New site

I decided to consolidate my writing at the new addr. below (except for the non-public Keenan family blog).

http://mycitylife.wordpress.com/

Francis Collins and NIH

Francis Collins, well known scientist who also is a well known Christian is about to take over the Nat. Inst. of Health. Some are concerned his Christianity may override his science inclinations and affect how research gets funded - a main function of the NIH. What if he decides that stem cell research is not necessary? Or that God designed the brain so we don't need to look into it too much?

Is he the right guy to keep the public informed about the cutting edge of US research?
See Steven Pinker's opinion - a brain researcher.
It seems awfully hard to keep church and state separate.

Two links that are really worth following.

This one is to some cartoons of Jesus and Mo(hammed). I know, more cartoons.

This one is to a scientist, author and blogger on his excellent book on evolution - being a fact, not a theory.

Kind of beating a dead horse as those who see this and don't have any argument w/ science of evolution don't need it, and those who need it won't be looking at this post and certainly won't read the book.

Norweigen comics

Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.

Solving the financial crisis

Someone sent me this (Evie). Thanks. Sounds sensible, actually.



SIMPLICITY AT IT'S BEST

This is from an article in the St. Petersburg Times
Newspaper on Sunday.

The Business Section asked readers for ideas on "How Would You Fix
the Economy?"



Dear Mr. President,

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America 's economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the
money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following
plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. - Pay
them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the
following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto
Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing
Crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in
Congress and their constituents pay their
taxes...

I copied this from another website (jhuger.com) but I totally agree w/ it. He said:

I frequently hear Christians claim that the United States is a Christian nation, or that the Founding Fathers intended us to be a Christian nation. When they bother to offer evidence it's usually some McCarthy-era addition to our pledge or our money, or some quote (often bogus) from a speech or a letter by one of the Founding Fathers.

Think about this for a second: If you were starting a Christian nation, how would you go about it? Would you make oblique references to "Great Powers" and "Guiding Hands" in obscure speeches and letters, or would you fill your foundational documents with references to Jesus Christ and the Bible?

The Founding Fathers were brilliant men. They spent months and months working on the Constitution. They were very, very careful about what they wrote, discussing and debating every passage at great length. It seems to me that if they had intended this to be a Christian nation they would have said so somewhere in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had no reason to be vague. There was no ACLU, no "Activist judges." If they had wanted a Christian Nation they could have written:

God Almighty, in Order to form a true Christian Nation, establish Divine Justice, insure adherence to His Laws, provide for the defense of His Church, promote His Word, and secure His Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, has led us to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Instead they wrote:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The words "Jesus" "Christ" "Bible" "God" and even "Creator" appear nowhere in the Constitution ("Endowed by their Creator" is in the Declaration of Independence.) Just how stupid would someone have to be to create a Christian nation then forget to mention Christ in the Constitution?

Also notice that nobody ever asks what the Founding Mothers might have said. There were no Founding Mothers. The Founders were all men; White men, many of them slave owners. White male slave owners who may or may not have been Christians, but explicitly forbade any kind of religious test for office. In other words, you have a far stronger case if you'd like to argue that the Founding Fathers intended us to be a racist and sexist nation.

I think you can make a good case that some or even most of the Founding Fathers were Christians, but it's absurd to think that they wanted to impose that belief on the nation, and even more absurd to imagine we should be bound by their prejudices.

Religious affiliation declines

I found this interesting.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/this-i-believe/

which led me to this.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583/page/1

Pope sentencing people to die ?

A friend of mine, a good Catholic (well, maybe not according to the pope....) had this to say after the Pope's recent comments on NOT distributing condoms. The Pope is still anti-birth control, not to mention disease control.

Hello, Pope Benedict. Remember me? I’m the cradle-to-tithing Catholic who frequently offers you advice not heeded. Gee whiz, now there you go again doing the flat earth thing with condoms. In Africa of all places! I thought you would welcome the Godly logic our good Lord gave us. Heck, Germans’ gave us the reformation and the Mercedes, for Pete’s sake!. But no, you rejected science and the efficacious prevention of HIV all in one breath amidst corpses from AIDS stacked like firewood. No wonder you embrace priests who believe the holocaust never happened and that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath. You cloak the face of Jesus in a world desperate to see Him when you condemn millions to hideous preventable deaths because of your intransience on human sexuality, the same condition Jesus enjoyed. I love you, Joseph Alois Ratzinger. But I reject your position, i.e., condoms won’t help the problem of HIV, as one of many positions you take that shroud Jesus; misogyny, homophobia and exclusivity to name a few. Yet the body count for earlier flat earth encyclicals pales compared to the number of God’s children extinguished by your comments in Cameroon. Like the previous Joe, Karol Józef Wojtyła, whom I also loved, you’ll have to answer more than the average Joe for the misery of the Corpus Christi. Did you hear the cock crowing for the third time in Africa? The rest of us did. Loudly.

MJC

"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" Saul asked. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." Acts of the Apostles

Religulous

Finally saw Bill Maher's film (DVD) and it is good. Nothing new if you have thought about this stuff before, but entertaining. Not likely to change anyone's mind unless you are on the bubble already. Worth the rental fee, tho.

Preacher leaves the faith.

Fresh Air w/ the author of Gospel Truth. Long, but interesting.
In brief, he was raised a good christian, went to seminary, became a religious teacher, but later saw bible inconsistencies, world wide suffering, and ultimately left the church. However, as an agnostic believes he has even more meaning in his life.

How about that!

Rush is hurting his own party.

Hopefully they won't catch on any time soon. See NYT story.

Don't know if anyone is checking this out. Been a while since I posted anything new.
Enjoy, whoever is out there.