Someone pointed me to a recent Nightline segment on “child witches” in Congo: Child Witches: Accused in the Name of Jesus. It describes and shows how a number of children are being accused of being witches and publicly abused and tortured during religious sermons. Priests extort money out of parents to supposedly exorcise demons out of their little kids. It’s pretty horrible and difficult to watch. ABC reporter tells us that this is a widespread phenomenon in Congo.
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It looks like there is still some interest in some of my old writings. Well, at least people seem to be finding them on google and attempting to look at them on this blog. So I will be re-publishing some of the old posts (using their original date of publishing) as I go through them.
I was looking through my old blog posts and I realized that I started blogging in 2004. It’s been a while. To be fair I haven’t posted a lot and for the last couple of years I hardly posted at all. When I started I had a couple of goals in mind. I wanted to practice my writing skills in English and I wanted to talk about freethought and atheism. Those were the topics on my mind at the time and I was looking for a way to express my thoughts, doubts and to perhaps establish a dialog with others who might be interested in those subjects. It was a very interesting experiment and I enjoyed writing and discussing ideas with others. Read more…
While I am working on figuring out how to title the blog I should mention a couple of passing holidays.
First of all, yesterday was a day celebrated in Russia as Victory Day. On May 9th 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered in WWII. With possibly as many as 20 millions who perished just on the Russian side in this war, every family in Russia has lost someone. This day, the day of official end of war is possibly the most celebrated holiday in Former Soviet Union. They call it Victory Day, but are there victories in wars?
Today is Mother’s Day in United States. Not everyone knows, however, that this holiday, like many others, was not conceived simply as feel-good day where you supposed to consume more goods, candy and burgers. In fact, this day was more about peace, end of wars and feminism than we are let to believe. Read more…
I moved to a different (supposedly green) hosting company, changed the hosting platform from Windblows to Linux, I abandoned my self-baked blog software in favor of open sourced WordPress and I am in the process of trying to figure out what to call the new blog and what it should look like and what I should write about. Too many questions. Not enough answers.
It’s been two years since I’ve read Sam Harris’ book “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.” At the time, I dismissed his book as uninteresting and disappointing. However, Harris became more and more prominent in secular community, virtually reaching a status of de facto spokesperson for the non-believers everywhere. He wrote a second book since then and he becomes increasingly more vocal on the topics of secularism, reason and foreign policy (of all things). While I agree with his aims and rhetoric that claim to promote a secular worldview, I find that when it comes to politics and history his evidence is lacking, reasoning unsound and some of his views are disturbing.
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Many people believe that the Bible is the word of god, it is literally true, it has no contradictions, no errors, and no falsehoods. They think that it is the source of our morality. They maintain that even though it was written by men it was inspired by god and therefore it is truth, only truth and nothing but the truth.
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