ISIS and U.S. Weaponry: At Home and Abroad

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When someone commits mass murder in the United States and is tied, however significantly, to a foreign terrorist group, there remains a section of the U.S. population willing to recognize and point out that no ideology, fit of hatred, or mental derangement can do the same damage without high-tech weaponry that it does with it. Why does this understanding vanish into the ether of ignorance and apathy at the water’s edge?

ISIS videos display U.S. guns, U.S. Humvees, U.S. weaponry of all sorts. read more

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Talking About Forgiveness

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By David Swanson

An atheist’s sermon on Luke 7: 36-50 delivered at Saint Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, Minn., on June 12, 2016.

Forgiveness is a universal need, among those of us who are not religious and among believers in every religion on earth. We must forgive each other our differences, and we must forgive much more difficult occurrences.

Some things we can forgive easily — by which, of course, I mean eliminating resentment from our hearts, not granting an eternal reward. If someone read more

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"Modern Warfare Destroys Your Brain" in More Ways Than One

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The most likely way to die in a U.S. war, by far, is to live in the country that the United States is attacking. But the most likely way in which a U.S. participant in a war will die is by suicide.

There are a couple of widely observed top causes of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops returning from recent wars deeply disturbed in their minds. One is having been near an explosion. Another, which has been around longer than explosions have, is having killed, having nearly died, having seen blood read more

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"Flag Day Has Been Canceled!"

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If that headline sounds a bit like “God Is Dead” to you, you just might be from the United States. Only what the people who live in this one country of the American hemisphere call “an American” carries that variety of flag passion. If, on the other hand, you find watching paint dry more engaging than the suspense of waiting for the next Flag Day, you just might be a candidate for citizen of the world.

In fact, I think Flag Day read more

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Beauty Contestants Now for World War, not World Peace

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Even within what Dr. King called the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, there used to be one constituency you could count on to speak up for world peace: beauty contestants.

No more. And the switch has produced no scandal. Last year, when Miss Italy said she wished she could live during World War II, survivors of that worst ever horror that humanity has inflicted on itself, and other people of normal intelligence in Italy, were scandalized.

But when a soon-to-be Miss USA recently praised read more

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