Randy Blazak is a PhD from Emory University with a specialty in hate crimes. Specifically he studied racist skinheads (he doesn't say just "skin heads" because you can shave your head without being a racist). He's a professor of sociology at PSU where his intro class is opening people's minds, and a professor of criminology at OU.

His talk for ( Read more... )

Maher crossed a line with his joke, but that's what comedians do. It's the taboos that make jokes funny, the fact that they refer to something that is painful or secret. The US history of enslaving Africans is not secret, but it is painful. The pain is felt by many of us, perhaps not the same for those with other colors of skin, but there is no ( Read more... )

So when I say, as the subtitle of my book, that I think religion poisons everything, I'm not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle, I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can't be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can't be good to one another, ( Read more... )

I am just home from a terrific talk on cults by Lisa Kendall of Portland, Oregon. Her family joined a cult called The Move of God, which Wikipedia calls a nondemoninational charismatic Christian group. It happened because her 7 year old sibling made friends with another 7 year old on the walk home from school, in a city that seems as safe as ( Read more... )

Most humans exist somewhere on that line between enslavement to destructive habits at one end and total consciousness and nonattachment at the other. In exactly the same way, freedom of choice can be represented as a continuum. Realistically, very few people could ever be found operating at the positive extreme, truly conscious and consistently ( Read more... )

Here's a nice post by Bill Sheehan on American culture, and how it is shifting.
http://bill-sheehan.livejournal.com/221299.html?view=608371#t608371