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September 28th 2010

Atheists Outdo Believers in Survey on Religion

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There are a few gems in this article. The first of which is from the president of American Atheists and is not very nice…

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Even if you happen to be right, it doesn’t preclude you from being a dick.

Something funny to me is the section where they point out the basic shit each religion is supposed to know and how many respondents from that particular religion got the answer wrong. At first I laughed at the fact that 53% of Protestants didn’t know who Martin Luther was (HELLO!), but then it hit home when it said that 43% of Catholics did not know that the church teaches that communion is not symbolic but really the body and blood. Ouch.

Still, a very interesting survey and apparently the first one of its kind in the U.S., so we have no idea if we are more or less intelligent with regard to religion now than in the past.

Posted at 11:09am and tagged with: religion, survey, nytimes, atheist, yes they really do believe thats blood they are drinking,.

October 15th 2009

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Op-Ed Contributor - Wall Street Smarts - NYTimes.com

A pretty interesting theory on how an influx of exceedingly intelligent people screwed Wall St.

Posted at 6:00am and tagged with: nytimes, op-ed, wall street,.

“
When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.
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September 5th 2009

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Google will help you find ways to break bad habits, potentially stop wearing a habit, and kick that crippling Facebook addition.

I refuse to believe that quitting Facebook is a more common search query than quitting smoking or the church. What the hell do I know?

This search was done at the suggestion of the NYTimes.

Posted at 6:00am and tagged with: habit, nytimes, google,.

Google will help you find ways to break bad habits, potentially stop wearing a habit, and kick that crippling Facebook addition. I refuse to believe that quitting Facebook is a more common search query than quitting smoking or the church. What the hell do I know? This search was done at the suggestion of the NYTimes.

August 17th 2009

How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection

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Great primer for your parents. I’d love to see an NYTimes front page photo with a big FAIL on it. I’d get a Kindle and subscribe to it just for that.

Posted at 9:38pm and tagged with: FAIL, nytimes,.

August 16th 2009

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A Conversation With Paul Root Wolpe

Morbid question and answer of the day.

Cool interview though.

Posted at 8:53pm and tagged with: nasa, paul root wolpe, nytimes, space, ethics,.

“
Q. WHAT WAS THE MOST UNUSUAL QUESTION NASA HAS POSED TO YOU? A. It wasn’t an ethical question, it was a religious one. My father, the late Gerald Wolpe, was a rabbi, as are two of my brothers. There had been an Israeli on the crew of the Columbia shuttle. After it broke up, NASA wanted to know about Jewish religious standards in regard to gathering and interring remains. NASA teams were recovering pieces of bodies on the ground in Texas and Louisiana, much of it unidentifiable. And NASA wanted to know if the Israeli government would want only Ilan Ramon’s flesh returned to it because, if so, NASA would have to do genotyping of every piece of tissue. That would take months. I told them there were countervailing values. In Judaism you bury the body as soon as possible. I didn’t think the Israelis would want to have months and months pass. I’ve since heard that a lot of the tissue buried in the various graves of these astronauts was unidentified. There’s something touching that some of what is buried in each of their resting places is tissue from all of them.
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