The Arrow's Path

Except someone else said it first ...

Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware did a very interesting interview about his conversion from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy. His recollections of the problems of the Russian Orthodox church are very interesting.

Taken from the The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science Facebook Page This image has been floating around Facebook by people who are educated (or at least claim to be) and should know better. This is complete and utter nonsense. Easter has nothing to do with Ishtar. This is called a etymological homonym fallacy, meaning that just because two different words sound similar or identical in a given language does not necessarily mean they are related in meaning, nor do they necessarily come from the same source. A lot of words do come from similar original sources in Greek or Latin, but this is not always the case. For instance, the word "bow." This word has several definitions, but let's look at two of them. One definition came mean something like to bend a knee in reverence, as in I bow before the King. This comes from the Old Norse word buga, which meant 'to bend.' Then there is the bow as in a string bow, like a crossbow string or a bowstring ...

"The problem that confronts them [the new atheists] is as stark as it is simple: our morality has religious roots. Put another way: when God is rejected, the stakes are gulpingly high; the entire moral tradition of the West is put in question. "This was the insight of Friedrich Nietzsche — and for all the different atheist thinkers and philosophers since, it remains just as true today. It’s all very well to say that blind faith is a bad idea, and that we should move beyond it to a more enlightened ethical system, but this raises the question of what we mean by good and bad, and those ideas are irrevocably rooted in Christianity. Nietzsche saw this, and had the courage to seek a new ethos amid the collapse of all modern systems of meaning. Did he find one? Yes, in pagan power-worship — the sort that eventually led to fascism. We think of him as mad and bad — but he was brave. Imagine Ed Miliband trying to follow in this tradition, gazing into the abyss of all meaning, the dar...

This is fascinating .

"...seminary is not a refuge for those who have “psychological problems” or lack the courage “to get on in life.” -Pope Francis Having had to endure crackpots, angry middle aged white people, perverts, and nuts in seminary, all I can say is "Preach on, Holy Father."

Very interesting article here on what it means to "respect the office" of President if you don't personally like or agree with the incumbent. I do not quite agree with him, but he makes a very interesting point.

"It has long been clear that to oppose the gay agenda means running a gauntlet of intolerance. An alarming number of Christians have been arrested, jailed or otherwise had their collars felt after preaching against homosexuality. Bill Edwards, a former teacher in his seventies, was asked by a police officer to stop preaching as passers-by found it "offensive". When he refused, six officers grabbed and arrested him... Underneath the "equality" rainbow, free speech seems to have died... The intolerance, however, extends far more widely. In the 1990s, when I started writing about the breakdown of the nuclear familiy, I quickly found certain things had become unsayable. Researchers who produced evidence of the harm often done to children by divorce or elective fatherlessness were not only villified as "senile", "sloppy" or - again - "Christian", their grant funding dried up. At government level, statistics revealing that unmarried co...

Hank Aaron is still the home run king.  Barry Bonds is completely illegitimate and should be stricken from the record books. Nobody has a season of .812 slugging percentage at age 39. That is simply not possible honestly. 

This is why I don't buy the "science" in claims that homosexual attraction is completely genetic . That argumentation is a type of fundamentalism; it really is. All science and experience to the contrary is dismissed prima facie .

Across the western world the fertility rate of religious conservatives far outstrips that of non-believers, so much so that modern liberal secularism is endangered... Today we view the ancient world’s attitude to infanticide as barbaric and incomprehensible, but perhaps future generations will look at our attitudes to abortion in the same way – that's not because pro-lifers would have won the argument, simply that (in addition to the effect of the Pill) abortion is killing the atheists of tomorrow. ~ Ed West (kindly ripped off from the Amorality of Atheism Facebook group)

I agree . That is all I will say about the issue, other than to note that several silicon valley companies gave money to defeat Proposition 8, and somehow that's fine.

Very interesting article , in the New Yorker of all places, on how mainline America has real trouble embracing diversity when the diversity is obnoxiously so, a la David Koresh. "Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community. Whenever these liberal feats are accomplished, we congratulate ourselves. But it is not exactly a major moral accomplishment for Waspy golfers to accept Jews who have decided that they, too, wish to play golf. It is a much harder form of tolerance to accept an outsider group that chooses to maximize its differences from the broader culture. And the lesson of Clive Doyle’s memoir — and the battle of Mount Carmel — is that Americans aren’t very good at respecting the freedom of others to be so obnoxiously...