Thoughts of a Freethinker

The cyber world is full of articles praising Chief Justice Roberts and demonizing him. In my opinion, this is the best analysis out there explaining what he is all about. While I'm not a lawyer one can somewhat read into a judge's mind what is going on there. I think I see the Chief Justice sizing up a new role in decisions. He realizes that with the new appointees there is a majority that does not like abortions. He also sees, however, making up reasons for stopping abortions that are false or outright lies is not justification enough to ban them. The other conservative judges don't seem to care what the reasons are for banning abortions, the important thing is the ban. Anti abortion operatives have been operating on the theory abortions could be stopped by a thousand tiny wounds. That is, adding more and more requirements, more doctor visits, more ultra sounds and more travel would make abortions to bureaucratic and paper work burdened to continue. Judge Roberts' opin...

This morning's ruling from the Supreme Court's majority gave abortion clinics in Louisiana the right to perform abortions without admitting contracts with local hospitals. It is the same ruling it issued only a couple of years ago when Texas brought an identical case. Both cases cost anti abortion groups untold amounts of money but also burned bridges between young people and Christianity. Trump burned bridges twice, first between himself and religious conservatives whom he over promised and from millions of voters called "suburban women."  The irony is this was all unnecessary. It was not necessary to lie about the "dangers" of abortion or the "dangers" of doctors not having admitting contracts. As one of the judges pointed out, there are seldom emergencies. But when they occur women are simply taken care of at an emergency room. The abortion doctor can voluntarily stop in to visit the patient but the hospital bills the patient for its own doctors...

Since the beginning of religion surely there must have been atheists. Since the beginning of recorded history those with skeptical thoughts have been making written challenges to religious myths. With religious people killing each other over which god is real, perhaps atheists were able to reach across cultural divides and save humans from annihilating themselves. Survey statistics show that old people make up the lion's share of church attendees these days. But, old people are a steady force in non belief as well. While some senior folks find comfort in the final years in the myth of a life after the funeral, others have accumulated decades of failures by religion to correct the world's ills and of over-riding dishonesty. It is often said that because old people are closer to the end of their lives they trend toward religion and belief in the afterlife. I've not seen polls that show this is true. Atheist publications and local atheists groups have lots of testimony from pe...

Many know a new kind of resistance by gays to persecution started during the Stonewall riots in New York City on June 28, 1969. Police routinely raided gay bars taking gay people to the police station and harassing them generally. So much of the world has moved on to understanding being gay is not something people choose to be and it has no effect on anyone else. The source of prejudice then as  today is "sin." Once they spot sin in others, true believers demand what they call "justice." Justice is to harassment of enemies in life and celebrate their eternity in a fiery hell. The real name for Christian "justice" is revenge.  What is entertaining to follow is the slow but steady erosion of this homosexuality-as-sin narrative. For decades it was profitable for preachers, denominations and Christian non profits to rail against this "sin." The push for gay marriage caught them by surprise. They came out on the short end. There are still holdouts cli...

There is an old idea that stays alive in the heads of some religious people. It is that Christians, or one particular branch of Christians, must have more children than other groups so there will be more of them in later generations. It has always been the assumptions of many that anti abortion politics of the Catholic Church came from the notion the faith needed more children to win against the competition of other Christian branches. Even though this naïve idea is still promoted by some, it never worked and is a failure today. The Catholic Church, and other branches of Christianity plus branches of Islam, are unsuccessful in their advocacy of more children because they do not bother to study the economics of family life. In the case of Catholics, policy makers and well as local priests are not married. This isolates them even further from economic reality. Economics has been studying the economics of institutions like the family, businesses and governments for most of the last 300 ye...

The self described "pro life" political group has never had much interest in "life" other than the lives of fetuses. There are so many ways it could have helped prevent death. Religious views about fetuses put up a roadblock to saving lives. I've mentioned here many times deaths in automobile crashes. It would be simple and not very expensive to reduce to almost zero these deaths, over 30,000 a year in the U.S. It would be unpopular, however. If there was a fundraising effort to fund a national non profit for this purpose, good luck. It has no religious juices.  Then, there is the entire field of good health. More than 30 countries in the world have more life longevity than we do in the U.S. For some reason, increasing human longevity is not "pro life." To be in favor of longer and healthier lives reflects liberal, secular or godless politics. To advocate longer and healthier lives instead of saving one fertilized cell would not be doing what God wants...

Religion, even for the not religious, is so diverse and otherworldly one can only absorb a little at a time. While I have Jewish friends and relatives, I never knew about the exacting rituals that are observed at death.  The link discusses in great detail the dilemma faced by the faith for the death ritual. The old rules are very gender specific. Appropriate people like relative and such are to prepare the body for ceremony and burial. This includes washing the body, etc. Only men or only women are to prepare bodies of their own gender. Then, along came people who changed gender, trans, during their lives. Some living trans people made their wishes know about these ceremonies while still alive. Others in the faith pondered what to do. Sometimes trans people get surgery for the change and some do not. Some get some but not complete surgeries.  I did not read the link carefully, but I believe the consensus of all this is that in death the body should be treated as of the gender ...