Religion
Scientists are speculating that gravity is actually a force caused as part of the universe’s tendency toward entropy. Furthermore, the effect may have something to do with the way in which spacetime erases information on its march in that direction. The broader relevance of information is the interesting part: Over recent years many results in…
Would there be room in the public sphere — specifically, within the the Cranston West High School cafeteria auditorium — for a banner beginning with the words “Heavenly Father”, if the most recent Establishment Clause precedent issued by the United States Supreme Court were to say that a relevant lower court decision was flawed, because…The…
Whenever I express concerns about the odd and threatening behavior of such regimes as that currently ruling Iran, our comment sections become host to statements of blame-America relativism. No doubt, the same will prove true upon my posting this bit of news from the benighted region: A Christan pastor in Iran has been sentenced to…
David Goldman captures something well in modern society, within the setting of Richard Wagner’s operas: Unlike Flaubert or Tolstoy, Wagner flatters his audience with the conceit that their libidinous impulses resonate with the Will of the World, and that their petty passions have the same cosmic significance as Isolde’s or Kundry’s. That was the debut…
There’s something surreal about the continuing insistence that Pope Benedict has somehow changed Catholic teachings on condom use. This Christian Science Monitor article captures, pretty well, the error: Secular Europe is a region that Pope Benedict views as critical to rebuilding Roman Catholicism. The pope’s notice of acceptable condom use in some cases, such as…
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby marks the coming of aggressive-atheist season. (For some, of course, every season is aggressive atheist season.) This year, the [American Humanist Association] is taking a more combative tone. It is spending $200,000 to “directly challenge biblical morality’” in advertisements appearing on network and cable TV, as well as in newspapers,…
Further to this morning’s post about cultural expectations for geniuses, I offer the suggestion that true revolutionaries aren’t creating innovations, but discerning them in the patterns of the reality into which they’ve entered. Physicist Stephen Barr notes the corollary in science: As we turn to the fundamental principles of physics, we discover that order does…
It would be a mistake to make a splash of the quiet trickle of societal conversion, but it can be a source of hope to note this sort of thing: A handful of Roman Catholic convents are contradicting the decades-long slide in the number of women choosing to devote their lives to the sisterhood. And…
Even the most plain, factual description of Andrew Conley’s murder of his kid brother is chillingly disturbing: The teenager told police he choked his brother while they were wrestling until the boy passed out. He said he then dragged his brother into the kitchen, put on gloves and continued strangling him for at least 20…
So, you might have come across the minor splash that physicist Stephen Hawking recently made by publishing a book that declares the concept of God unnecessary. Physicist Mike Flynn notes some need for specificity of terms, in such conversations: … to say that a space-time manifold came from “nothing” is a stretch. The “no-universe state”…