Reading Time: 6 minutes First Amendment-loving conservatives have long blamed isolated mental-health issues in very angry individuals but never the availability of guns as the proximate cause of America’s decades-long epidemic of horrific mass shootings in America. Or they claim mass shootings are hardly a problem at all and that, by the way, overall gun violence is supposedly down […]
crime
Posted inParenting & Family
How do we explain gun violence to our kids?
Reading Time: 3 minutes How do we strike a balance between honesty and shielding when we discuss Sunday’s mass shooting in Buffalo?
Posted inReligious News
Bible museum received $2.4 million from ‘Bill’ Hwang, an evangelist who committed wire fraud
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the same year the museum opened its doors, faith-based Hobby Lobby paid a $3 million fine in a Justice Department settlement for not exercising due diligence in acquisitions. The judgment directed the forfeiture of 5,500 clay tablets and other illegally imported items to the Iraqi government. Later, the man who launched the $500 million […]
Posted inCulture
Yahoo boys, money rituals, and the magic of desperation
Reading Time: 6 minutes Yahoo boys, babalawos, money rituals. If these terms don’t already mean anything to you, brace yourself—we’re venturing into hard territory. Nigeria is a West African country with two-thirds of the US population packed into less than a tenth of the territory. And there, in recent months, a perennial cycle of violent rituals thought to bring […]
Posted inRacial justice
Did too-blind justice free Kyle Rittenhouse?
Reading Time: 4 minutes FYI to my readers: My OnlySky essays are always informed by secularism, nontheism and humanism but do not always focus on patently irreligious themes. My essential aim is to investigate our world from the perspective that gods are nonexistent. Blind justice, it turns out, can be too blind. Take, for instance, then 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, […]
Posted inReligion
Kent Hovind: Arrested on Domestic Violence Charges
Reading Time: 10 minutes Hi and welcome back! The other day, we took an introductory look at a relic of Creationism’s heyday: Kent Hovind, who styles himself ‘Dr. Dino.’ Hovind got arrested right at the end of July on domestic violence charges against his newly-estranged third wife. He also didn’t respond well to her decision to end their relationship. […]
Posted inNews
Shielding luminaries from criticism would be a monumental blunder
Reading Time: 3 minutes THERE has been widespread upset about the damage and desecration of memorials in the UK with a recent spate over the summer of 2020. It has long been considered that the law is not sufficiently robust in this area and the government intends strengthening the existing law by introducing the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts […]
Posted inUncategorized
Free Will: Just Deserts
Reading Time: 2 minutes I am really excited to have received in the post (from Bookshop.org, the competitor to Amazon that reimburses local bookshops with 30% of the value of the book) my friend Gregg Caruso’s book with Daniel Dennett. It’s a debate book over free will called Just Deserts [UK], and this idea of just deserts looks to be the […]
Posted inPolitics
Astounding Cognitive Dissonance and Trump Support
Reading Time: 10 minutes I am writing this as both a challenge and a response to someone I know on Facebook who has featured namelessly as an interlocutor in a number of articles here. I am interested in his, as a well-read and educated British citizen, public support for Trump. He will produce memes such as this: To which […]
Posted inReligion
Chris Watts: Virtue Signaling His Heart Out
Reading Time: 10 minutes Today, let me show you how Chris Watts is leveraging his understanding of evangelicals to seek freedom — through the magic of virtue signaling!