as if a heartbeat somehow represents a functioning brain. In truth is it represents nothing. All mammals embryos have heartbeats early in their development. A human embryo with a heartbeat is no smarter than a rabbit embryo with a heartbeat. The heartbeat does not mean the embryo is a human being. The odd notio

First, "Dutch Reformed Church" is not a corporate church name anymore (so far as I can tell). In the Netherlands it has a different name and in the U.S. there are several names. It is a conservative force in the politics of Iowa. During pre Christian times some of the region we now call the Netherlands came under Roman rule. Pagan gods where popular. After the Roman Empire broke up Catholic Christianity converted large areas. The Reformation established Protestantism in some regions. During all of this time the economy was peasant farmers, slaves and surfs eeking out livings while the wealthy lived lives of leisure. This arrangement was locked in for many generations. Then in the late 1500's the weather changed across Europe. The period is now referred to as the "Little Ice Age." According to the book I'm reading, Nature's Mutiny, crop failures, disease and low living standards meant peasants and slaves could no long make payments to the wealth

The title is in jest, of course. It refers to a new book entitled, "45 Lies Christians Have Been Told" (about what is in the Bible).  The author says he is setting us straight on what various passages of the Bible mean. He is, instead, one of a small industry made up of people who claim to know "the truth" about Christianity. Often each says something different. Suspicions started when he quoted the apostle Paul in an interview. Quoting Paul means one assigns to him the status a great authority on what Christianity is all about. Yet, Paul assigns himself that authority, there was no impartial body of experts who passed judgement on his expertise. He assigns himself to be an authority because he visited with Jesus several times after Jesus was dead. Instead of Apostle Paul, he should be known as Impostor Paul. If you want to know more about "the truth" you could read other "expert" from the Moody Bible Institute. His book's title says t

When I first started writing about the coming prosecution of women for obtaining abortions, several anti abortion commentators said I was making groundless speculation. They posted that in the pre Roe days women were seldom prosecuted for abortions. The latter is true. By all indications there were hundreds of thousands of abortions done in doctors offices and no prosecutions. I knew a hospital chaplain who said in his hospital there was an entire wing devoted to young women recovering from botched at-home abortions. No prosecutions. But, today things are different . Headlines proclaim women are at risk of being prosecuted in the Georgia version of an anti abortion bill. The political juices are there for the prosecution of women. When women did not hold the power and purse strings as they do now a political decision was made to give them a pass. There were almost no prosecutions of doctors either. A political friend here who died recently at the age of 99 grew up poor on the st

If the people who want religion out of government prayed, and many of them are believers, Satanists are the answer to their prayers. They are making a religious argument out of the "religious freedom" case. So far, they have introduced Satan monuments to public areas that display the Ten Commandments. Now they are preparing to make abortion a religious practice that should be available to them. If we start with the not refutable view that religion is something people carry around in their heads and is located no where else, what is to stop people from carrying around the idea that what other people carry around in their heads violates what I carry around in my head? Arbitrary for one person has to be arbitrary to another. This is a difficult concept to master for those of faith. While it is self evident to people like me the ideas in the Bible were made up by wealthy goat herders in ancient times, this is hard to grasp for folks who believe there is an independent an

While less known, there has been a thread of secular theory passed down since the so called "Time of Christ." Much of this writing has made light of the religious concept of an afterlife. Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), a Roman General, naturalist, writer and philosopher, was an example. He wrote the afterlife theory adds to the anguish of death by causing one to worry he/she might not measure up. Why not, he wrote, simply recognize that nature prevented you from existing before you were born and will treat all of us in an identical way after we die. In the 1500's, Frenchman Montaigne, who was a nominal Catholic, wrote of the Christian hypocrisy about an afterlife. He noticed Christians live the lives of secularism by valuing their contemporary lives. Yet they pretend to place a higher value on the afterlife.  Even Martin Luther upon the death of a daughter said he felt a grief that was not supposed to be there. He was experiencing a kind of secular view of life.

James Carroll, a well known writer and former priest, explained in clear terms why the priesthood as it has been known cannot survive. He noted that when Pope Francis opened the door for divorced and remarried Catholics to remain in the faith it addressed one of the most fundamental flaws in Catholic theology. He said it dramatized the limits of the Church's moral theology for a century. When the Catholic imagination, swayed by Augustine, demonized the sexual restlessness built into the human condition, self denial was put forward as the way to happiness. But sexual renunciation as an ethical standard has collapsed among Catholics....because of it's inhumane and irrational weight. I really like the phrase "Catholic imagination." Celibacy was not part of the original belief but was added on when the notion suffering was good got into the minds of those in charge. Nearly all Catholic lay people have tossed away this strange notion and use birth control. Carrol

