Wanting Politicians to Legislate Moral Behavior Reveals an Enmeshed Church

A recent Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone, The Death of a Red State, marks the falling star of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District Representative Marilyn Musgrave. Musgrave is noted for a political career spent fighting for conservative social issues. By working to censor books at the local library all the way to seeking a federal [...]

Doomsday 2012?

An article by the Associated Press discussed a recent attack by the conservative Christian Right group, Focus on the Family Action, against Barak Obama.  This attack went beyond showing voters Obama’s voting record on abortion or his healthcare plan or even his tax increase on people making over $250,000 a year; the attack instead attempted [...]

I’m Undecided.

Good news!  The New York Times tells me I’m not stupid!  Apparently undecided voters have been getting a bad rap in the media- mostly at the hand of comedians and rabid pundits.  Well, I’m taking solace in the Op-Ed piece “Your Brain’s Secret Ballot” in the October 27, 2008 edition.  The piece states neuroscientists have [...]

Spread the Wealth?…or Opportunity?

John McCain made a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio on Monday and spent a great deal of time during his speech highlighting the distinction between his and Obama’s views regarding the redistribution of wealth as a solution to our nation’s woes.  Ever since “Joe the Plumber” took center stage in the McCain campaign as the [...]

Pro-Life Hypocrisy

A couple of days ago I posted this sentence as my Facebook status, “Eric is saying if you’re Pro-Life you should be Pro-Life in every aspect. This means anti-death penalty, ANTI-WAR, and anti-assisted suicide.”  I got a lot of response from it; some agreeing, some disagreeing and some confused on whether this view is Democrat [...]

Manufactured Versions of Reality.

The book, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, is a collection of essays that explores ethics, power, and knowledge in an effort to understand the hegemony of vision. Given the influence of modernism, attention is given to ocularcentrism and the nature of visual understanding in modern thought. The essays include both affirmative and negative viewpoints [...]

$10 billion a month… to bin Laden’s buddies?

“While I was looking at these destroyed towers [by a US-aided Israeli bombardment] in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women.  …  [...]

Silence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

My knowledge and understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very limited. Quite frankly, when someone talks about the matter, headaches start pressing on and I just want to put my mind to something simpler, quantum physics or something. I wonder if the candidates feel the same way or at least know that many voters react [...]

This Side of Heaven

KCRW ran a fascinating interview on Sunday between Kurt Anderson and Sarah Vowell, a historian who has just written a sardonic little account of Puritain origins in Massachusettes Bay colony, which points out how many of their ideas are still floating around in the words of contemporary American politicians and politicians-elect (KCRW hasn’t posted their [...]

Life Lessons from Calvin and Hobbes

 
Last night, as I was strolling along the sidewalk, I was thinking about the definitiveness with which people can say, “Republican,” or, in turn, “Democrat.”  I was thinking specifically about my family, and how, in this upcoming election, they make it seem so simple.  They say that there is a right way to vote and [...]