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December 2006On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
September 2006Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you will always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H.L. Mencken
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.
By Bethany SaltmanSeptember 2006Still, there is one day in the year when I go plumb God-happy. It’s a made-up holiday pulled randomly from the calendar, as far away from the retail conspirators and their chocolate bunnies and sawed-off pine trees as I can get; a twenty-four-hour period of gratitude, humility, and atonement I call “God’s Day.”
By Poe BallantineSeptember 2006Unless I tell people about the voices, they don’t know. I’m not sure how this can be: that they don’t hear them, too. It’s suspicious, in fact. I want to crawl inside their heads and listen, see for myself where their thoughts come from.
By Carroll Ann SuscoJuly 2006One of the uncomfortable things about living with a person who suffers from Alzheimer’s is that it makes you confront your own character flaws.
By Jan ShoemakerJune 2006Fundamentalist Christians are leading a movement to teach “intelligent design” in our public schools, as an alternative to evolution.
By SparrowMay 2006April 2006Nowadays, the common wisdom is to celebrate diversity — as long as you don’t point out that people are different.
Colin Quinn
Ever since the divorce, my mother had been living life at a frantic pace. There were mornings when she hardly had time to butter her bread, let alone toast it.
By Jason SchosslerApril 2006October 2005If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
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