It is true that in general Democrats are more likely to support government health care for all, lower drug costs and equal opportunity by subsidized education. But looking at the larger scheme of things, capitalism brings about many of the ends Democrats seek and may not be available under genuine socialism. Racial integration gave us an example of how capitalism can drive liberal ideas forward when government may hold them back. The young Jimmy Carter, a peanut buyer in Georgia, made certain a black woman was not pushed to the back of the unloading line by bully white men. Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. Others had refused before and no one forced them to move. The city bus service was owned by a private firm. That bus firm lobbied City Hall to abandon the ordinance requiring black people to sit in the back because, it said, drivers did not have the time or energy to police where people sat. They had enough to do just driving the buses. The current controv

As organized Christianity is seeing numbers fall, so is an organization steeped in Christianity, Alcohol Anonymous. There are now dozens of organizations people can seek out to decrease or stop  drinking and other drug abuse. There are several reasons AA is no longer the esteemed organization it once was. First of all, it is not researched based. There was never hard data showing those who attended AA meetings fared better than those who fought the battle in some other way. Second, AA had a theory of alcohol that has not been carefully tested. The theory is the chemical, alcohol, turns on switch in the brain that results in an uncontrollable urge to drink more. There are people who take a drink and are unable to stop, but others stop easily. The cause of the former seems more complicated than the AA theory. Third is the importance AA puts on the "higher power." AA literature states this "higher power" in not necessarily the Christian god but may be some oth

There are endless articles written by Christians about how unhappy atheists must be because their lives have no "ultimate meaning." I put the word "meaning" in quotes because there are various perceptions about it. This doesn't apply to all Christians but I can comment of what some write. They are certain atheists have no purpose and thus are miserable. What they mean is they themselves are too smart to die. Their personal importance is such they, apparently, will be wearing a name tag for eternity. Atheists, on the other hand, will vanish from existence leaving no clue they ever existed. That Christians will get a name tag in heaven makes their life "meaningful." Science has given us information that should make these Christians a little less self important. We know eventually the earth itself will not exist. The sun will burn itself out and, poof, no more life on earth including humans. Not only are we who live here unimportant, the earth we l

When government over regulates or overtaxes the  goods or services go underground. Like during the pre Roe days, having abortions at home will continue. They will safer than in the old days but all abortions would be safer under professional supervision. Providing supervision is now a little easier because of the cell phone and computer. The internet has, to a large extent, by passed traditional institutions like religion and government. The drug currently used for at home abortions, misoprostol, is available in pharmacies around the world. It is prescribed for several kinds of health issues. It is the "go to" drug for women around the world where abortions are outlawed or difficult to find. At least one nonprofit, Cambridge Reproductive Health Consultants, is setting up volunteer networks around the world which can be used as a source of help for pregnant young women. Older women are encouraged to buy and keep on hand misoprostol so it can be made available through

Fortunately the time of our founding fathers, last half of the 1700's, was the period before the telephone and a fairly good postal system was in place. Those officials, friends and relatives preserved thousands of letters. It's almost as if we can eavesdrop on their private conversations. One thing for certain they did not want a system like England where the King or Queen is head of the government's church. The language they included in the Constitution seems clear about their intention. The Founding Fathers knew well how to write a religion into the Constitution. Several of the Colonies endorsed Christianity in their respective constitutions. Some of the same men who endorsed Christianity in the colony constitutions did not want it in that of their country. We all know the "God" phrases on our money and in our pledge were not there originally. They were inserted in the 1950's when politics was preoccupied with Communism. Politicians wanted to beat

News reports on school shootings almost always mention or imply something about the shooter's history in religion. A new study tried to answer definitively whether religious people are more or less prone to violence than the non religious. A review noted none of the many times this issue has been studied was the most relevant question asked. An article that studied all available published studies about the relationship between violence and religion showed there was no clear cut conclusion. Some showed church attendance reduced the inclination toward violence. Others the opposite. The latter are well known, the Crusades and Muslim attackers. The entire question is wrapped up in group identity as well. Religious people who live in a circle of people that are prone to violence follow the group's thinking. The same for non religious people. This, in turn, is influenced by the group's history and culture. Religion comes out of these backgrounds. Then, there is the questi

In politics and religion, language and imagery is what it's all about. And, it is not language about abstract and complicated issues. Instead, it's about the kind of language used by those who write billboards. On long automobile trips, I entertain myself passing judgment on the effectiveness of billboards. When speeding along the highway, one can only glance at a billboard. Effective billboards, then, have less than about five small words and maybe a picture or drawing. These two must combine in a way that  allows the message to be understood after just a glance. In Missouri there are several billboards with "Home of Throwd Rolls" and a picture of pastry flying though space. I had to find that place. Yes, they throw rolls to you. In abortion, opponents have forever shown pictures of babies several months old and equated them with fetuses. This simple message on billboards and other places has worked for them. The abortion rights people have not been as ski

