Reading Time: 5 minutes An ounce of gold is currently worth almost twice as much as an ounce of cocaine. That reality has changed the funding formula for guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Venezuela and Colombia. Where narcotrafficking once brought in the lion’s share of resources for groups like ELN and dissident FARC, two heavily-armed movements that occupy densely […]
justice
Posted inWar and Peace
Peace lessons from Colombia’s long night of war (and still-arriving dawn)
Reading Time: 7 minutes Sometimes I forget that I used to live in a place where national news didn’t routinely bring me word of an assassinated social leader, or another death related to civil-conflict violence. Colombia is the second-most biodiverse country in the world, and even within specific departments (states) afflicted by cartel and guerrilla violence, there is quite […]
Posted inDeep Dive
No justice for the dead: Resisting martyr narratives in the struggle
Reading Time: 4 minutes On my 25th birthday, half a world away, a man not much older than me died after three weeks in a coma. Ninety percent of his body had been severely burned after he had lit the match that set himself on fire. His death, along with the circumstances that brought him to self-immolate on a […]
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 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.
Posted inEthics, Religion
Debating the Unequal Evidence Problem Again (III): Grace
Reading Time: 13 minutes A very quick synopsis so far in this debate initially with Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong and then carried on by Catholic Paul Hoffer. Please read the previous pieces for context. There are quite a few: The Double Standards Involved with Doubting Thomas Doubting Thomas: A Response to Catholic Dave Armstrong Doubting the Lessons from Doubting […]
Posted inPolitics, Secularism
Deceit, the dark art, is growing more ominous in public life. Get ready.
Reading Time: 5 minutes As the technology to spread disinformation grows more sophisticated and easy to use, truth faces an existential threat. We need to get smarter.
Posted inUncategorized
Even if Biden wins the 2020 election, all Americans have already lost
Reading Time: 4 minutes Winning isn’t everything, in politics as in life. Win or lose, a contest sometimes carries its own soul-crushing after-effects. Like the 2020 election.
Posted inHistory, Secularism, Sex & Gender
Why do honor-killers’ families applaud their murder of young women?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Honor killings, the ancient retribution for sins of the flesh in families, is also as contemporary as McDonalds franchises. We can thank religion for them.
Posted inUncategorized
Religion tilts justice scale in incestuous rape of young Missouri girl
Reading Time: 4 minutes Two young Amish men and their underage brothers have sex multiple times with their barely teen-age sister, who gets pregnant. They get slaps on the wrist.