Religion
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Fifty years ago I enjoyed arguing with people of religion about the existence of god, but nowadays I find it to be a singularly unprofitable exercise. The believers and the atheists are so entrenched in their positions hat no one ever convinces anyone of anything. Moreover, the faithful are so damned touchy that it's no…
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Unaware that I was choosing a splashy and controversial best-seller, I selected from the library's new book shelf something called Unorthodox (New York, 2012), by one Deborah Feldman, and a sadder, more dispiriting book I have rarely read. Ms. Feldman had the misfortune to be raised in the Satmar branch of the Hasidic movement – a…
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Megachurch Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, an enthusiast for Governor Rick Perry (the Texax governor for people who think that George Bush was way too bookish) has labelled Mitt Romney's church (Latter-Day Saints) a "cult." Jeffress made the charge while addressing a convention of right-wing "value voters." (The particular value which Jefress himself exemplifies is "smugness.") According to Jeffress, Perry's…
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I was informed that the granddaughter had become interested in Egyptian mythology, so I decided to buy her a book on the topic. It's hard to know what to put in the hands of a young lady whose reading level is astonishing but who is just eight years old. I visited the "young adult" quarters…
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It's an ancient commonplace — sleep is the image of death. In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end. "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare: "sleep thou ape of death," "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc. My own personal sleep is so wracked…
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We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, unlamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We…
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Ordinarily, I'm skeptical when supernatural images magically appear on everyday objects. To me, such manifestations are perfectly explicable run-of-the-mill instances of pareidolia. [Pareidolia: the tendency, inherent in the human brain, to discover patterns (e.g. faces) in random markings.] No matter how intently I peer and squint, I simply cannot find the blessed virgin and her…
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In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia. Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted. "All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of…
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I stopped at one of those highway gas-station convenience stores a few weeks ago, searching for some invigorating M&Ms. I couldn't find them, but I said to myself, this is America and I'm an American, and if there's one thing I know it's that there are going to be M&Ms somewhere in this quickstop. I poked around…