Just as when Obama was first a candidate, the candidacy of Mayor Pete Buttigiege has the internet humming with writers claiming to know Buttigieg "is not a real Christian." Maybe we could say a favorite pastime in the U.S. is commenting on the Christianity of others. Obama learned quickly that his enthusiasm for his church life fell with a clunk on those who believe only they themselves follow the "true Christianity." Whether Obama was sincere in his religious life or was doing for political appeal, probably he go no votes for it. I get the feeling Mayor Buttigiege is a little more sophisticated about religion than is Obama. No doubt he has had countless citizens from his city make appointments to tell him the definition of a proper "true Christian" and point to his shortcomings. I was a Mayor and had this happen many times. Of course, Christianity is not the only religion in which followers cannot agree on what it means. So far as I know, every

In the late 1500's and on into the 1600's there were preachers of many ilks and followers of most everyone of them. I suppose this has been true always. Fortunately, there was a treasurer trove of writing at the time passed down to us. Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592) was the mayor of Bordeaux and adviser to the king of France. He was also quite wealthy and wrote and traveled much of his life. He owned an estate of note that was filled with books and was passionate about understanding the nature of human beings. He made considerable effort to analyze himself to better understand whatever prejudices he might have and where he acquired them. His book, Essays , has long been regarded as the most far-reaching and penetrating study of humanity penned in that era. Montaigne saw himself, though a celebrity, as an unimportant cog in a world so large and complex it could not be completely mastered. He lived during the "Little Ice Age" when his wine crops failed. The

Some conservative Notre Dame students requested the University install a porn filter on the campus internet system. The President rejected their request. This is typical of why there is tension between Catholic universities and Catholic clergy. I believe some state universities have or have had porn filters. This includes North Dakota State University. I haven't looked at Harvard but I suspect it does not. Nearly all of what we refer to today as "major" private universities were started by churches or religious leaders. As time went on these universities and their church founders began to disagree on what should be taught and how. When the universities had enough money they began to ignore a lot of the pressures from church sources. I remember a story from decades ago about a new young history professor at a small denominational college. Shortly after he arrived, one of the prominent alumni and a donor was dispatched to have a talk the the young fellow. "We

When preachers and other Christian pundits write about falling church numbers they often blame church members. They say church members are not dragging their friends and neighbors to church or annoying strangers with their testimony. Recently, an author took note of the most frequent answers ex church members had when asked why they left . The most common answer was the bashing of gays. I've always thought gay bashing, also known as "homosexuality is sin", would be a negative game changer for the Christian faith. Conservative branches of the church are still preaching the same old garbage that people are either gay by choice or if there is not a choice they must remain celibate. The faith missed an opportunity to grow as society began to understand this issue. Certainly, there are branches of the faith which have addressed homosexuality in an enlightened way. A United Church of Christ down the street from where I live has been doing same sex marriage ceremonies for

This new demographic will change everything in the economies of the world. There are now more people over 65 than there are less the five. When this is discussed, especially by anti abortion operatives, Japan is pointed to as an example of what might be in store for other countries like the U.S. because of its large percentage of retired citizens. That may well be. The birthrate world wide is now low enough so that in a few decades total world population will began to drop. Until then it will continue to grow. To me, the world's population is now so high it is difficult to imagine an additional few percentages of growth. Any rational assessment of the effect of humans on the earths health can see we now have too many humans. There are various effects of lower numbers of births that are easy to predict. Everyone can see that more people drawing social security and fewer people paying in will either raise the Social Security tax or reduce the Social Security paid out or some

All eight members of a confirmation class in Omaha refused to join their Methodist church because of the denomination's anti gay policy. Certainly eight young people's protest will by itself have no influence one the 12 million person United Methodist denomination. It is second in size to the Southern Baptist Convention. Several things, however, make it worth discussing. The first is that the event got a lot of press, at least on line. That tells me youth protesting old denominations is the preferred press narrative at this particular moment. Second, the protest reflects the widening gap between the Methodist church of the U.S and Europe and that of Africa and perhaps other places in the world. Western members of the international conferences have consistently voted majority to allow gay pastors and sanction gay marriages. African majorities have consistently voted not to allow. How deep the dug in the various factions are remains to be seen. Some churches are consid

It was a first, but perhaps not the last. The valedictorian of the graduating class at Brigham Young University came out for the first time as a gay man in his acceptance speech. Homosexual people have been seen as sinners of the worst kind by Mormons and across conservative religion. When a member of the family announces he/she is gay it is a fork in the road. I think the majority of parents and siblings come to accept their gay family members. Now conservative denominations have to make that same decision. I don't see how a church or a denomination can defend its position that homosexuality is a sin. They might have been somewhat successful when it was believed all the gays lived in San Francisco so they could point at them like animals in a zoo. But things are different when church officials are in the same cage as the animal on display. There is first the problem that the Bible is vague about homosexuality. Several passages refer to straight men acting as women but refer