There is an old joke about the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic. A drunk doesn’t go to meetings.
Category: Zombies
Religions of England
The main BBC Web site home has a lot of links to interesting internal resources. There is a page on Religion and Ethics. There is a box on that page which links to an Index of Religions in Britain The Guardian Online has its own Guide to Religion in the U.K..
Addiction 101
Addictions are rewarding in the judgment of the addicted person, when he or she is engaging in the addictive behaviour. Addicts will pursue their addiction even when they know, or should know, that their addiction is harmful to physical health, economic potential, social status, and to the survival of supportive, trusting, and intimate relationships. Some addictions alter perception and judgment, and all addictions seem to offer such powerful rewards that the disadvantages and side-effects are disregarded. Psychologists have run a variety of interesting and cruel experiments to see exactly what harm rats and monkeys will endure for different rewards. These studies tend to reveal what kinds of sensory and psychological experiences are inherently attractive to mammals and primates and to provide insights into the psychology of value, but they don’t even begin to measure the harm that human beings can endure and inflict under the influence of addictions.
Addiction 100
What is an addiction?
Freedom in the American Dream
An interesting story, courtesy of the BBC World News Web service about a survey of American teens. One of the findings is that American teens tend to be authoritarian in defence of patriotic values. They tend to think the First Amendment is too liberal and promotes anti-American values. The group responsible for the survey has its own web site with a page devoted to the survey.
Religion or Culture
I have shuffled some categories and category names, and brought several entries into a category called, for now, Religion. It ties to other parts of culture and ideas, but it stand up as way of grouping entries.
Religion is fact of social life and a set of ideas about truth, justice and reality.
Brezhnev of the Vatican
Some European countries (England) have laws that curtail freedom of speech to protect religious groups from criticism. There is a BBC an article that a Polish Court convicted a prominent journalist of insulting a foreign head of state. He compared the Pope to Brezhnev. I haven’t been able to get the offensive text. He may have meant that the Pope is isolated and dependent on the Vatican bureaucacy and a few personal assistants, and losing touch. That argument has some merit.
The head of State was the Pope who is the head of state of the Vatican City, which is a separate state under International Law. Poland doesn’t seem to have laws that specifically protect the Catholic Church and other religious groups from hate speech or other lesser forms of criticism. However I am not sure how those laws might apply to criticism of the Pope or his performance in the Vatican.
Barr’s Religion
Nevada Barr’s book “Seeking Enlightenment, Hat by Hat” has a few interesting turns. I mentioned it in a review a few weeks ago.
Tsunami Preachers – Atheist
Richard Dawkins, the grand ayatollah of English atheism, has written a couple of letters to the Guardian which interpret the Indian ocean tsunami disaster around his personal value system. While he is a more presentable salesman of values than the homophobic pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, he is emotionally vested in his own beliefs, illogical about the lessons of the disaster, and ruthlessly determined to build his story on the bodies of the dead.
Swedish Preacher
My previous post, devoted to the Westboro Baptist Church’s bizarre interpretation of the Indian ocean disaster, refers to a case in Sweden in which a Pentecostal Minister was charged with the criminal offence of hate speech against gays and lesbians for a sermon preached in his own church. I had trouble getting a clear factual story on the Web, because most of the Web sites that mention it are either devoted to the interests of religious groups, or devoted to gay pride issues. Each side has its own stories and both contain mistakes and legal inaccuracies. The coverage in the online edition of Christianity Today was clear and informative. It also played a minor part in a story about the cultural war between religion and liberalism in Europe in Time Magazine.