I haven’t paid much attention to these Tea Parties; however, I was so embarrassed for these people, I had to post this. There once was a time when we actually wanted intelligent people running this country…I wonder what the Constitution Party guy has to say about African Americans being counted as 3/5’s of a person…
This is the kind of solution that probably makes too much sense for it to work out in the near future. Even though most of us know that change is really the only constant throughout human history, change scares people. (Hence – Conservatism.) Of course, many things are worth preserving, like, well – marriage.
If this type of legislation were to pass, it would not hurt the institution of marriage. Marriage would still be alive and strong within the framework of the religious or otherwise secular traditions of which it originates. The vast majority of Americans would still remain married, and their children would most likely wed as well. All that would change is that in the eyes of the government (you know, that institution that Conservatives say should stay out of our business [even though we are the government]) is that for legal purposes, two consenting adults can acquire civil union status for both legal and private equality purposes.
(Newser) – Confirmations, bar mitzvahs—religious institutions mark a number of rites of passage, but marriage is the only one the government has mucked with. As the heated debate over gay marriage continues, two professors ask: Why not take the government out of the equation? Officially, any couple could have a civil union, and "marriage" would be left up to one’s place of worship, Time reports in a look at the idea.
After the results of the latest American Religious Identification Survey, Christian Science Monitor appears to blame evangelical Christianity on the reduction of believers nation-wide.
One interesting tidbit here is that strong proponents of the Separation of Church and State are strong proponents for two reasons. 1. They want the church to stay out of the government business, and 2. They want the government to stay out of church business.
1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap ofbelieving in a cause more than a faith.
This is interesting information, especially the data about Vermont being the largest non-believer state with 34% “nones,” or no religion. I would be willing to bet that the numbers of non-believers is much higher that this survey shows. I only say that because when I talk to people who doubt their faith, or otherwise claim to be agnostic or atheist, they only do so after they feel comfortable talking about it for awhile. Therefore, I bet that many more people are agnostic than they would ever admit to on a survey, or at the very least, function as deist. The only reason why the number jumped from 8.2 to 14.2 like it did in 2001 is probably just an indication of an increasing population feeling more and more comfortable admitting their agnosticism. However, I don’t have any hard data to prove that, so that is nothing more than a hypothesis waiting to be tested. It seems that most people just don’t know how to categorize their doubts.
In broad terms, ARIS 2008 found a consolidation and strengthening of shifts signaled in the 2001 survey. The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million “Nones.” Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent “Nones,” leading all other states by a full 9 points.
“Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,” Keysar said. We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union.”
The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent. Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent.
On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.
This Johns Hopkins School of Public Health study shows that not only are ‘Virginity (abstinence) pledges’ ineffective, but they also lead to substantially lower usage of condoms and other forms of birth control. Other studies have shown that ‘abstinence only’ programs in schools have been ineffective and pointless over the long term.
The obvious medical problem is that with the lack of use of condoms and other forms of birth control, teens are at higher risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. (And according to the Population Council, abortion rates increase with the non-usage condoms and other forms of birth control.)
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”
Barack Obama continues to dedicate his administration to science and the quest for knowledge and understanding. I often compare George W. Bush’s administration to the Roman Catholic’s denial of factual evidence of a heliocentric solar system in the time of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo. It was not until 1993 that the Catholic church finally officially recognized the validity of Galileo’s work.
Obama’s organization of his science team is akin to freeing Galileo from the isolation forced upon him by the Roman Catholic Inquisition.
I think scientist Brian Greene best explained the relationship of science and religion when he said, “There is room for both. Science explains the how, but can never explain the why.”
(CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama named his science and technology team Saturday with a pledge to ensure that “facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”
“It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” he said in his Saturday radio address, in an offhand swipe at President Bush.
“It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient,” Obama said, adding that government support had been essential for the greatest scientific breakthroughs of recent history, like the development of the Internet. “Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us.”
Thanks for your thoughts Todd. We obviously have a different opinion on what it means to have a “loving commitment,” but that is Okay.
The really ironic thing is that by Ms. Hancock going to FoxNews.com with this story, she got to expose her “sins” on her own terms, especially since she is not even a member of the church any more.
I see this differently than you. This is about power and ego. The church threatened to expose her publicly to the congregation, so she resigned from the church. In a blatant display of abuse of power and trust, they are going to go through with it any way.
Perhaps Mathew 15:1-3 is in order?
Then the scribes and Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying, “Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.” - He answered and said to them, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition?”
A 49-year-old Florida woman says her former church is threatening to reveal her sins to its congregation after learning that she is in a “sexually immoral relationship.”
Rebecca Hancock told FOXNews.com that Grace Community Church, a non-denominational church in Jacksonville, Fla., was against her relationship with boyfriend Frank Young because the two were sexually active but not married.
When she wasn’t willing to obey the church’s orders to leave him, she decided to leave the church instead, allowing her two children to remain active members.
Now, she says, church elders have given her the worst ultimatum yet: In a Dec. 8 letter, they told her she either has to meet with them and end her “immoral” relationship or she will face public humiliation.
“Bottom line, on January they 4th they are going to the church publicly with my sins, and my children will be sitting in church at the time,” Hancock told FOXNews.com.
A couple of weeks ago I asked the question, “Is consciousness nothing more than a survival mechanism for the human body’s ecosystem,’ but then I read the ‘Space Zen’ article from ‘The Daily Galaxy’ that delves even deeper in to the human conciousness farther than I was thinking about it at the time. The question that I had asked was related to a white blood cell attacking a piece of bacterium in the human body. I was looking at the question from a microscopic level up instead of a macroscopic level down. I was also looking at it from the point of view of a human on Earth, as opposed to all things, living or not.
As the ‘Daily Galaxy’ points out, consciousness is defined simply as ‘the most basic level of awareness.’ From that point of view, even plants have been shown to have a particular level of awareness. (If you happened to catch the banal [Yes! 10 points for use of the word 'banal'] movie ‘The Happening,’ you would be fully aware of this concept.) This does not disprove the question of a possible purpose of consciousness being a survival mechanism. However, it does illustrate the idea that the mere existence of consciousness is not solely a means to exist. Consciousness, while highly developed in human beings, is perhaps one of the simplest building blocks of our universe - an interconnectedness between all things, both animate and inanimate.
In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeling of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.
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(CNN) — President-elect Barack Obama named his science and technology team Saturday with a pledge to ensure that “facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=17fdac74-2eee-40a5-951d-5de69a442e0b)
A 49-year-old Florida woman says her former church is threatening to reveal her sins to its congregation after learning that she is in a “sexually immoral relationship.”![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=14e1928f-9437-4236-9518-d3243ac5f0db)
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