Dr_Evil_Mouse

Well I'll be damned. Morse code for YYZ, eh? Morse Code Translator

And I thought targeted banner ads were weird. The Billboard That Tailors Itself to You

I guess that's pretty much the problem - the irony isn't quite there so blatantly as it is in The Onion, because there are so many nuts that would believe the stuff on Christwire. Interesting comments about Christwire

Very happy birthday to ya !

Interesting; I wonder if this ever went anywhere. Aerial Bombardment to Reforest the Earth

Watching The Wall right now with my daughter (her pick!), trying to deal with not being able to go to the show tonight . Y'all have a blast!

Bump!

Not looking great for us getting out, so if you've got $25 for the pair (OBO), they're yours. PT me.

And now that's what they throw back at people like Ignatieff (not that I'm a big fan or anything, but still). Politicians seem increasingly electable because they come off like someone the average voter would like to go have a beer with. I'm glad I'm not being a meat-eater for personal reasons, because with shit like this going on all the time, it looks pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Ow . Not quite sure what to add to that. I just wish people were more farsighted and recognised that an economy is about a lot more than money.

And then - crap . Bruce Cockburn cancels tour due to pneumonia, collapsed lung He's supposed to make a full recovery, fwiw.

Come one come all !

Interesting piece. Don't Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I've never seen anything myself that would convince me that there is anything like a soul that transmigrates from body to body, affected by moral conduct in each given life - I'm inclined instead to believe that our identity is formed in the gray matter, and when that decays after death, that's it for any sense of self - but if it works for anybody and helps them not mess anybody else up, great (though this kind of argument gets complicated - PromiseKeepers used to get kudos for getting deadbeat dads and so on back on track, but it was bundled with all sorts of pretty dodgy stuff as well). It's always going to be complex as soon as you buy into any system, though. The traditionalist Hindu view worked just fine to let some people stand on the heads of others so long as they thought following dharma (subjugating women, lower caste people, etc.) had everything to do with good karma. I imagine similar stuff is going on in evangelical Buddhism (Soka Gakkai, e.g.), too. I do like the idea of karma in its simplest sense: it translates just as "action". I'd like to think that there's something there - from the Upanishads onwards - that sees good action as its own reward (and bad action creates its own hell), because if we are ultimately identical with the Absolute, nobody has any kind of given advantage over anyone else; we all share in the same identity. In other words, what applies across the board is the Golden Rule: don't do to other people what you wouldn't want them to do to you (negative form), or, do to others what you would have them do to you (positive form). This is that ethic that interfaith advocates are all over. Great starting point, imo, for "redeeming" religious ethics.

And fwiw, the word "religion" didn't get used as a noun until early modernity. Before that, it was just people acting according to a certain way of doing things. Now we've got that noun, and we can talk about it,and more clearly (or badly) against it - and this even though there's still no adequate definition of religion in the field (maybe this will always be the problem). It's funny, though, how establishing those kinds of concepts through language gives us an edge on how things work. There's a great interview with Paul Ekman that touches on this - he found talking with the Dalai Lama that there's no word in Tibetan for "emotion"; it's just a bunch of stuff that happens to you. When you get the concept, you gain control over it, so that you're not so subject to it. For a Buddhist like the DL, this is a good thing.I think the same thing happens with morality - until we peel away all the layers and can categorise what goes on there, we're subject to whatever happens to be in play. Modernity is all about getting control over all that (which has it's downside - cf. Foucault). Weird thing with religious conservatism is that too often there's not the same kind of reflexive understanding; there are just non-negotiables which end up being poorly understood.

{{{{{{giv'er vibes}}}}}} - more details this weekend, please, and I'll recalibrate the vibes accordingly .

kk - Ok, that was friggin' hilarious ) ! (sobering note: why do people like that have such a hard time with their sense of humour?) bradm - well, yes and no. Yes, they don't get the same press, which is good in not letting it get critical mass, but we do have our Charles McVetys and Grant Jeffreys and so on. Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor is something I've been both meaning to and avoiding picking up for a while now, because I'm sure it would bum me out, and I spent too many years doing that to want to dive full-on into it again. But it remains true; the level of most of the Christian Right discourse in Canada is so, so much more civil/polite/cautious than you get down south. It just means you have to be still more subtle and careful whenever you happen to disagree with it (viz., do I complain to my boss about the Operation Christmas Child campaign currently underway where I work, or wait till I have more job security?).

Here we go - showtime!

What I want to know is how whatever impels these people to do what they do isn't what happens here. Book Burning 2010

Just reminded me of this (wait for about the 2 min. mark). A10PvpbPJZw

While it's fair to say that much of the tenor in the thread has been anti-theistic, I wouldn't say that there has been a total lack of sympathy for religious perspectives, or that there hasn't been nuance. fwiw, I still empathise with anything that recognises the need for meaning that words can't quite reach or pin down. I also think it's terrifically important to point out where people who claim to have a lock on the truth are just trying to pull one over on the rest of us. I mean, check this out.