thoughts in and out of season
I don’t see why the “no ban on gays” that’s currently expected for Catholic seminaries is so different from the “ban on gays” people thought was going to come out. If you have a guy who doesn’t have homosexual inclinations that would create a risk in an all-male environment, and he’s not involved in “gay … More ...
Another way to make the point touched on in my last entry is that Islam is found mostly in multiethnic and multicultural societies, which in their most characteristic form become ruled by transnational bureaucracies like the Mamluks with the aid of of radically denationalized professional armies like the Janissaries or for that matter (in a … More ...
The various complaints about Islam and Muslim society at View from the Right and elsewhere (aggressiveness, deviousness, honor killings, polygamy, female genital mutilation, political irrationality, organized punitive rape, etc., etc., etc.), to the extent they reflect realities, suggest a common explanation related to the circumstance that Islam appeared where it did and spread mostly by … More ...
I recently touched on the ambiguity of “random variation” as one of the basic principles of evolution. The word “random” appears to be something of a placeholder. From the point of view of any science, it seems that random events are simply events the science doesn’t try to explain that follow a normal distribution or … More ...
I’ve never put much effort into sorting out the dispute over evolution and intelligent design, partly because it would take too much work and partly because I really don’t understand why, rationally speaking, there’s such an issue. Still, the Cardinal Schönborn situation got me thinking a little about claims that science of necessity is “naturalistic”—it … More ...
I don’t really understand the to-do between Cardinal Schönborn and his critics over evolution. [If you look lower down on the linked page you’ll find his original NYT op-ed piece, together with the paper’s commentary.]
As I understand the Cardinal’s and Church’s point (I think His Eminence presented it in an overly partisan and combative … More ...
In an email discussion a Lefty said:
… More ...The religious right believes promiscuity is bad because the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe doesn’t like it, never has and never will. The left believes it’s good or bad depending on the consequences on this earth, in this lifetime, and those are going to change over
He was an admirable man, but why not leave the judgment of history to the passage of time? Rushing into these things has a bullying quality: Petition Declaring That Pope John Paul II Should By Public Acclamation Be Known Henceforth and Forever As John Paul the Great.
Not surprisingly, people who believe that gender is socially constructed think the same of truth. Here’s a report that touches on both points: APA Study Says: “Who Needs Dad?” There’s nothing very complicated about the situation. If you want something to count as true, in judicial proceedings for example, you just generate a lot … More ...
Since Vatican II the updated Church has fallen into the unfortunate updated habit of churning out an ever-increasing flood of words and events. That rather misses the point, it always seemed to me. Didn’t people use to talk about a “small still voice” and that sort of thing in connection with religion? So it’s a … More ...