{"id":16652,"date":"2013-08-01T08:31:11","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T12:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=16652"},"modified":"2013-08-01T07:45:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-01T11:45:36","slug":"smart-people-saying-smart-things-8-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2013\/08\/01\/smart-people-saying-smart-things-8-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Smart people saying smart things (8.1)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Anne Th\u00e9riault: \u201cNot That Girl\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

No, no, please don\u2019t apologize. It was a good joke. Really funny.<\/p>\n

Liquid panty remover.<\/em> Hah. That\u2019s great. I\u2019ve never heard that one before! Oh man, that\u2019s hilarious.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t worry about telling jokes like that to me<\/em> \u2014 I love<\/em> those kinds of jokes. I\u2019m not really the type to get offended, you know?<\/p>\n

I mean, I\u2019m<\/em> not that<\/em> kind of girl.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BooMan: \u201cCasual Observation\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

I suppose some Republican heads will explode when they learn that President Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington. But there\u2019s one big difference between them. They both stood up to an oppressive colonial regime. They both won in that struggle. They both helped found their countries. They both served as their country\u2019s first presidents. They both stepped down voluntarily in the interest of promoting democracy.<\/p>\n

But Nelson Mandela never owned any slaves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dorothy Boorse: \u201cAn Evangelical Scientist\u2019s Notes on Climate Change and Faith\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Science helps me understand how human activities affect global conditions, but it is not my primary motivation in trying to call attention to climate change. That motivation comes from my faith commitment. I come from a broadly evangelical Christian faith tradition, and I teach science at a Christian college. I see four big principles in the Bible that relate to environmental degradation generally and climate change in particular: wisdom, compassion, justice, and stewardship of the natural world. Wisdom says you do what is sensible. It is sensible to make hay while the sun shines, or like the ant, to save summer harvest for winter eating. It is not sensible to sleep all the time, eat too much, fail to work, waste your money, build your house on sand, or save things that lose their value. Likewise, it is not wise to pollute ourselves today and harm our children, to waste materials we may want later, to make a giant bet on the climate that we cannot afford to lose, or to believe the world is so big we cannot harm it. There are many wise reasons to care about climate. Ask anyone losing jobs in tourism, logging, and fishing. Ask the Department of Defense, which called climate change a national security issue and has written a plan to lessen its effects.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

President Barack Obama: \u201cRemarks by the President on Climate Change,\u201d<\/a> June 25, 2013<\/p>\n

Now, what you\u2019ll hear from the special interests and their allies in Congress is that this will kill jobs and crush the economy, and basically end American free enterprise as we know it. And the reason I know you\u2019ll hear those things is because that\u2019s what they said every time America sets clear rules and better standards for our air and our water and our childrens\u2019 health. And every time, they\u2019ve been wrong.<\/p>\n

For example, in 1970, when we decided through the Clean Air Act to do something about the smog that was choking our cities \u2026 some of the same doomsayers were saying new pollution standards will decimate the auto industry. Guess what \u2014 it didn\u2019t happen. Our air got cleaner.<\/p>\n

In 1990, when we decided to do something about acid rain, they said our electricity bills would go up, the lights would go off, businesses around the country would suffer \u2014 I quote \u2014 \u201ca quiet death.\u201d None of it happened, except we cut acid rain dramatically.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Libby Anne: \u201cHow I Lost My Fear of Margaret Sanger\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Growing up in the pro-life movement, I was taught that birth control originated as an attempt to eliminate \u201cunfit races,\u201d and that the chief instigator in this was Margaret Sanger. In my circles, Planned Parenthood carried a stigma because it was founded by that eugenicist, Margaret Sanger.<\/em> Yesterday I wrote about Teddy Roosevelt and suggested that anti-feminists may want to look elsewhere for an endorsement of childbearing, because Teddy\u2019s endorsement was rooted in his racist and classist eugenicist beliefs. As a child, I was given to believe that Margaret Sanger\u2019s endorsement of birth control, like Teddy\u2019s endorsement of childbearing, was rooted in her belief in eugenics. But then, as an adult, I happened upon Sanger\u2019s own explanation of why she became such a strong advocate for birth control. Hint: It wasn\u2019t because of eugenics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A pitch-perfect post from the Belle Jar. A “casual observation” from the BooMan. Dorothy Boorse offers “An Evangelical Scientist’s Notes on Climate Change and Faith.” President Obama parries the perennial objections to environmental safety. And Libby Anne recounts how she learned that the legends and lies she’d been taught about one famous woman weren’t actually true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-16652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-smart"],"yoast_head":"\nSmart people saying smart things (8.1)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A pitch-perfect post from the Belle Jar. A "casual observation" from the BooMan. Dorothy Boorse offers "An Evangelical Scientist's Notes on Climate Change and Faith." 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}