Tête-à-Tête-Tête

forget about it

If this is true (via 1gm), freethinkers should run, not walk, away from Sam Harris as fast as our short little legs will carry us.
Frankly I’ve always admired Harris’s ability to turn a phrase and make a succinct case. I have one of his quotes in rotation at the top of the [...]

via Dave.

I don’t know exactly why I wasn’t invited to the Salk Institute forum on science & religion, or asked to participate in the TSN special, Beyond Belief. Maybe because I’m not [mockingly] famous enough. Or maybe because I didn’t hang around for my PhD (or my BS, for that matter). Whatever the reason, [...]

It’s war on Christmas season again. Interestingly, I just got an e-mail from God about it, and it turns out, he’s sold the Defenders of Christmas up the river. Here’s the text:
A letter from God to His children
Dear Children,
It has come to my attention that [...]

The NJDC gives Dennis Prager a much deserved ass-whoopin over this demonstration of the dumb.
While the NJDC sets the history straight & addresses the constitutional “question” quite well, what struck me was this part:
The answer is obvious — Ellison is a Muslim. And whoever decides these matters, not to mention virtually every editorial page in [...]

The wife e-mailed me some of the reading she has been doing on how our society deals with mental health issues (i.e. wait until someone who has an illness kills someone, then lock them up or kill them)… Depressing, I know, but people need to be aware. So make yourself that way:
The Unhealthy [...]

WRT Michael Richards… Man, I just don’t know what to think.
My first instinct was that this was a Borat-style stunt, possibly with a couple of actors doing the heckling to lead up to it. Maybe for Seinfeld’s “Bee-Movie”. After seeing Richards on Letterman, though - that wasn’t the tenor of his apology.
I [...]

Via 1gm again, Newseek/Washington Post has a collaborative “blog” for interfaith discussions, and at first glance, it is quite an ambitious project. It is called On Faith, and includes about 60 different contributors… you have Southern Baptists, pagans, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, Muslims, Catholics, charismatics, freethinkers… you have movement leaders, political pundits, academics of [...]

My own initial reaction, and probably a lot of political liberals, to the troubles of Ted Haggard, included at least a small sense of schadenfreude. But the matter is bigger than politics, bigger than religion.
I mostly sat on my hands and wondered to myself how the fundamentalist right would react. While I was [...]