Careful Thought

Michael Yon posts a great piece about the soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 24th Infantry of the Stryker Brigade (known as Deuce Four) and their efforts to provide medical assistance to the truly needy in Iraq. This isn’t photo op stuff for the evening news; it’s real soldiers helping people to have a better life. (And I can guarantee you won’t see this on the evening news.) Read all of it here .

Welcome Here in the Bonny Glen , Michael Yon:Online Magazine and Normal Rockstar to our list of cool links! Three blogs with nothing in common but coolness.

Some more amazing shots from Mount St Augustine in Alaska.

According to a passel of British librarians , here are the thirty books all adults should read before they die. I think the list speaks to the sad state of our librarian friends across the sea. Other than the Bible (and maybe LoTR, Dickens and Steinbeck), I’m thinking the rest are all in the ‘nice to read’ category.

And how did Phillip Pullman’s swill get on the list? The Time Traveller’s Wife? Poisonwood? Within six months those will be in the $1.99 ‘last chance’ rack at Megabooks.

I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read. What would you add to a list of books that all adults should read before they die?

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D’urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

I would add the following:
Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis

Mollie at GetReligion has a great piece on the sad status of atheists today. Seems that nobody loves them.

Some people say this country is one White House Bible study away from a Christian theocracy, but President-elect Dwight Eisenhower may have summed up the religious sentiment of the nation best when he said, in 1952, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”A new University of Minnesota study, which has received precisely no coverage yet, found that people rank atheists below gays, lesbians, recent immigrants and Muslims in “sharing their vision of American society.” A press release from the University of Minnesota expounds :

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public . “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

[Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje of the San Antonio Express-News wrote a] piece, which came out a few days before the University of Minnesota study was released, [that] describes the difference between atheism and agnosticism and talks about the difficulties of being irreligious in a religious society:

The overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens profess some religious faith, although far fewer attend worship services on a regular basis. The public square has become increasingly dominated by religious (specifically, Christian) rhetoric, from the “values voters” of the 2004 presidential election to hot-button cultural issues that carry a religious edge - abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, intelligent design, the right to die.

The Minnesota study lead Penny Edgel also argues that

“Today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past - they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy, and in America, that core has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings. “Americans believe they share more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens, they share an understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.”

I can’t argue with that — though there are certainly whackos and hypocrites within the community of believers. Why hasn’t Brokeback Mountain been more of a financial success? It’s simple - people don’t want their values mocked. Why was there a war over Christmas, and now Easter ? For the same reasons. For the past forty years or so religion has been pushed from the schools, from our places of employment, from our government buildings.

Atheists just don’t get it and now people are beginning to fight back in the battle against faith and values.

It was interesting to note the differences in responses during the recent posts on “unschooling” ( here , here , and here ) between believers (who make up a substantial portion of the homeschooling crowd) and non-believers. Believers certainly made their points, sometimes quite strongly, but the non-believers/atheists tended be so bitterly hate-filled that we ended up moderating comments to keep the language at a PG-13 level.

It seems that believers treat atheists better than atheists treat believers.

Tags: atheism, faith

This Reuters piece is just too wrong for words.

BASTOY PRISON, Norway (Reuters) - The web site reads like an advertisement for a holiday home.”Is Bastoy the place for you?” it asks next to photographs of a sunset sparkling off the tranquil waters of the Oslo fjord and horses pulling sleighs over packed snow.

This wooded island could be — if you are a rapist, a murderer, a drug trafficker or have accepted a large bribe.

“We try to take a cross-section of the country’s prison population, not just the nice criminals,” said Oyvind Alnaes, governor of the minimum security prison on Bastoy Island about 46 miles south of the Norwegian capital.

Inmates have included Norway’s most notorious serial killer, Arnfinn Nesset, convicted of murdering 22 elderly people when he was manager of a nursing home in the 1970s. He was freed for good behavior after serving two-thirds of a 21-year sentence.

“A lot of people in Norway say that we treat them (the prisoners) too well because they should be punished. But this is the biggest mistake we have been making since the 1600s. Taking this line makes people bad,” Alnaes said.

“You have to believe people are born good.”

So punishing people for their crimes makes them bad? How did they get to prison in the first place if they weren’t, uh, bad? And, no, you don’t have to believe that people are born good. That’s the whole not-grasping-the-true-nature-of-man problem all over again.

Tags: Bastoy Prison, leniency

[Young-earthers, cover your eyes for this!] This is another stand-in-awe-of-the-Creator piece from the good folks at NASA and the Astronomy Picture of the Day . The Blogger-befuddled picture below doesn’t do it justice, so click on the picture or the APOD link to get a better view.

The Universe is expanding gradually now. But its initial expansion was almost impossibly rapid as it likely grew from quantum scale fluctuations in a trillionth of a second. In fact, this cosmological scenario, known as Inflation, is now reported to be further quantified by an analysis of three years of data from the WMAP spacecraft. [That's the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe to the uninitiated.]

WMAP’s instruments detect the cosmic microwave background radiation - the afterglow light from the early Universe. WMAP’s amazing success in exploring the first trillionth of a second and favoring specific inflationary scenarios lies in its ability to make unprecedented, precise measurements of the properties of the microwave background. The subtle properties are distilled from conditions in the early Universe and related to its first moments of existence.

Schematically, this diagram traces the 13.7 billion year (plus a trillionth of a second …) history of the Universe from the quantum scale to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and WMAP.

Tags: APOD, cosmic expansion, WMAP

Jared at Thinklings nailed it.

Look no further. I hold the secret right here.

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

No, it’s not really [Your Struggle Here]-specific. And it’s not easy. But neither is the pseudo-gnostic “secret knowledge” please-tell-me-what-to-do-so-I-don’t-have-to-make-a-decision brand of discipleship.

Be joyful; keep praying; give thanks no matter what happens. There’s God’s will for your life.
Nuff said.

The horror!

NEW YORK—Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.

As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families. Traffic was bottlenecked for more than two hours in many major metropolitan areas.

Across the country, buses and trains are operating on limited schedules and will cease operation shortly after 12 a.m. EST, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters in outlying areas effectively stranded in their homes.

(From The Onion - America’s Finest News Source )