All Thoughts Being Equal

So you might remember my earlier post contra to Dr. Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't. In that post, I raised some objections to Prothero's claim that "religion matters," including that it's a case of special pleading, and that a lot of the time, religion is somewhat incidental to the salient points of history. Well, on 15 November I attended a lecture here at Western by Dr. Prothero, mostly about his newest book, God Is Not One . In that book, he examines the world's eight greatest religions—in mostly-descending order, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Confucianism, Judaism, and Taoism—and especially their differences. In his lecture he explained that, far from being "eight roads up the same mountain" as some people claim, there are actually different mountains entirely. They ask and attempt to answer different "Big Questions." For example, Christianity asks "ho...

So I gave a rather glowing review of True Grit in my last post , and in fact I plan to see it for a third time in theaters up here in Bellingham. Needless to say, I liked that movie. So why, on my second viewing, did I choose to see that over a second shot at TRON: Legacy (and even when the latter was offered in 3-D)?

Oh, it's been so long. As it turns out, summer wasn't actually the optimal time to keep updating this space with musings and especially links to things (although I managed to plurk a few). Now I feel like there's a very good reason for me to keep up, namely, my almost certain lack of literature classes this quarter. So while it's not November (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month) I will be jonesing to write creatively and think with the right side of my brain. But to quickly catch up on an amazing development: Astronomers have found a planet in the 'Goldilocks' zone of its parent star . What's more, this planet is somewhere between 3.1 and 4.3 times the mass of Earth, meaning that it's probably of a rocky composition and the absolute most Earth-like planet discovered so far... other than Earth, naturally. The 'Goldilocks' zone, by the way, is an area around a star at which water will exist as a liquid, and is therefore assumed to have the best ...