Links With Your Coffee - Sunday
- Yes Men at TED (tip to Brad)
- Meet the Flintstones
Texas, second only to Utah
- Metaphor of the Week
We've come full circle. When I was a boy growing up, "made in Japan," was synonymous with junk, then as I got older it became a byword for quality. And now once again . . .
- Robert fisk on the Mossad Dubai Assassination
- Vocabulinks
- Honor Societies (xkcd)
- Socialist Books at the White House
the point that's being missed: owning a book means an intellectual curiosity, not blind allegiance to what's inside it. We have a history of reading to understand and learn. The American Library Assn. has a seven-point statement on the Freedom to Read, which begins:
The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label "controversial" views, to distribute lists of "objectionable" books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.
That was originally written not in response to this latest to-do, but in 1953, in the heat of the McCarthy Era. Which is long over, right?
I'm working on a humorous list of ways to prove you're not an religious accommodationist. If you'd like to contribute please send me an email with your suggestions. For example, you're not anaccommodationist if you say superstitious bastards instead of people of faith.
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Hey now! What if I regard "people of faith" as an insult? OK, OK ... I'm an accommodationist. A couple of times in the past twenty years, I let my wife drag me to church. I confess that I let the pastor get through his whole sermon (the entire service, in fact) without once standing up and yelling what I was thinking, that they were a bunch of superstitious bastards. I was weak, it was Easter.
But I did make my wife suffer on the ride home...
I had someone commenting once how I didn't kneel at church (catholics kneel several times during mass). I wanted to go on a rant but they weren't being serious (at least the guy said so). It was a funeral mass, so I didn't wanna get into it, and besides I just sat in the back. I think staying quiet and paying respects to the family is enough without getting into the stupid rituals.
btw, I don't go as far as "superstitious bastards", but I absolutely hate the term "faith" and I don't use "people of faith" cause I know for 99% of the people including agnostics and half-baked atheists that's synonymous with "virtuous people". Perhaps when it's commonplace that faith is not a virtue, I'll use that phrase. I use "the religious" more often than not.
Perhaps someday "faith" and "deveout" will not be complements.
But not all folks with supernatural beliefs are religious. Some people jsut believe in "something".
Whatever that even means.
I think you meant "compliments"?
In any case, "people of faith" is usually used for religious people, not for just anyone with a supernatural bent.
Vocabulinks: The typo of the week (in my opinion) is the comment by 'Pundit Maddy' where (with reference to Obama) she states "We elected him to fix Iraq, fix health care, fix the collapse of the baking system" Thank Obama for your better bagel, your tastier tart and your munchier muffin.
:)
Sorry, can't play that game with you. I will never call Martin Luther King, William Sloane Coffin, Dan Berrigan, and their ilk "superstitious bastards." That's Glenn Beck punk garbage unworthy of the intelligence that many of the atheist faith claim to, and in fact, do possess. Name-calling does not place you above the faithful, but puts you right into their field of error.
I separate inwardly from faith because it doesn't help me live. In my writing and my counseling practice, I urge the faithful to lighten their grip on their belief, to give it air and room to both breathe and, perhaps, escape. But experience has taught me this: when I call them names and sling mud in their faces, it generates not debate but hostility; not discussion but hatred.
If that's the game you'd like to play here, I think I may be deleting my bookmark.
I don't think that Norm had therapy in mind for that turn of phrase.
I won't say that Norm was kidding when he used the phrase, because I don't speak for him. I would say that I think that the list he is hoping to put together would be a combination of truth and humor. I think it is a fair insertion into the debate to put terms religious folks would find offensive on the table to inspire some honest discourse about what is fair.
The point is that in a public debate you can't allow those on the other side of a debate to define all the terms. If you do, you lose before the first point is made.
Certainly as a therapist, you cannot debate religion with every patient you see. In that it does make sense that you would accept their frame and work with them to integrate those beliefs into their potential progess.
Exactly, you're not an accommodationist if you cheer for the lions in the movie "The Ten Commandments."
You are not an accommodationist if you keep wondering why church goers are always talking to the cieling.
Um? Perhaps you should say how you really feel more often.
shhh. be vewy, vewy qwiet. norm and reed are hunting "accomodationism".
You're not an accommodationist if you usually disagree with jb on religion
Jb is an Atheist in regards to all religions, except one.
"You are not a religious accommodationist if you give up Jewish zombie meat for Lent."
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