Intolerance

Update: Amazingly, Yusor Abu-Salha recorded some audio for the StoryCorps project last spring, a conversation with her third grade teacher, and NPR broadcast it. It's pretty heartbreaking.

Yusor Abu-Salha at her wedding, dancing with her father, via news.com.au.

Is it inappropriate for me to say, as a person who does not believe in the existence of a God, that I unreservedly condemn the murders in Chapel Hill of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha, apparently by a person who calls himself an atheist? To say that such an act is incompatible with the principles of nonbelief as I understand them (probably more correctly classified as secular humanism), according to which our lives, from birth to death, are the closest thing we have to something sacred, and which call for

Build a better secularist and the world will beat a--Wait, they build themselves? Really?

There are tons of secular communities; you just can't tell because they let everybody in. Sydney Cityscape by Dion Archibald, 2006.

David Brooks writes (Building Better Secularists, New York Times, February 3 2015):

In recent years, the number of unchurched, unbelieving, or unaffiliated infidels appears to have been increasing quite rapidly, in 2012 up to 20% from 15% in 2007 among U.S. adults and 32% among the 18-to-29 group, and their increasingly assertive spokespersons have been going around making the paradoxical claim that there could be something positive in all this startling negativity and that faithlessness might be regarded as a kind of faith.

I'm not sure whether I've met anybody like this—I mean, you wouldn't expect me to ask, I'm only a journalist, for Pete's sake—but I've been learning about them from the fluid and pleasurable prose of Phil Zuckerman (I haven't used the word "fluid" in months—nice to see you, old pal!), a sociology professor, in his new book "Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions", which wandered into my Kindle in January.*

Cheap shots and chasers 2/17

Said the pediatrician: I'm afraid he's going to be severely conservative, Mrs. Romney—but with suitable care and a loving home environment there's no reason he shouldn't have a fulfilling life...

 Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields Special Nerd Handshake

Now that Michelle Bachmann's not running for president any more, she's back to her old job of making the other Congresspersons look sane by comparison. From Huffington Post:

The House and Senate both approved a payroll tax cut bill on Friday that would extend unemployment benefits through 2012.

But according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the extension is hardly the bill's crowning achievement.

"They're extending unemployment, too, but the big thing that we get is no longer can a welfare recipient walk into a strip club and get money out of an ATM machine to pay for a lap dance," she told conservative radio host Mark Levin on Thursday night. "Now, I'm not making this up. That's the big thing that we get out of this bill."

And remember these?

At a Santorum rally in Tacoma, Paul Constant (h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice) reports a little crowd taunting a lone freedom-from-religion protester,

pinching their noses and miming as though they were swatting away flies. "I can't stand the smell of this guy," one fly-swatter said, adding, "it's like he's got garbage in his pockets." An old woman told the nose-pinchers, as she squeezed past the whole scene, "Watch out for the maggots." Another woman clucked her tongue, and told her friends, "If you're an atheist, you'll just believe in anything."

Just shoot me.