Features

Apocalypse Soon: Why Are Christians So Obsessed With the End Times?

Posted by N4CM Belief, Features 26 Apr 2012

In the summer of 2010, I saw him several times a week: a portly gentleman, leaning against a pillar in Penn Station and holding out two fistfuls of pamphlets to the disinterested commuters. He wore glasses and earbuds connected to an MP3 player in his coat pocket, and always had a serene, almost bored expression that was in sharp contrast to the urgency of his message. He was one of the devotees of Harold Camping, a formerly obscure Christian [...]

The Top 10 Reasons I Don’t Believe in God

Posted by N4CM Belief, Features 6 Apr 2012

Source: AlterNet. When you look at the history of what we know about the world, you see a noticeable pattern. Natural explanations of things have been replacing supernatural explanations of them. Like a steamroller. Why the Sun rises and sets. Where thunder and lightning come from. Why people get sick. Why people look like their parents. How the complexity of life came into being. I could go on and on. All these things [...]

Diagnosing the Republican Brain

Posted by N4CM Features 5 Apr 2012

Source: Mother Jones. We all know that many American conservatives have issues with Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution. But Albert Einstein, and the theory of relativity? If you’re surprised, allow me to introduce Conservapedia, the right-wing answer to Wikipedia and ground zero for all that is scientifically and factually inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet. Claiming over 285 million page views since its 2006 inception [...]

The Secret History of the GOP and Choice

Posted by N4CM Features 4 Apr 2012

Source: Catholics for Choice. If americans today often read “Republican” as “antichoice,” GOP leaders from just a few years ago would have balked at this political shorthand, and probably taken their party to task for many of its recent initiatives against reproductive choice. For example, in 2011 the GOP proposed to defund the 40-year-old Title X Family Planning program, which provides contraceptive and related services [...]

How Religion’s Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages

Posted by N4CM Belief, Features 30 Mar 2012

Source: AlterNet. For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became settled and stratified, tribal chiefs and conquering warlords rose to become kings, pharaohs and emperors, all ruling with absolute power and passing on their thrones to their children. To justify this obvious inequality and explain why they should reign over everyone else, [...]

Why Teaching People to Think for Themselves Is Repugnant to Religious Zealots and Rick Santorum

Posted by N4CM Features 2 Mar 2012

Source: Truthout. Right-wing fundamentalists such as Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum hate public schools, which he suggests are government schools wedded to doing the work of Satan, dressed up in the garb of the Enlightenment. Santorum, true to his love affair with the very secular ideology of privatization, prefers home schooling, which is code for people taking responsibility for whatever [...]

The .0000063% Election: How the Politics of the Super Rich Became American Politics

Posted by N4CM Features 16 Feb 2012

Source: Tomdispatch.com. At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80% [...]

5 Brave Religious Leaders Who Fought Christian Theocracy in America

Posted by N4CM Features 15 Feb 2012

Source: AlterNet. Over the years, atheists, agnostics and skeptics of organized religion have taken a lot of high-profile stands in favor of the separation of church and state. Many Jews have been active in this area as well, and these days the ranks of church-state defenders are being augmented by Pagans, Wiccans, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and other religious minorities. But we shouldn’t overlook the many members [...]

Investing in the Fountain of Youth

Posted by N4CM Features 12 Feb 2012

Source: CNBC.com. There’s no denying it: America is getting old. By 2030, the number of Americans older than 65 will have grown by 75 percent to 69 million, and 20 percent of the population will be older than 65 – compared with only 13 percent today. But what if “getting old” wasn’t really “getting old?” What if aging – at least the physical deteriorations that accompany it – was something that could be prevented?

Talking to the Enemy: An Alternative Approach to Ending Intractable Conflicts

Posted by N4CM Features 11 Feb 2012

Source: Solutions Online. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union shattered the brief illusion of a stable, bipolar world, most of humanity has been engaged in a massive, media-driven political awakening. Many, especially the young, are searching for respect and meaning, and they are forming their identities in global political cultures through peer-to-peer relationships. One such culture [...]