Jan 29th, 2008 Posted in rants | 4 comments »
…Today!
And yesterday!
Oh…wait for it…and tomorrow, too!
We have lived in this frigid freezer of a town for TEN YEARS now, and have not yet experienced cold to this degree (oh, LOL, what a super pun!)
It all started last Friday, when we woke up to this sight: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: cold, freezing, rants, weather, wind chill
Nov 9th, 2007 Posted in atheism, rants, religion | one comment »
If you haven’t, you can go ahead and read Can You Believe? Part One here.
So yesterday I addressed the missing link argument in Searching for the Missing “Pink” Link on Family Reformation. (As in my first post, as well, I’ll point out that all quotations of Pastor McDonald below are from the post linked here so I won’t link to them again.)
Now…let’s move on to this “pink” link of Pastor McDonald’s. He doesn’t specifically define the term, rather he cites examples of “the alleged poster women for an alternative career path” and “that ever-missing link” sought by “evangelical feminists”. By this I can only presume he means evangelical Christians who are also feminists, and not feminists who are evangelical about their feminism; these could be — and no doubt are — from all and no faiths.
I’m not going to argue with McDonald on the basis of his Biblical examples. You see, I’m an atheist, so I don’t see the Bible as the received word of god, but rather as a piece of literature (and one full of contradictions at that). I have read it – cover to cover, actually – but I don’t see it as a valid source of ethical, moral or other guidance. Therefore I cannot enter the argument on those grounds. Those who see the Bible differently may be swayed one way or the other by quotations of biblical verse, but to me, you might as well quote the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Niebelungenlied or John Lennon. Actually, I think more people should quote John Lennon. Now that’s something that would make the world a better place… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: atheism, education for girls, feminism, rants, religion
Nov 8th, 2007 Posted in atheism, huh?, rants, religion | 6 comments »
Every now and then I click on the links that WordPress features on their main page, and sometimes I find a gem of a blog that I bookmark, and sometimes I find something that shocks and amazes me.
In the shocks and amazes category, I clicked through to a blog called: Family Reformation (that should have been my first red flag; in the immortal words of Monty Python, “Run away! Run away!”) where there was a post entitled, intriguingly:
Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”
(read it here, if you dare, and note that all quotations of the author below derive from this link, so I will not link them individually.)
In Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”, blogging Pastor James McDonald takes aim at women seeking fulfillment outside the domestic sphere by comparing the arguments in favour of said expansion of women’s sphere by “egalitarians” (quotation marks his) to the evolutionary missing link – a species between apes & humans that McDonald clearly believes is a silly myth. I should point out here that taxonomically speaking, of course, we — Homo sapiens sapiens* — are already apes, as we belong to the family hominidae, or great apes, along with gorillas and chimpanzees.
*From here onwards, I’ll shorten Homo sapiens sapiens for simplicity’s sake to just H. sapiens: anyway, when you read tripe like this you question whether we deserve even the one sapiens moniker; wise indeed!
As a thinking (and reasonably educated) person, I couldn’t ignore his off-hand dismissal of evolution; as if it were a given that there was no missing link (there are many!), and so I’d like to take on Pastor McDonald first on these grounds, then (in my next post) on his real argument: that of woman’s “unique role as wife, mother, and keeper at homeāthe normative role for women…happily under the authority of her husband”. Join me, if you will: all that’s required is an open, questioning mind. I ask you simply to look at the evidence and make your own decision, unlike some, who would require you to believe in the – frankly – unbelievable. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: atheism, creationism, evolution, missing link, rants, religion