Salt City Sinner

  The very stupidest piece of common wisdom regarding religion is a hard pick to make. There are many worthy contenders. For my money, “there are no atheists in foxholes” may be the winner. 

Illustration by Miguel Ángel posted on 12/16/2018 by the Salt City Sinner The Religious Education Series is has proved to be an interesting and welcome addition to life in Salt Lake City. Since 2017, Executive Director Megan Kennedy has presented a series of free public lectures on topics including religion, anthropology, and archaeology. On Saturday, RES (in conjunction with the Godless Rebelution Podcast , which sounds like a lot of fun based on the name) presented the seventh lecture in the series, “Delusions of the Gods: The Colonial Racism of Ancie1nt Aliens, Mormon Anthropology, & Other Pseudohistory.” Recordings of all of the RES lectures can be found here for free, which is mighty generous of them. Now, I was not in need of a debunking on this subject. I absolutely did not subscribe to the “ancient aliens” theory going in, and have long considered it to be both nonsense and not a particularly rich vein of nonsense at that (although I have a lingerin...

posted on 5/11/2015 by the Salt City Sinner One year that I attended college in Arkansas, my girlfriend at the time and I used to hang out in Little Rock with friends of hers, including one friend we'll call “Rob.” Rob was ex-military, and politically on the conservative side, so needless to say he and I spent a good deal of time arguing about politics. We also spent a a not-insignificant amount of time arguing about religion, because Rob was definitely a God person, whereas I, since the last time I attended mass as a tween, have decidedly not been a God person. Our political arguments were often heated but there was a certain amount of mutual respect. When Rob talked about Jesus, on the other hand,his lips would curl into a gloating little smile and his voice would take on a condescending timbre as he said, for the hundredth or three hundredth time, “you'd understand if you'd ever been in the military or seen combat. There are no atheists in foxholes.” This wou...

posted on 5/13/2013 by the Salt City Sinner "Wh-wh-why can't I force people to pray how I want?!"   The advent of video sharing online has led to many amazing things, from the humble   Arnold mash-up  to the lofty grumpy cat   smile video . It has also led many organizations – both those I loathe and those I love – to apparently scrap their marketing departments entirely and wallow in the gutter of “viral” videos. This is unfortunate. Exhibit A: Anonymous. This crafty hacker anarcho-collective is savvy and fun-loving enough to   light up  the Westboro Baptist Church’s web presence like the world’s most obscene and hilarious Christmas tree. Happy face! Presented with the opportunity to make a video, however, their efforts quickly devolve into the standard puddle of internet   horribleness : the dramatic music, the silly logos, et cetera et cetera. Sad face! If a web video call-to-arms induces chagrin when it comes from a source I quasi...

Andrew Sullivan's blog pointed me to a post , a very good post, by Sam Harris. Harris is best known as a prominent member of the so-called "New Atheists," who I guess are like the Justice League of America to the old atheists' golden age Justice Society. Like Harris, and, in fact, like many nonreligious people I know, I practice meditation - the exact type of meditation that Harris recommends, in fact: [Despite its roots in Buddhism], this method of introspection can be brought within any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. The same cannot be said for most other forms of “spiritual” instruction. The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is generally referred to as “mindfulness” (the Pali word is sati ), and there is a quickly growing literature on its psychological benefits. Mindfulness is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and nondiscursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of...