An interesting application of the Book of Mormon to a very contemporary news story, from an exceptionally interesting blog:   http://mormonwar.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-do-you-solve-problem-like-iraq-fall.html     Read more

    Are there other universes out there?  Do they have different natural laws?   Those are actually two distinct questions, as I see it, though they’re often conflated as if an affirmative answer to the first automatically entailed an affirmative answer to the second.   And there are at least a few scientists and philosophers who, for entirely non-scientific reasons, ardently hope for positive answers to both questions — since the apparent fine-tuning of this universe (the only universe... Read more

    Stories such as this one (“First hospice for Utah’s homeless dedicated by community, religious leaders”), called to my attention by Charles Steinman, illustrate how very toxic religion is.  The project might have been a good one . . .  if religion hadn’t been involved in it:   http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=34605751     Read more

    A nephew just graduated from the law school at Emory University in Atlanta.   My brother-in-law, currently finishing a short visit to Utah en route back to his home in the Pacific Northwest, was there at Emory for his son’s graduation.   He told me tonight that Emory’s commencement speaker was Sir Salman Rushdie, of Satanic Verses fame.   Mr. Rushdie, my brother-in-law recounted to me, told the graduates of Emory’s Candler School of Theology sitting there in the audience that they... Read more

      My friend Bill Hamblin reports an interesting find:   http://www.patheos.com/blogs/enigmaticmirror/2015/05/18/philip-jenkins-on-book-of-mormon-historicity/     Read more

  The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.  Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.” Martin Luther King, Jr.   Read more

    American soldiers paid an enormous price to take Ramadi from the bloodthirsty terrorists who ruled it.   And now, in effect, we’ve given it back:   http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/18/asia/isis-ramadi/   I hope that the veterans of the Ramadi campaign, many of them wounded and maimed, are doing alright, and that the families of those who fell there are getting the support the need.  And that those in the city who helped American forces were able to get out.   Some... Read more

      Hillary is running as an advocate for the American middle class and the poor.  She feels their pain.   She mingles with carefully selected Ordinary People, and once actually ate a taco salad (or something) in a restaurant to which the masses are admitted.   Bill and Hillary Clinton, together, have earned approximately $30 million since January 2014:   http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/15/politics/hillary-clinton-speeches/   And to think that, when they left government housing only fifteen years ago, in January 2001,... Read more

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/418379/why-does-organized-religion-get-bad-rap-because-elite-lies-about-it-david-french?target=author&tid=1048   And, on a related note, have a look at “Obama’s casual slander of American Christians.”     Read more

    The ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist temple at Borobudur, in Indonesia’s Central Java, provides yet another example of Christopher Hitchens’s principle that “religion poisons everything!”   Indonesia and the world would have been better off had it never existed.   Right?     Read more