Something I was thinking about...

Organized religion is on its way out, or so proclaim headlines on newspapers and blogs across America.  Type 'organized religion' into Google and it will suggest completing the phrase with "is the root of all evil."  It seems that all the hip people in politics, news, science, and philosophy are down on organized religion.  It's okay to have your beliefs, they say, but churches are just about power and oppression.  Even the religious try to down play it with statements like, "'I go to church, but I don't really belong to a church."  Everyone is aware that it is just plain unpopular to be part of organized religion. The big argument is that society has advanced past the need of archaic churches.  Science teaches us the secrets of nature, schools educate our children, and government takes care of the poor and enforces law.  Who needs organized religion? I recently left my house in New Mexico and bought a home in Indiana.  As I was driving acros...

I kept seeing "When will you realize you are on the wrong side of history" posts on Facebook, and this comparison leapt into my mind.  Considering it was Democrats that led the fight against freeing slaves and giving Blacks civil rights, and now it is Democrats that lead the fight to promote abortion, when will the Democratic Party realize that they are on the wrong side of history?

Christians believe the marriage is primarily a religious institution, and that government should not meddle with it.  The Family Research Council , a prominent Christian organization, defines marriage this way: Marriage is a covenant, a sacred bond between a man and a woman instituted by and publicly entered into before God and...involves at least the following five vital principles: permanence, sacredness, intimacy, mutuality, and exclusiveness.  Christians claim that marriage is about a man and woman committing to each other, being true to each other, and raising children together, and all of this is part of their commitment to God. Because of this belief, Christians are upset, claiming that Gay Marriage Supporters are destroying the meaning of marriage. I believe, however, that Christians have done more to destroy the meaning of marriage than gays or any other group ever will. Here's how they have worked to destroy their own s...

Found some information collected by the U.N. on gun ownership rates and murder rates among nations.  I decided to make a scatter plot of the data and do a linear regression to see how strong the relationship was between the number of guns and the number of murders in nations around the world.  Here is the graph: The linear regression resulted in a negative slope, which would indicate that as gun ownership goes up, murders go down.  However, before you pro-gun pundits get too excited, the R-Squared value of the relationship was .01.  The R-squared is a value that ranges from 0 - 1, with 1 indicating a perfect correlation, and 0 indicating no relationship.  A value of .01 essentially means there is no relationship between the number of guns in a country and the murder rate in that country.

We always hear from the media that the United States leads in its murder rate among developed nations.  In fact, I was recently reading a magazine while waiting for an appointment (I didn't think to pay attention to which magazine or issue, so I'm sorry I can't properly cite it) and it said that the United Sates is the most heavily armed and violent nation in the world.  It is a fact that we are the most heavily armed, but most violent?  Certainly not when compared with everyone else in the world, but are we even the most violent when compared to developed nations? I was reading a paper written by Dr. Don Kates , who was a professor at Stanford when he wrote the paper, and it discussed the difference in how murder rates are kept between nations, and how culture affects how and who we kill.  For instance, he said that in Japan it is common to have "family suicides," which is when a father kills his wife and children, and then kills himself.  All of those death...

Are Republicans stupid?  Their response to this gun control issue illustrates why they are suffering as a party.  Democrats want to save lives.  How can you fight that and not see yourself as the bad guy?  11,078 people were murdered with guns in 2011, and 606 people were killed by the accidental discharge of firearms, which means there were 11,684 innocent people killed by firearms in 2011.   That's a lot of lives.  That's what prompted Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, to say,  "This is a scourge on society. At what point do you say, `No more innocent loss of life."' Rahm Emanuel, Mayor of Chicago, stated his concern when he wrote,  "This crisis is real — and every day it is tearing apart families and neighborhoods throughout America...common-sense reforms are a first step toward ensuring a safer future for our country — a future worthy of the memory of those lost to senseless gun violence everyday." Republicans need to join th...