Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 227
August 17, 2015
Now sexual orientation is seen as “fluid”
Now that gays have won the right to marry, the tune is changing. Instead of the view that homosexuality is a fixed, permanent, non-alterable state, the word now, including among gays, is that sexual preference is “fluid” and exists along a continuum. Kinsey’s scale, ranking people somewhere along the continuum of exclusively heterosexual (zero) to [Read More...]
What abortion does to us
Charles Krauthammer raises a striking point in his discussion of the Planned Parenthood videos: Abortion critics have long warned that the problem is not only the obvious — what abortion does to the fetus — but also what it does to us. It’s the same kind of desensitization that has occurred in the Netherlands with [Read More...]
August 14, 2015
Vocation and dissidence
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of [Read More...]
Thought experiments with Trump and Bernie
Donald Trump is leading big in New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina. If he wins those early primaries, what’s to stop him? Meanwhile, the Democrats’ outlier, avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, has passed Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls and is attracting huge crowds wherever he goes, unlike the former First Lady. The unfair stereotypes [Read More...]
Fighting in Armor
The estimable David Mills takes a break from writing about Planned Parenthood, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and other major issues to discuss something just because it’s cool: What it was like for knights to fight in armor. I’d always thought that the soldiers in armor were like human tanks, clumping slowly around and taking wide [Read More...]
August 13, 2015
The Bread of Life
Pastor Douthwaite’s sermon last Sunday was based on the reading from John 6, in which Jesus continues his discourse about how He is the Bread of Life. I was struck by the way the sermon showed how Jesus is undoing the Fall and restoring us to the Garden: an act of eating makes us lose [Read More...]
More Planned Parenthood incrimination
A new video from the Center for Medical Progress, part of a documentary the group is making, features a biotech technician who tells of the aggressive approach used by Planned Parenthood in acquiring fetal organs to sell. This included pressuring mothers to sign over the body of their child or even taking the body without [Read More...]
Could Google steal the election?
Research shows that whether favorable or unfavorable articles show up on search engines–and the order of those articles–influences the way people vote. So, conceivably, Google–or, rather, the search algorithm that Google uses–could determine the election. So warns Wired Magazine. From Adam Rogers, Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency | WIRED: Imagine an election—a close [Read More...]
August 12, 2015
Kierkegaard on Luther
We keep hearing that today’s church needs to change; that is to say, it needs reformation. What will it take to reform the church? The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, credited or blamed for inventing existentialism, took up this same question. First of all, he said, we need a reformer. And the reformer needs to be [Read More...]
Why there is heroin in the heartland
Heroin used to be a plague in the big cities, but today heroin addiction is rampant in the small towns of America’s heartland. Rod Dreher reviews what sounds like an important book, Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. It is a tale of a peaceful network of illegal immigrants, a new [Read More...]
