New post: "Culture trumps institutions." Why who gets elected isn't the most important thing.

Today's post on my blog: "Comprehending conformity." People who follow the crowd think those who don't are weird, and vice versa (I'm the vice versa part).

This week I went to a talk at Harvard by Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True. His presentation on how various kinds of evidence support the theory of evolution was excellent, but at the end he wandered a bit to explain why so many Americans reject evolution. He said that this is because of religion, and that America is a highly religious ( Read more... )

The Boy Scouts continue to enforce their ban on homosexuals and atheists.

I know some people who have kids in the Scouts because their local organizations don't do things like that. That's their choice, but if I had children, I would never subject them to an organization that teaches that I, as an atheist, am not "the best kind of citizen."

On February 26, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed; George Zimmerman has been charged with murder ( Read more... )

I've started reading The Underground Railroad by Charles L. Blockson. This is a book which I'll have to read in small increments, but it contains a lot of first-person accounts by ex-slaves, so it's worth the reading ( Read more... )

If you've been reading my posts for any length of time, you won't be surprised that I find this article on tribalism by E. O. Wilson fascinating. I'll need to look at it more carefully when I have the time.

The discussion of my previous post about attitudes toward atheists brought out the point that it makes a big difference whether people regard someone as an individual person they know or as "an atheist." That's true with any characterization that people react strongly to. We know what happened in Germany not so long ago with people identified as ( Read more... )

Every so often I see articles, such as this one, reminding me that I'm a member of one of the most despised groups in America. I need the articles to remind me, because they don't match up at all with my personal experience. Certainly the area within a hundred-mile radius of Boston (with the notable exception of Cranston, Rhode Island) is much more ( Read more... )

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