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POPSThe Reassurance of Magic A very straightforward polemic to chew over between the cornflakes and the coffee. (Certainly, almost anything is better than pop science).
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POPSHow Can This Be??? How in the world can a person be a decent, moral person without the promise of heaven or the threat of hell. Just what is this world coming to??? Now I'll carefully remove my tongue from my cheek.
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POPSPope Points to Saints who Conquered 'Hell on Earth' of Nazi Camps 5 Comments So, why does the wealth of the Vatican need the protection of a secular state? The Catholic Church has always been in love with power Ironic........Pope during ww2 turned a blind eye to the horrors of nazi germany and holocaust. I swear I remember reading from multiple source including his own autobiography that the current pope was in Hitlers youth brigade and luftwaffe (Air Force) as an assistant something or other. Info...that is true
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POPSPope Points to Saints who Conquered 'Hell on Earth' of Nazi Camps
"The Nazi concentration camp – noted Pope Benedict - as every death camp, can be considered an extreme symbol of evil, of the hell that comes to earth when man forgets God, and when He is replaced, usurping from Him the right to decide what is good and what is evil, to give life or to take life. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not confined to the death camp. It is rather the culmination of an extensive and widespread reality of often nebulous boundaries. " This reality is precisely the antithesis that became clear at the end of the second millennium, "the opposition between atheistic humanism and Christian humanism, between holiness and nihilism”. "On the one hand - continued the pope - there are philosophies and ideologies, but also on an increasing scale ways of thinking and acting, which extol the freedom of man as the only principle, as an alternative to God, and thus transform man into a god, whose system behaviour is of an arbitrary nature. On the other hand, we note th
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POPSThe Coming Superbrain Some more excerpts: not all humans of the industry are optimistic, "The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines." And some worst fear is the Moses Syndrome being just one generation before: "Indeed, despite this high-technology heartland’s deeply held consensus about exponential progress, the worst fate of all for the Valley’s digerati would be to be the generation before the generation that lives to see the singularity; Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,’ ” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”
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POPSSerrfdom in Tibet prior to Chinese intervention It`s all a matter of perspective, perhaps ? The Chinese ar oppressive invaders, but the place was a squalid dungheap previously by all accounts. In `primitive` Buddhist countries, all those boys do not want to go off and be monks necessarily; it is a socio-economic solution, same as some Muslims locking up women.
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POPSPosthuman Stories Are Creation Myths Turned Upside Down An interesting perspective to ponder about: Are the posthuman & transhumanist movements the new belief-systems for scientific-mindsetted non-believers? Where lies that fine line between religion, belief, speculation & reality, naive optimism & depressive realism? How does our cultural heritage influence this reversal from past to future? And also a link to the free scifi ebook on this topic.
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POPSSupport For Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom Has Exploded see that their country is changing, see that the influence of Islam and Islamization is growing, and they don’t like that. They are not xenophobes. They are not racist. They do not hate Muslims. But they feel that their own culture, based on Christianity, Judaism, and humanism is something to fight for. Hurd: What does your not being allowed in the United Kingdom prove, if anything? Wilders: It proves that the influence of Islam in Western European countries is huge. Wilders still faces trial in the Netherlands for hate speech. But his political stock continues to grow.
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POPS"Newton Day" In America? as the father of modern philosophy, but since logic and philosophy are not so uniquely Western as science, I’ll let it pass. The real giant of modern Western science, in my mind, is Sir Isaac Newton, whose articulation of the laws of gravitation and motion, and subsequent derivation of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from those laws, demonstrated that the heavens and the earth all obeyed the same physical laws. While we’re celebrating his contribution, though, we should probably remember Kepler who went before him, and also Galileo Galilei, whose painstaking observation Stephen Hawking believes contributed more to the creation of the modern, natural sciences than anybody else. So, why are we not celebrating Newton Day, Galileo Day, Kepler Day, Copernicus Day, or Augustine Day? It’s because the day we’re being told to celebrate is actually a religious observance by a non-theistic religion, and what they’re celebrating is neither science nor reason.
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POPSLiars for Christ The not surprising survey by the Baptist funded Baylor University which shows religion holding its own is shown to be more of a propoganda screed than a scientific survey. This does not reflect well on a well known "institute of higher learning" such as Baylor. Particularly when the biased survey is so easily refuted. It kind of reminds me of the past administration. Tell a lie often enough and you can get a sizable number of people to start to believe it.
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POPSReligion in schools to go God-free Basically any group with an accredited curriculum can go into schools and take time away from teaching by the employed teacher (who usually sits at the back of the room to control the class).
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