“The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank”: Commonly attributed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti but the citation has never been documented. It is found written by GK Chesterton in St. Francis of Assisi (1928)
The Tiger Kills
When a tiger stalks its prey we take nor moral offense. Why not? The tiger shows no mercy. The tiger seems to enjoy the game and relishes the feast at the expense of the goat. We might wish the tiger be more utilitarian about his food supply, but we take no offense. It is a tiger.
Killing involves culture for us. We have expectations about how cows and pigs should be killed in the slaughter house. We have laws. There is no sport.
When we take down a deer there is challenge and relish, but we expect there also to be respect for the animal. We disdain the storied slaughter of buffalo from trains as waste and unsportsmanlike.
If someone teases and slaughters a small, weak animal for sport they make be arrested, serve time, and we will pass judgment their mental health.
Why are these cases different? Because people have story. Our self inhabits the story. The story creates the self.
A Twitter Spat over Calvin College Continue reading
Because of the absence of religious values and the presence of sensuality and brutality, the book of Esther has posed a problem for interpreters throughout its history. For the first seven centuries of the Christian church, not one commentary was produced on this book. As far as we know, John Calvin never preached from Esther nor did he include it among his commentaries. Martin Luther denounced this book together with the apocryphal 2 Maccabees, saying of them, “I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities.”
Jobes, K. H. (1999). Esther (p. 21). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
SF Gate from 20 things from Dave Ramseys 20 things Rich People Do Every Day
Neal ran computer modeling of different fictional neighborhoods and, after millions of trials, consistently found the same thing: The more integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, and vice versa. –
http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2013/11/atheists-get-sweaty-when-daring-god.html
A team from the University of Finland got 16 atheists and 13 religious people to read aloud statements like “I dare God to make someone murder my parents cruelly” and “I dare God to make me die of cancer”.
Perhaps surprisingly, both atheists and the religious got emotionally aroused when daring god to do terrible things. In fact, if anything the atheists were even more het up.
A lot of struggling with trying to figure out prayer in the comments section on this piece. One commentor noted Jesus’ teaching about prayer: “ask and it will be given…” Tough stuff. Always tough stuff.
The American Occupation of 1945-51 ended Shinto’s status as a state religion and attempted to banish its influence from Japan’s public sphere, notably its emphasis on a pure racial identity linked to the Emperor. The core element of this belief, ruthlessly enforced through the education system, was the emperor’s divine status as a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Though weakened, Shinto conservatives in Japan “were simply biding their time” until they could restore the religion’s rightful place in Japanese society, says Mullins.
He sees 1995 — the year of the Kobe earthquake and Aum Shinrikyo deadly gas attacks on Japan’s subway — as a turning point. The two events, combined with the agonizing decline of the miracle economy, had a profound impact on the nation’s confidence. “The sense after that was: ‘We have so many troubles in Japan, we need to go back and get what we had,’ ” recalls Mullins. “There are certain people very sympathetic to that, to Shinto’s restoration vision.”
