by Carl Howard | Apr 22, 2011 | Atrocities and Oppression, Blog Topics, Society
You are born in a communal barracks and your parents have no time to show you any affection. Your earliest childhood memories are of constant, excruciating hunger, as food is heavily rationed. You also know work from a very early age: you and your peers work in a...
by Carl Howard | Apr 14, 2011 | Atrocities and Oppression, Blog Topics, Society
A follow-up from yesterday’s post, which in turn is a followup of my earlier musings about cults of personality. The story I described yesterday is of course real. I might have gotten some of the details wrong (vague as I tried to make them) but this really is what...
by Carl Howard | Nov 24, 2010 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, Evolution and Biology, Philosophy, Science and Skepticism
I’ve noticed an interesting disonnect between proofs some fundamentalist believers use for their religion and their beliefs about science (especially evolution). For an example, let’s take Judaism, which has a proof that the Torah is divine. This is called the Kuzari...
by Carl Howard | Apr 7, 2010 | Atheism and Religion, Atrocities and Oppression, Blog Topics, Blogging the Bible
After a brief hiatus thanks to holidays and conferences about nothing, regular blogging should be back. I’ve yet to catch up on the blogging-the-Bible posts but I was spurred to write about the Bible and terrorism thanks to this recent post by Keren Tuch The Jewish...
by Carl Howard | Aug 15, 2009 | Atheism and Religion, Atrocities and Oppression, Blog Topics, Blogging Jewish Law
I want to look at stoning in Judaism as a quick case study of how concepts evolve in religions as their practitioners mature morally. Early Hebrew Bible: You can get stoned for anything (there’s about 22 capital crimes, although stoning itself only applies to some)....
by Carl Howard | Jul 16, 2009 | Atrocities and Oppression, Biases and Fallacies, Blog Topics, History, Science and Skepticism
I usually try to keep posts concise. But I thought once a month I can splurge on my word count and try talk about something in a bit more detail. Here goeth my first attempt. A few days ago Takis Konstantopoulos wrote a reaction to my 2008 post about the Holodomor...
