I've decided that I'm not an atheist. That doesn't mean I believe in "God" per se but being an atheist requires faith as well. We don't know how the universe got here. Oh, we have theories that go something like this: Around 14 billion years ago there was a gigantic explosion from a source that was theoretically smaller than an electron. As hard as it is to imagine, the universe isn't growing to fill up some "void" because there is no void. There is nothing else outside of our universe. One ...
One of the things that always bugs me is when people say things like "the truth is somewhere in the middle" between two parties. I hear that kind of moral equivalence argument all the time. But where the heck does it come from because while technically true, in spirit it is not. In my experience, when two parties disagree about some issue and have different versions of events, odds are that one of the parties accountings of events will be predominantly true and the other party's predomi...
One of the ongoing issues people who want to discuss the nature of Islam or other cultures is that inevitably, someone will come on and accuse everyone else of being "racists". The goal of calling people racists is always the same -- to prevent a given topic from being discussed. I am not a racist. But I don't really care if people think I am. If someone wants to think I'm some sort of bigot because I'm not a fan of Islam then I'm perfectly okay with that. The reason being, I only...
Being the only child of a single parent with no extended family nearby gave me some pretty warped views on a lot of things. One of those things was the concept of love. Since the only relationship I had growing up was my mom, I came to believe that love was a finite thing. I.e. If I felt close to others, I would feel less-close to my mom. Of course, that went out the window the minute I fell in love. My first true love was a girl I met at the end of high school. We were togethe...
When I get into a political debate with friends or family that are liberal in their political views, at some point one of them will say "Well yea, you're conservative because you're one of the ones benefiting most from Bush's tax cuts." I'm 33. So for most of my life I wasn't well off. Yet for as long as I've even contemplated what the role of government should be in our lives as well as what people should do for themselves versus what the "community" should do for them I've had conservative ...
How do you define success? Different people define it different ways of course. But most of the time, people in conversation qualify the term success. They say things like "He is very successful in business" or "She has a successful marriage". So what does success mean in the generic sense? What does it mean when someone says John is successful? Here's my definition: A successful person is one who is able to achieve a level of material and emotional comfort in which their ...
Predictably, when someone talks about anti-Americanism the far left will begin distorting it to sound like that if you criticize your country then you are "UnAmerican". Pretty soon, the original point is turned into a charactiture of itself and the original author's points are ridiculed into oblivion. Criticizing the policies of your country does not make you unpatriotic. Not agreeing with the US President doesn't make you anti-American. The intellectually lazy may find it appeali...