Douglas Adams: Radical Atheist
Mr. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" makes some good points. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjvSX4Y8C1o[/youtube]
Bush is insane
The US House and Senate Democrats have passed supplemental funding bills for Iraq and Afghanistan which, for the first time, put conditions of oversight upon such funding, which past Republican Congresses had merely rubberstamped, with added pork. President Bush has cried “Wolf!â€Â His attack upon the bill first relied upon…
So just who are we all talking to, anyway?
I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life.  Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general.  He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas.  This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause.Â
As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious. I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?â€
I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership. Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum. There. I’ve laid out a blanket compliment. Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??
Here goes:
Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur …
Einstein’s God
At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.” During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God. Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”
The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson). For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.” The bottom line?
[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.
Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.” Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood. While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.”
At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …
Global warming gets a bit of local newspaper coverage
How important is it that the United Nations just issued an apocalyptic report on global warning?
Serious stories on global warming have been rare in my local paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I was thus happy to see that the Post-Dispatch placed a punchy graphic about global warming on the front page of yesterday’s paper—2,500 scientists say it’s going to happen and it’s going to ruin the planet. To get the story, though, one had to turn to page 25A. There, one learns about
more than a billion people in need of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a planetary landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.
This report was so incredibly important that the Post-Dispatch dedicated 21 column-inches of text to the story. It’s about the same amount of space the PD gave to yesterday’s front page story about “bratzels” (bratwurst wrapped in pretzels) a new food featured at Cardinal baseball games. Who would have thought that “bratzels” were almost as important as global warming?
That this story on global warming appeared in a local paper at all is important. Most people get most of their news from local TV and newspapers. If global warming hadn’t appeared in the P-D, many people in my city might have assumed that it was all a hoax or that someone figured out what to do about it.
Setting aside the graphics of the global warming story, the PD provided three thin columns of 7-inches each to describe …