A thought experiment: Your next door neighbor has always been a menace, beady-eyed with a seemingly permanent scowl that suggests a profound dislike and distrust of the world. The world, of course, has always repaid him in kind. You are certain that previously, he has stolen a number of expensive pieces of equipment and tools you kept in a shed at the back of your property, but you were never able to successfully see a legal claim through to fruition. Then one day you’re sitting down to breakfast when you see him and his sons descend upon your home with…
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It’s that crazy bouncing football called “predicting the future” all over again on the world stage, every player on the field chasing it amidst a muddy squall, the ball slithering and sliding just beyond everyone’s grasp. Thought you had it, until you didn’t, and there it goes again… How diabolical of the game’s founders to make the ball such a pointed, often unmanageable mess that keeps eluding a firm grasp! So Marjorie Taylor Greene makes a months-long, conspicuous, two-issue policy break with the president whom she continues to insist she loves. But on these issues of Israel’s pitiless destruction and…
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With some 64% of its population self-identifying as Christian for the 2020 census, the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 Christian populations of the world. But once the camera pans out from the tiny countries comprising that list (Romania, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, et al) the picture changes significantly. Partly owing to its relatively large population (331 million in 2020) and partly to its history of being settled heavily by those fleeing religious persecution, the U.S. leads the world in the gross number of Christians. Its 64% of the U.S. translates to 213 million people, easily outdistancing Brazil at…
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My natural inclination is toward the silver linings, buoyancy, resilience, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Light followed by dark followed by brighter light. The view from afar, over the long-term. Not letting our daubers down, lemonading from the lemons. First the birth, then the fall, then the grace. I used to think time was on the side of the human project, our capacious brains ultimately squeezing out a net gain for human reason, the virtues of cooperation, and the case for common decency in the face of ignorance, superstition, greed, and fear. That however ceaseless is the struggle for mere survival, humanity would…
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The words below have been spoken, part of the historical record, and they speak powerfully for their respective viewpoints. So I will leave very few words here myself. I was going back and forth about the order I should put these video clips in, but a bit of reflection was all I needed to understand who and what must be slotted in as the last word. May the goodness, kindness, compassion, mercy, forgiveness and love associated with the gods of every religion, of the life force and the best of the human heart, prevail in this struggle to lay claim…