It's all about freedom
Public service announcement: Gradatim Ferociter.
Democrats eating their own will not help anyone: Ex-Dem. Party boss blasts Kerry in book. They need to come together with a cohesive strategy to fix the nightmare mess Bush has left this country in, instead of Monday-morning quarterbacking a campaign from three years ago. No one needs to read about Affleck and Paltrow making out a decade ago either.
Extremism never works: Atheists challenge the religious right ~ and I'm all for that. But, as the article points out:
These offerings are so intolerant of religion of any kind - liberal, moderate, or fundamentalist - that some scientists and secularists have critiqued their peers for oversimplification and for a secular fundamentalism.
"They undermine their own case by writing in a language that suffers from many things they say are true of believers - intolerance, disrespect, extremism," says Alan Wolfe, a professor of religion at Boston College, who is a secularist and author of several books on American religious perspectives.
On the one hand you could say that Dawkins and Harris are only fighting fire with fire. But it will backfire on them. I think most people, theist or not, prefer a more moderate stance. Religious, dogmatic, people piss me off to no end, and I've ranted about it often enough. People of faith I can deal with because they usually have no agenda, no need to force me into their mold. The dogmatic atheists are no different from the fundamentalist religious - they are as determined to force the people to see the universe only from a rational point of view, just as the religious insist on the rest of us viewing the universe from a god-centered point of view. I, and I think many people, aren't going to listen to either side and will just be put off both messages.
Many nontheists don't share this militant perspective, but have decided that keeping silent in religious America no longer makes sense. They are astonished that a majority of Americans question evolution and support teaching intelligent design in the science classroom. They are distressed over polls that show that at least half of Americans are unwilling to vote for an atheist despite the Constitution's requirement that there be no religious test for public office. And they contend that in recent years, Congress has passed bills and the president has issued executive orders that have privileged religion in inappropriate and unconstitutional ways.
As a result, seven organizations of nontheists - including atheists, freethinkers, humanists, and agnostics - began the Secular Coalition for America (SCA), a lobby seeking to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints in the United States.
Sadly SCA also stands for SCA, which is bound to confuse the hell out of everyone. Anyway, if they stick to their stance: "Still, the group makes clear on its website that while it promotes reason and science as the bases for policymaking, it also supports religious tolerance." they'll have my support.
This is the internet as it is meant to be. How to go to M.I.T. for free.
"We believe strongly that education can be best advanced when knowledge is shared openly and freely," says Anne Margulies, executive director of the OCW program at MIT. "MIT is using the power of the Internet to give away all of the educational materials created here."
OCW
