Category: religion
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update on Signing for Something website
Not that I’m excited to post on here about Mormonism again, but I do think this turn of events is interesting. One of the key people who set up the website “Signing for Something” opposing the LDS Church’s attempts to ban gay marriage in California is now being excommunicated for expressing his dissenting views. He…
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Colorado City and Home
Our trip to Southern Utah was pretty short, just 3 days. My in-laws wanted to see the Shakespearean festival (though Cyrano de Bergerac is not by Shakespeare), Zion National Park, and Les Miserables. I suggested Mountain Meadows and one other stop: Colorado City. For those not familiar with Colorado City, Arizona, it’s a town literally…
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the latest Steve…
In case you’ve never heard of “Project Steve” of the National Center for Science Education, here’s a quick recap: NCSE’s “Project Steve” is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of “scientists who doubt evolution” or “scientists who dissent from Darwinism.” (For examples of such lists, see the FAQs.) Creationists draw…
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Workers of the World Unite! (on Sunday… in Church?)
I’m adding this sentence from a paper to my list of memorable student quotes, The religious affiliations of the United States as a whole are that 77% of people are Christian (which includes Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, Methodists, Lutherans, Christians, Proletarians, Episcopalians, Mormons, and others), 1% are Jewish, 1% are Muslim, 1% are Buddhist, less than…
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Fort de Soto; Expelled
We had our first familial visitor last weekend. My Dad was in Orlando for a carwash convention and made a side trip out to Tampa (about 1 1/2 hours away). He and a colleague of his spent the night then we took them out to Fort de Soto. Debi and I had never been but…
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I’m not alone; peas, wonderful peas
I’ve been buried in classes and haven’t been doing much of anything other than school related stuff as of late, so not much to post. Here’s my round up of the last few weeks: I just received an email from a friend with this link rating Bank of America as the worst bank in America.…
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Tampa in the News
I’ve found since I started teaching Sociology that being up-to-date on local news can be useful (though it is less useful at my new school where many of the students are from other cities). This leads me to read the local paper, which is often relatively quotidian – thefts, car accidents, political debates, etc. Occasionally,…
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the current zeitgeist – “Zeitgeist, The Movie”
A student of mine recently asked me my opinion on a movie making the circuits online called “Zeitgeist, The Movie”. He was smart enough to recognize that most of it is conspiracy theory (the movie mostly focuses on 9/11 conspiracies, which are crap, and banking conspiracies, which are also crap), but was interested in the…
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conference entertainment
I spent the past weekend participating in an academic conference I regularly attend (Society for the Scientific Study of Religion). I have a number of friends and colleagues who attend and we had a good time together. But I have to tell about one session at the conference. The conference organizer – who did a…
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I’m in the Cincinnati Post!
Kevin Eigelbach, a religion columnist with The Cincinnati Post, wrote an article a couple weeks ago talking about a new law floating around Capital Hill (The Public Expression of Religion Act). In the column he mentioned Edwin Kagin, a local leader in the atheist movement. I liked the column, with one exception – Eigelbach said…