American culture celebrates the quick fix. Diet pills like Trimspa and Ephedra enjoyed massive popularity despite their health risks because many people want to look healthy without actually living healthfully. Take a diet pill, pop a multivitamin instead of getting nutrients through food, starve yourself- it doesn’t matter how you…
A Jesuit college in St. Louis just won a Missouri Supreme Court case allowing them to get public money, $8 million of it, for their college.  Not being one that believes public money should be spent in support of religion, I was aghast. "How could that possibly happen?" you might say. The answer…
A friend called me recently. The doctor just found a “suspicious” lump and scheduled a biopsy. As you can imagine, she is anxious that she might have cancer.
What can a good agnostic say to such a person? Consider these options:
Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):
Promising to pray makes it appear that one is really doing something. It would certainly be much more satisfying to both me and to my friend I I could honestly tell her that I was doing something rather than settling for the agnostic version of prayer (i.e., “I hope it isn’t cancer” or “Would you like to talk about your upcoming biopsy over dinner?”).
The false efficacy of prayer plays into one of the great fallacies of our time, …
This long awaited report had been authorized by Congress in 1997, according to the Washington Post. Here are the results: A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration's social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or…
It never takes long for people to exploit a tragedy when they have something to gain from doing so. President Bush, who has done virtually nothing notable this year, has dropped whatever he had on his calendar for today so that he can swoop down on Virginia Tech, the site…