I confess to having a seasonal defective disorder about this—Christmas I mean.

I am frankly tired of news about religious extremists plotting world takeover from septic tunnels, watching deals between “good” Taliban and “pro-western” Pakistanis brokered and shredded within months by toothy politicians, depressed from smiling over my gin when MSNBC reports that a pilotless drone (no, a different entity from the United States Senate) has killed a “top level Al-Qaida leader.” (No, not bin Laden. Certainly not—but someone who knows someone who met him once. Maybe at a barber shop.)

Bored enough even to yawn at the last report of a horrific car, market, bus, mosque or school bombing somewhere in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Weary to the point of dizziness at the latest decisions to send in another doomed-from-the get-so cadre of troops to “finish what we started” [sic] in Afghanistan. Innocence betrayed by the allure of travel to…

Jacques Berlinerblau’s recent HuffPost religion column touches on a theme that is near and dear to the heart of this blog: the difference between atheism and its false equivalents.

In the past months (and years) I’ve occasionally commented on the highjacking of the term ‘humanism’ by atheists in search of an upmarket brand name.

As most readers will know, its combination with the term ‘secular’ to make the brew even weaker and more tasteless (e.g., by the so-called “Council for Secular Humanism,” a limb of the uniquely misnamed “Center for Inquiry”) continues to appeal to shrinking numbers of full-blooded atheists.  Increasing numbers of atheists are happy to be known as atheists; and a few of those are just as pleased to be free of the moniker “secular humanism,” which  never meant anything anyway.

But on the pretext that words and definitions matter, neither secularism nor humanism are explicitly irreligious, anti-religion, or atheistic.

by admin Posted on December 7, 2011

 A New Oxonian Repost from December 2011

by admin Posted on December 25, 2011

AM in China this year.

I love China. Food, people, culture, history. Public toilets, not so much. When I was in America I loved “Chinese” food. Now I love Chinese food. There may be things to criticize about China, but on average, I think it’s one of the finest countries on earth. That is an opinion, not an assertion. Believe me, I know what counts against my opinion.

Once I thought that America was the best country on earth. Then I turned fifteen. Between John Kennedy and Barack Obama, forty five years if you’re counting, there isn’t much to brag about.

But America is no longer the finest country on earth.

That’s because Americans on average are becoming dumber and dumber. The political system has become the equivalent of a hamster’s treadmill: vote ‘em in on a whim, vote…