Discovered him again. I’ve always known about the man, the master theoretical physicist calculator who worked with Hans Bethe, an even more profound mathematical theorist of modern physics. But last night when I couldn’t sleep — yet again — I decided to read Dyson’s article in The New York Review of Books on [...]

I’m basically an atheist who wishes the world were magical. In fact, many times I feel it is magical, that the world is just amazing, and that it is amazing there’s anything here at all, and that what’s here must be precious and has to be sacred. And then I come back to [...]

Here’s Kate Braestrup, the only combination Game Warden and UU minister that I know of, and to boot she’s from the Great State of Maine! Listen to her talk about her work and about God:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dXHbhGLYJ8

A totally inspiring lady. Here’s her book: Here If You Need Me: A True Story.
For [...]

How about that new time religion?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_24X8YmNldk

Here’s Charles Pierce again, the last paragraph of his Friday piece in Altercation:
For those of us of the Papist persuasion, Good Friday services always came as two hours of existential dread. Purple swatches all over the sanctuary. Gloomy hymns. Latin intoned with an extra-special kind of lugubrious Lugosiness. More to the point of the past [...]

Perhaps I should mention the books I’m in the process of reading or have read recently. I just finished The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton, and before that the Irish novel The Gathering by Anne Enright which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Now I’m trying to simultaneously read The Private Life [...]

First, where it’s at: it’s snowing today. We are supposed to be getting about a foot of snow before it’s over sometime tomorrow. I had just finished on Saturday cutting a path in our brushy undergrowth below the house to the paths in the woods. Now I’ll be able to snowshoe there [...]

Antony Flew is a famous atheistic philosopher, well, was a famous atheistic philosopher. It seems late in his life he’s flown away from atheism: Flew flew? Who knew?
Here’s a head shot of him from his wiki:

Well, maybe just edged away, not really flown? [...]

Richard (Rev. Richard Beal, UU minister) had a great service at church today. He read a number of fine poems written by veterans of various wars. But the one poem that really got to me was done as a responsive reading. This was the powerful poem by Stephen Spender, The Truly Great. [...]

Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries
It’s too dangerous to have religion in prison!! The prisoners might become Islamic radicals and blow the place up, let alone what might happen when they get out! Perhaps all prisoners should be in gitmo for our protection?
Of course this ruling occurred during the Bush [...]