words and music
You are currently browsing articles tagged values.
Over two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, and over one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003–2006 and 2007–2008.
And according to the Social Worker, not a single one of them can help it.
Tags: values
Moving of the earth brings fears and harms
Men reckon what it did and meant
They did in Donne’s time and in Voltaire’s and in Kleist’s (The Earthquake in Chile). Candide is a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Such events used to challenge people to make sense of them.
Am I right to think that apart from moral brutes (“God’s judgment!”) we don’t? We do what we can, of course: Chile had better building codes than Haiti, and more money to build, and these things saved lives.
We have an answer to Why? (platelets) but no control and scant capacity to predict. Perhaps we now accept something like the ancient belief in blind fortune.
Tags: Lisbon earthquake, values
Want to donate to Haiti, but worried about your money passing through the hands of (ugh) believers? The Richard Dawkins Foundation will care for your needs. A whole bunch of impeccably atheist organisations has agreed to collect money, then pass it on either to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) or to International Red Cross.
But why not donate direct to one of those two organisations? In the words of the website
When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.
You are also helping to promote aggressive bigotry. Assisting hypocritical opportunists. Oh and because neither Doctors without Borders or International Red Cross is a development agency you are making a default choice about effective help – Haiti’s needs will not go away any time soon.
But it’s your money.
Tags: Haiti, Richard Dawkins Foundation, values
Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.
All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father. Read the rest of this entry »
Easy to get down about religious dogmatists, especially the 7th century lot. (How exactly perverse to use fertiliser to make bombs.) So it’s consoling to come across an item like this in The Huffington Report.
“The central government should understand the need for green turtles as part of traditional ceremonies because it relates to our faith,” Sudiana said. “Prohibiting it will hurt Balinese people.”
Up to five turtles are needed for sacrifice at each of the 100 to 150 large ceremonies a year in Hindu temples around Bali, he said.
Turtles were traditionally decapitated. But since they became protected in 1999, ceremonies in many temples have changed with turtles being symbolically sacrificed through their release to the sea alive.
Go turtles.
Tags: values
As I write, It’s about 4.30 US Central Standard time on 9th November. It’s the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Google’s tricksy logo is still about the 40th anniversary of Sesame St. Cute, huh?
Tags: values
