Reading Time: 3 minutes The latest election saw an uptick in support for Trump by labor unions and minorities who agreed with his anti-immigration stance. A growing number of both groups are adamantly opposed to immigration. Many immigrants are young people with few job skills, so they flood the bottom of the labor market for unskilled or low skill […]
Bert Bigelow
Posted inGeneral
Keep Your #$%^& Hands Offa Me
Reading Time: 2 minutes No, I am not worried about the orange-haired crotch groper coming after me. I want to talk about how organized religion insists on inserting itself into everyone’s privates…er…private lives. It starts before birth and doesn’t end until after death. Religion is a life sentence. Religious leaders want to examine everything you do, filtering their views […]
Posted inEthics, Politics
WINNING
Reading Time: 3 minutes Everybody likes to win. It boosts the ego, validates one’s views. It is a reinforcer of self-righteousness. That can be both positive and negative. If it’s a game you are winning, then it’s positive…unless you cheated to gain an advantage. Then, it depends on how important winning is to you. More about that later. In […]
Posted inGeneral
Too Close For Comfort
Reading Time: < 1 minute The national news today, both in the newspapers and on the Internet, is about the mass killing of four people here in the city of Orange, California, where I live. It happened yesterday afternoon about 5:30 PM. The site of the crime is 3 or 4 miles from where I am sitting right now at […]
Posted inGeneral
Redemptive Suffering
Reading Time: 2 minutes From a Catholic web site: “Every pain we endure with love, every cross borne with resignation, benefits every man, woman, and child in the Mystical Body of Christ. Those who are chosen to bear a greater portion of suffering than others are called by God to heal the souls of many whose lives are bereft […]
Posted inUncategorized
The End Game
Reading Time: 2 minutes Most people don’t want to talk about it, or even think about it. Woody Allen explained why: “I am not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” It is not a comfortable subject. We all know it’s gonna happen someday. For a young person, that someday is perceived to […]
Posted inGeneral
The SoCal Religion
Reading Time: 3 minutes You have never heard of this religion? It’s real, and in many ways more believable than all the others that I know of. It has three main tenets: You are what you drive If you’ve got it, flaunt it Big, noisy and fast is cool. I’m sure you have figured out by now that I […]
Posted inThe Secular
Stephen Hawking Answers the Big Question
Reading Time: 4 minutes I published this piece here a few years ago, but I was thinking about Stephen Hawking the other day, and it came back to me. I have always admired Hawking, not just for his genius, but for the way he overcame a debilitating disease through his personal courage and determination, and contributed so much to […]
Posted inUncategorized
Sinnott-Armstrong, Unfair Distribution of Evidence for God, Belief, & Free Will
Reading Time: 4 minutes To continue the theme of evidence with relation to convincing believers and non-believers to either maintain their belief or take on belief in God, after the recent set of articles concerning Doubting Thomas, let me bring philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong into play with a quote from his book with William Lane Craig entitled God? A Debate between a Christian […]
Posted inUncategorized
Satan’s Gift
Reading Time: 3 minutes Along with belief in a benevolent supernatural being, many devout Christians also believe in its supernatural anthesis, Satan. God and Satan represent metaphorically the battle between good and evil. To nonbelievers, they are nonsensical creations of human imagination, but to many religious believers, they are as real as the Sun and the Moon. Many years […]