We are fed ideas in small sound bites that are really just the conclusions of particular beliefs. We do not examine what underpins these sound bites. If the sound bites are presented by a source we are accustomed to accepting as true, there is a dang...
She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corn...
Every text is unique and, at the same time, it is the translation of another text. No text is entirely original because language itself, in its essence, is already a translation: firstly, of the non-verbal world and secondly, since every sign and eve...
Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how muc...
I was a young impressionable 13 year old hearing the pro-left and pro-right argument. So one day I would be convinced that one side was right. the other day I would be convinced the other side was right. And then I was getting confused. How can both ...
Laine had been very proud of herself last night. Nicholas had talked about ghosts and magic and woven a bit of a spell himself. He'd sounded so convincing, so logical, so sad, that she'd found herself wanting to believe him. But testing prods at his ...
Science and religion both make claims about the fundamental workings of the universe. Although these claims are not a priori incompatible (we could imagine being brought to religious belief through scientific investigation), I will argue that in prac...
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find...
One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that...
Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God.... On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded himself as an atheist only in his inability t...
Madeleine Albright has said that there is 'a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.' What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Ed...
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns in to universal, rather than religion-specific, values... it requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason. Now I may be opposed to abortion for r...
This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' ...
Later, in my adulthood, I will read the book again, even watch the movie, and understand that I wasn’t equipped, as a child, to make room for arguments that would undermine every single choice made for me, that would shatter the foundations of my v...
Brody: I just- I just want to tell you what we're planning so far... Meadows: What about the beaches, Chief? Brody: We're going to put on the extra- the extra summer deputies as quickly as possible, and then we're going to try and use, uh, shark-spot...
Milton Arbogast: Now, if this Marion Crane were here... you wouldn't be hiding her would you? Norman Bates: No. Milton Arbogast: Not even if she paid you? Norman Bates: No. Milton Arbogast: All right, then lets say for the sake of argument that she n...
I didn't write about my mother much in the third year after she died. I was still trying to get my argument straight: When her friends or our relatives wondered why I was still so hard on her, I could really lay out the case for what it had been like...
Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. ...
What a host of little incidents, all deep-buried in the past -- problems that had once been urgent, arguments that had once been keen, anecdotes that were funny only because one remembered the fun. Did any emotion really matter when the last trace of...
Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act...
That's when it happens. Maybe it was my argument. Maybe it was my scary zeal. Whatever the reason, as soon as Megan whistles, the crowd is on its feet. They're blowing bubbles. They're raising their lighters high. They're cheering through their fangs...
