Judge: Parents can't teach pagan beliefs

Judge: Parents can't teach pagan beliefs

Oh, religous freedom is so passe.

Golden Pinecone

Freedom of Religion... as long as you are Judeo-Christian

Witchcraft Not Welcome

Elected officials don't have the right to determine which religions are legitimate and which are not. The only reason that having these "invocations" are consititutional is because they don't exclude specific religions. When they do, that's unconstitutional. It violates the clause saying "no law respecting an establishment of religion". This establishes Judeo-Christianity.

Media bias in the 21st century: Are we destinied for disaster?

It seems today that the media is more biased than before, and becoming more divided as we speak. For instance, I have been hearing off and on reports from various news sources that I would probably consider to have a left/liberal/whatver bent that Saddam Hussein was not captured by American troops, that he was captured by Kurds and then the "capture" that we saw on the news was staged. But no conservative-biased news source reports the possibility, and the few sources I consider fairly unbiased may have said it's a possibility, but have not commited either way. What am I supposed to believe? I can't make a decision based on which report is less unbiased, because all the possible sources for the decision are biased. So I'm likely to make a decision based upon which news source I agree with more.

Does anyone else think that's a bad idea? The current situation, of bias becoming more acceptable in news media, of opinion and reporting combining in media such as blogs, of the greater ability for people to select news from different sources, seems destinied for one thing: the division of the political spectrum. People from one side of the spectrum will hear different things than people on the other side, have different news stories, believe different things. Hoaxes like the one about the taxpayers being charged to pay the Clinton's mortgage or the one about the "Coalition for Traditional Values" encouraging George Bush to keep his wife on shorter leash will become easier to propagate, as the people who see them will be those more likely to believe them, and less likely to believe those who disprove them.

Is a world where one person reads the news and sees "Four gays bashed to death by conservative group" while another reads another newspaper and sees "Church meeting attacked by gay group", and neither story is true, the future? Let's hope not.

Hostages in Iraq

There's all these hostages in Iraq who keep getting killed. Now, I understand that it's a bad idea to negotiate with terrorists, but why don't they send in the Marines? or the SWAT teams? or whatever? That is what they are there for, isn't it? Or are they just there to protect the oil drills?