Imagine Forever: a no-heaven reason to be good

Once upon a time, not so long ago, and not very far away, a farmer imagined having a cow that he could feed and milk forever. A cow like that, he reckoned, would enable both ...

[Arabic] Thou Shall Not Kill…Whom?

يعتقد أغلب المسيحيين واليهود أن الكتاب المقدس ينهاهم عن قتل الناس، أما الصهاينة فهم يدركون أن وصية “لا تقتل” لا تشمل كل الناس، وإنما هي أمر إلهي للمؤمنين بألا يقتلوا بعضهم فقط. إن هذا التفسير ...

Love Thy Neighbor : The Evolution of In-Group Morality

The world’s major religions espouse a moral code that includes injunctions against murder, theft, and lying – or so conventional 19th- and 20th-century Western wisdom would have it. Evidence put forth here argues that this convention is a conceit which does not apply to the West’s own religious foundations.

Passover: Read Thoughtfully

Long before The Holocaust, Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) urged readers to consider the Passover story’s backstory – the enslavement of Egyptians that preceded the enslavement of Jews. He used the word ‘corner’ in the ...

Israel’s Racism: The Nation-State Law

A Music Video on Israel’s Racism : its Nation-State Law. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s George Washington, could not have known in 1948 that in 2018 Benjamin Netanyahu would steer a 180-degree turn away from Ben-Gurion’s promise ...

Thou Shalt Not Kill…Whom?

This video addresses the apparent contradiction between commandments to love our neighbors and commandments to kill our neighbors in the Bible. Lead Image Courtesy: The mass grave found at Lützen. NICKLISCH ET AL./PLOS ONE

Why Do So Many Muslims Act Like Barbarians?

Barbarism is not in the Koran. We, the sophisticated barbarians, have driven them to barbarity. Making Palestinians pay for what Germans did to Jews during World War II has been a preoccupation of Judeo-Christian nations ...

On Burning People Alive

When we revile ISIS, we should remember the magnitude of our own massive premeditated murders and our own original sins. American pilots who dropped napalm on Vietnamese and Cambodian villages did not target noncombatants, but ...