Reading Time: 5 minutes May 17 was the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. It was also the day when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed five new bills into law, under a so-called “Let Kids Be Kids” package that would better fit the title if certain childhood traumas, like lockdown drills, weren’t considered part of doing business in […]
children’s rights
Posted inParenting & Family
Parenting a precocious child
Reading Time: 3 minutes She was savvy even as a toddler, with apt facial expressions to match—the knitted brow, narrowed eyes, faraway gaze, puckish grin, chin in hand. When she was three, I asked her to her face if she was the Buddha. She demurred. And so it went through years of parenting a socially astute, logically shrewd child. […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, The Secular
Of faith and fetal cells, COVID and cannibalism
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Catholic Church has been surprisingly nuanced in weighing fetal-cell use in coronavirus vaccines vs. life-saving vaccine efficacy in advising faithful.
Posted inReligion, The Secular
Ross Douthat offers this dubious tip for finding faith: Stop thinking rationally
Reading Time: 5 minutes New York Times conservative pundit Ross Douthat believes that if you believe hard enough in the divine, even without evidence, it becomes real.
Posted inReligion
U.S. vaccine refusniks lack legal leg to stand on
Reading Time: 3 minutes If Coronavirus vaccine refusniks think they are protected by the U.S. Constitution, they have another think coming. The Supreme Court has endorsed mandates.
Posted inPolitics, Religion, The Secular
Are godly religion and sectarian violence two sides of same coin?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religion and sectarian violence share a checkered history. That’s one reason why Europe’s top court just ruled companies can ban employee headscarves.
Posted inPolitics, Religion, The Secular
Facebook and religion forging unholy alliance after joint assault on democracy
Reading Time: 4 minutes Worrisomely, Facebook and religion are getting more and more chummy in the U.S. What good will come of supercharging the spread of fantasies as facts?
Posted inCritical thinking, Education, The Secular
Texas GOP, education still in throes of medieval Christianity
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Texas GOP Legislature really, really doesn’t want the state’s school kids to learn to think critically. Welcome to medieval Europe in the 21st century.
Posted inScience, The Secular
What if an ‘omnipotent’ god can’t save mankind convincingly?
Reading Time: 4 minutes What good is an omnipotent is a god who can’t demonstrate his all-powerfulness in the world by ending evil and suffering and saving mankind? Not much.
Posted inPolitics, Religion
If fidelity to free speech fades, will religious privilege wither, too?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Americans are starting to take a hard look at free speech, which in the Trump years was corrupted by falsehoods that were accepted by the gullible as truth.