The Daily Bluster

Since ancient times, people had been digging up bones and other mineralized remains of creatures that lived and died a long, long time ago. When dinosaur bones were unearthed in China about a thousand years ago, people wondered about the kinds of animals that had these bones. This was probably the start of dragon legends. All over  the world, there are places that if one digs deep enough, one may find some ancient shells, bone fragments, a piece of petrified wood, or even a leaf print. These relics are called fossils. They are usually found through digging. In fact, the term "fossil" comes from a Latin word that means, "to dig." Fossils are remains of ancient life; they give us clues about the distant past. Countless animals and plants that lived a long time ago were preserved in different ways. In hot and dry places, actual bones or teeth of an extinct creature are sometimes preserved; in moist places, the relic may be replaced by a rock-like copy of ...

Simply put, monotheism is the belief in the existence of a single god, in contrast to polytheism, which is a belief in the existence of many gods. Until the advent of monotheism, polytheism was the norm among the early civilizations. Civilizations that worshiped many gods were traditionally more accepting and more tolerant of the gods of other people, e.g., the Sumerians, Hittites, etc. (Hittite state documents unearthed by archaeologists often bear the invocation “The Thousand Gods of the Hatti.”)  The first monotheistic religion may have been the worship of the Sun God Aten in ancient Egypt, which was established by Amenhotep IV (1364-1347 BC). Aten However, this did not last, as a subsequent pharaoh eradicated the worship of Aten. Then sometime before the 6 th century in Persia, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) founded Zoroastrianism, which many  scholars believe to have influenced the three major religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.   Zoroastr...

Below is the text of Dr. Richard Dawkins' speech at the Reason Rally held last March 24 in Washington D.C.   What a magnificent, inspiring sight! I was expecting great things even in fine weather. In the rain -- look at this: This is the most incredible sight I can remember ever seeing. The sharper, critical thinkers among you may have discerned that I don't come from these parts. I see myself as an emissary from a benighted country that does not have a constitutional separation between church and state. Indeed it doesn't have a written constitution at all. We have a head of state who's also the head of the Church of England. The church is deeply entwined in British public life. The American Constitution is a precious treasure, the envy of the world. The First Amendment of the Constitution, which enshrines the separation between church and state, is the model for secular constitutions the world over and deserves to be imitated the world over. How sad it wo...

Probably one of the most pointless and depressing activities one could do in this day and age is read the comments section on Yahoo. Or participate in an Internet forum debate about politics and religion. Which, to my eternal regret, I did, these past few months. So what did I learn from reading all those caps-locked posts, ad hominems, straw man arguments, and other fallacies that I didn’t even know existed? Absolutely nothing, except that I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with this country’s educational system. Yes, random strangers hiding behind stupid user names, your posts are a scathing indictment of how rotten our state of education is.  Either that, or majority of humans are just naturally idiot scumbags. Easier to blame education (or the lack of it), I think. I wish I could take back all those hours reading those posts, and trying to explain to faceless strangers that no, evolution does not say that we evolve from monkeys, and that the exi...

Besides ruling the largest land empire the world has ever seen, Genghis Khan apparently is also the ancestor of 0.5 percent of the world’s male population. That’s around 16 million living, breathing great, great, great (and so on) grandkids of the Scourge of God himself. While the Phoenician Empire was built through commerce , Genghis Khan’s empire was built through warfare, with the result that he killed off a good portion of Asia’s population during his bloody conquests.   To be fair though, he also helped repopulate the world . How’d he manage it, though--how did he build an empire that, at its apex, occupied 16% of the world’s total land area? For one thing, he had an efficient, disciplined, well-organized army. For another, he had history’s greatest generals leading that army. One of them was Subutai, widely considered as the military mastermind behind the Mongol Empire. One of Genghis Khan’s legendary “Dogs of War” (there were four) Subutai is arguably the ...

I need not fear my enemies because the most they can do is attack me. I need not fear my friends because the most they can do is betray me. But I have much to fear from people who are indifferent. Assyrian Proverb  The Assyrian civilization is  one of the most brutal and fearsome civilizations of the ancient world , but little is known about their early history. According to some traditions, however, the city of Ashur (also spelled Assur ), one of the capitals of ancient Assyria, was founded by Ashur the son of Shem, the son of Noah. Yes, that Noah.    No, not this Noah. I mean the ark guy. Named for its ancient capital city Ashur, Assyria was originally a region on the Upper Tigris River. At its height, the Assyrian Empire controlled areas in what are now modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, western Iran, Kuwait, and Egypt. Nineveh was its capital. The Kings of Assyria controlled large kingdoms...

From the New York Times:  Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer CRANSTON, R.I. — She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years. Read more here . And here . It says in the nytimes article that at ten years old, she became an atheist. Clearly, the girl is made of sterner stuff, and not just of sugar and spice. Yep, that's Jessica As local florists refused to deliver flowers to her, I asked a friend to deliver one to her: You rock, Jessica.