Flirting With Relevance

Just to determine if everyone here is a robber baron at heart or just a lousy commie. (I kid, I kid).

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There is one thing on which President Obama and I agree. The current health care system in this country is broken. Not the part that actually provides medical care, of course. For most part, the doctors and nurses in the trenches are, on the whole, dedicated and competent professionals who take pride in their role in keeping us healthy.

What’s broken, I think everyone will agree, is how we pay for it; in other words: health insurance.

One of the more persistent memes are that I have encountered, especially since the economic meltdown of 2008, is the notion that fascism means rule by corporations. This is usually mixed in with other anti-capitalist rhetoric, but the equation of fascism to corporations was novel to me. Given the level of political naivete that normally circulates on the old interwebby tubes, I initially dismissed it as a bit of mental flatulence from some college sophomore with more time than political sophistication.

There seems to be some confusion between the concepts of belief, faith and religion.

Belief is just that. It’s what we believe, politically, religiously and otherwise philosophically. Faith is what allows you to believe that which cannot be proven. Again, it is not necessarily a matter of any god or gods.

Religion is a system of beliefs, usually but not necessarily taken on faith. More than that, a religion is a codified version of such beliefs that has been agreed upon by more than one person, as well as the body of people who agree upon those beliefs. A religion is not the god or gods that the believers worship. It is only the collective agreement of those who believe in a common thing.

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the founder of the modern life sciences as we know them! Go ahead and celebrate your opposable thumbs!

Buy a copy of The Origin Of Species or read it online for free!