An Atheist Manifesto. Update: (2/08/2006 1:35 p.m. EST) Read Sam Harris’ additional arguments about The Reality of Islam Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself. Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied eastern and western religions, won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction for The End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of all faiths by moderates, has been and continues to be the greatest threat to world peace and a sustained assault on reason. An Atheist Manifesto Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl.
Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. No. George Carlin on God. Politics. Feminism.
News. Change.org. Human Rights. Women's Rights. Gay Rights. Environment. Sustainable Food. Education. 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. On paper and in person his visage exudes optimism, righteous ambition, and immeasurable humility. Which is why, as we searched for an iconic figure to represent this, our second annual list of visionaries, his name immediately jumped to mind. That’s because the visionaries we were drawn to made the cut not for being revolutionary inventors, innovative environmentalists, vociferous outcasts, or intrepid reformers—although you’ll find all of these enviable character types on the following pages—but for the unwavering, inexhaustible sense of purpose they bring to their work.
Labors of peace, love, and justice are rarely recognized by our celebrity-obsessed media, and by extension most of us. Quiet resolve does not fill tents at the circus. Principle doesn’t make for a sexy photo. Selflessness, unless it is exhibited by heroes in the heat of a crisis, is often presented as weakness. This section is a tribute to that resolve. Tiny a.k.a. Chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website. Clarissa's Blog. Vision of Humanity. Make/shift. Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters | Journal of the mental environment. Best of the Blogs. Eat The State! Global Issues : social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect us all.
Amnesty International | Working to Protect Human Rights. Worldchanging: Bright Green. California | Simple Steps. A Low Impact Woodland Home. American Psychosis. The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal.
Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class. The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. Three Myths About World Hunger. Myth one: OVERPOPULATION Actually there is plenty of food in the world. Production of cereals (wheat, rice, millet etc) last year reached 1799.2 million tons, enough to offer everyone in the world well over the recommended minimum of 2.500 calories per adult per day.
And that is before you’ve even begun to count the calories in vegetables, nuts, pulses, root crops and grass-fed (as opposed to grain-fed) meat. So what’s the problem? The problem is the distribution of that food, both within countries and between rich and poor worlds. People like us in the developed nations eat much more than we need. Americans represent only six per cent of the world’s population, yet they consume 35 per cent of the world’s resources - the same as the entire developing world. But Western countries have enough land to support their populations - Third World countries don’t. Western countries have enough money to support their populations. But doesn’t Africa have the world’s fastest population growth? Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers. For hundreds of thousands of years, up until the time when agriculture was invented (a mere 10,000 years ago), we were all hunter-gatherers. Our human instincts, including all of the instinctive means by which we learn, came about in the context of that way of life.
And so it is natural that in this series on children's instinctive ways of educating themselves I should ask: In the last half of the 20th century, anthropologists located and observed many groups of people—in remote parts Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and elsewhere—who had maintained a hunting-and-gathering life, almost unaffected by modern ways. Although each group studied had its own language and other cultural traditions, the various groups were found to be similar in many basic ways, which allows us to speak of "the hunter-gatherer way of life" in the singular. What I learned from my reading and our questionnaire was startling for its consistency from culture. . • "[! How Come Other Folks All Look Alike?
About 20 years ago I was having dinner at a restaurant in Jakarta, Indonesia with a group of psychologists from various countries. Only two of us were men, and we were both white Americans. The other man was several inches taller than I, significantly heavier, and had lighter colored hair--though we both wore glasses and had short beards. Despite the (to me) obvious contrast in our appearance, the waiter kept getting our orders mixed up; and it became evident that he couldn't tell the difference between us. The waiter's difficulty represents a fairly general perceptual phenomenon.
Visual perception begins developing in infancy. One of the byproducts of organizing marriage , neighborhoods, and other social categories along color lines is the development of a kind of perceptual provinciality within each group. Psychologists have shown that there are many problems with eyewitness testimony. Why is this so? Friend me on.