When America Made Things, This Place Was Important

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can An Atheist Raise a Moral Child? ... Yes!

Image
I am sure you have heard Mike Huckabee say that our removal of religion from our public schools ultimately made the Connecticut shooting possible.  Right wing media have picked up on this and spread the word.  From an angry Mark Levin , to a more restrained Larry Kudlow (who spoke to a Fr. John McCloskey yesterday  on this same topic) the word it out.  Yep, the shooting was another instance of our secular society letting us down.  But did the recent shooting and all similar shootings occur because our society lacks morality?  And does it take religion to foster moral behavior?  No.  There is no correlation between religion and violent behavior.  Our “blue states” are nominally less religious than the red states, but they don’t show higher homicide rates than the “red states.”  In fact, the highest homicide rates include a number of Bible belt (and southern) states.  And the states with the lowest...
Read more

The Pope & Company - The Show Must Go On

Image
--> As the Catholic Church goes about selecting a new Pope, this lapsed Catholic wonders if the men who run the show really believe in the message.    I mean the old men with the dresses and funny hats, the ones in charge.    Do they really believe that they can turn bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood?   That what looks to all like a tasteless wafer becomes the “true presence” of Jesus Christ?    “True food” and “true nourishment.” Really? They must know how ridiculous it all sounds.   And with their education, surely they know that in the early church there were no priests at all, nor was there a communion ceremony or wafer of any sort (yes, I know there was a meal, but it was a real one!)   As the Church grew, it built a complex and intellectually convoluted set of beliefs, usually culminating in a mystery when the story got too ridiculous for even the wiliest theologian.   And then there i...
Read more

The Twins

Image
The Twins  When I was a child, I was known as one of “the twins.”    I am a twin.  This was the most important fact of my childhood. My brother Jerry and I were same sex twins and we looked identical to everyone.  Still being identical was fraught.   The party line was that we were not identical. My mother explained this by explaining the when we were born, there were two placenta.  This fact was huge in the world of my child raising; it reflected my mother’s status as a nurse.  So despite the many signs of our being identical, we accepted the statements of my mother, that held doubt about our status.   Still we were very much alike.  More so than any other fraternal twins that I knew or that I learned about.  We appeared alike to everyone, even a dachshund that lived next door to my wife and I when we lived in Dayton, Ohio - we lived there from 1978-1981.   This annoying dog would bark incessantly at all strange...
Read more