It's 2015 and the U.S. still doesn't have a single offshore wind farm. Chicken Little billionaire realizes the sky didn't fall when we re-elected Obama. Terrorist groups shouldn't be allowed to use highway signs to intimidate their victims. And some rare good news and good sense from a police department. Read more
God’s point back in Job is well-taken. The creator of ostriches and sea monsters and the horsehead nebula is simply beyond us, beyond our ability to grasp or apprehend. But a person — a human being just like us — that we can understand and relate to and comprehend. Maybe we’ll never be able to understand everything there is to know about God, but maybe we could be shown everything we need to know. Read more
If you're 17 or older, then you've lived through the 10 Hottest Years Ever Recorded. Meanwhile, Exxon is pleading with us not to think about where energy comes from. Plus: Farewell to Mario Cuomo and Stuart Scott; a look behind the curtain at security theater; and the need to be aggressively suspicious when faced with things that sound aggressively inoffensive. Read more
I'm still grateful to this very bad English teacher for that assignment and for the lesson it taught me. She helped me learn how not to read. And not just how not to read poetry, but how not to read parables and prophecies and sermons and stories. As the very worst of my many fundamentalist teachers, in other words, she helped me to unlearn one of the worst things I had been taught by many other less-awful fundie teachers. She helped me to learn how not to read the Bible. Read more
"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterwards — when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown." Read more
If anyone ever tells you that you may have inherited a generational curse, you can be sure that this information will be followed shortly thereafter by a request for money. Don't give it to them. This isn't a Christian doctrine, it's a trick -- an ancient con-game that dates back to prehistory. Read more
"The one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments ... are summed up in this word, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law." Read more
It's still Christmas time, so here's another halfway-out-of-the-dark Christmas song, plus an update of the marriage map. some things that made me laugh or think or mourn or marvel or all of the above. Read more
The ethics and economics of Baileyism; John Cleese on stupidity; Alan Bean on pro-torture Christians; James Baldwin on the price we're still paying for refusing to see; and Bethany Suckrow on "pro-lifers" who bully children into suicide. Read more
The first attempt to describe the full scale of the Rapture in "Left Behind" comes to readers third-hand. We're told about the description of the global chaos as described by a passing pilot who is relaying the description he received from someone in the control tower at Paris Orly Airport. Here, as always in these books, Jerry Jenkins' insistence on Tell, Don't Show blunts the immediacy and the impact of what he's hoping to convey. Even stranger, it paints Paris as a hotbed of fundamentalist Christianity. And we learn that the oppressed minority of real, true, Bible-believing Christians makes up 50 percent of the global elite flying aboard the Concorde. Read more
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