I was trying to hold off all the rants I wanted to rant until after Christmas, but unfortunately (for me and maybe you)  the frothing, foaming self-proclaimed Christians have already slobbered their poison over the whole Christmas season, even before Advent 1 and continuing right up through Advent 4 to now, two days before Christmas itself.  So in ( Read more... )

First, congratulations to the South Carolina state legislature for voting to remove the Confederate battle flag from display on the Statehouse grounds.   Any moral deed, whenever it occurs, deserves recognition and a pat on the back ( Read more... )

Way back in Bible times, Jesus recognized the potential conflict between religious belief and civic duty when--asked if Jews should refuse to pay Roman taxes--he held up a Roman coin and said "Whose face is this?"  Caesar's, said the crowd.  And Jesus said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God."  In other words, pay your ( Read more... )

I've never been to Charleston, South Carolina.  I never intend to go there.   So aside from the rather obvious point that they celebrate their past (which includes a solid history of supporting the Confederacy, including the state capitol flying a Confederate flag), and the many-many pictures of pretty old houses and Spanish-moss-draped trees and ( Read more... )

While I have been mostly delighted with the Makers series on women in many fields, intended to encourage girls and women, the sponsors do tend to recycle the same quotes from interviews over and over...and one of those quotes, by Diane von Furstenberg, bothers me.   Disclaimer: I don't know von Furstenberg, and neither like nor dislike her ( Read more... )

The so-called "Pro- LIfe" movement (which should be more accurately called the "Pro-Fetus" movement, since the lives of women are considered less important--even negligible--in comparison with a fertilized egg) has resulted in changes in the law that increasingly criminalize spontaneous miscarriage and put all pregnant women at risk of unjust ( Read more... )

Books have been written about verbal abuse, and this isn't one.  This is specific to verbal abuse of women on the internet who speak out on issues affecting women ( Read more... )

Torture is wrong.  Period, end of sentence.  That's what I believed since I first knew what it was.  That's what I've believed in every subsequent situation that someone else has suggested might justify torture, including 9/11.  (Alan Dershowitz is a damn liar when he claims that "everybody" approved torture then.  No, they didn't.  He and his ( Read more... )

The Gospel According to Matthew 23:27...Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites.  You are like tombs covered with whitewash; they look well from outside, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all kinds of filth.  So it is with you: you look like honest men, but inside you are brimful of hypocrisy and crime...And here we have the ( Read more... )

Sunday before last, August 10, at the 11:15 service, we had several baptisms in the historic sanctuary of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas.  Part of the ceremony includes those already baptized reaffirming their baptismal vows, both in support of those being baptized, and to remind themselves and each other of what those vows are…what ( Read more... )