Curious about everything. A rationalist and skeptic who feels equally at home with romanticism, imagination, creativity, ambiguity and the unknown. Because of this I'm a relentless questioner. I'm intensely curious about absences, gaps, and holes in knowledge and understanding. I'm an unapologetic atheist and secular humanist, but feel attracted to secular Buddhism, and have a deep appreciation for the feel, psychology, wonder, mystery and yearning of various aspects of religion. I think we're destroying much of the natural world with our ignorance, greed and the growth fetish of contemporary capitalism, and that horrifies me. I love artistic expression that challenges with its complexity and abstruseness, and am incredibly excited to find new voices of brilliant creativity or intelligence in any field. Skilled experimentalism and risk-taking are welcome in my world. My politics centers on global human development, ecological wisdom, and conscious systemic evolution guided by science, art and wisdom. I own a lovely cat, and am fond of all animals. I often view them as teachers of humanity. yahoo chat: bluemetalrain AIM: plutoniumrain
A recent project of mine. If you have the time I’d love to know what you think!
-Eric
The Tibetan Sand Fox.
(via sitasays)
Hey, Occupy Wall Street. Here’s a book to rally around. Looking for a study of the wealth disparity that’s sent you to the streets? Ellen E. Schultz offers a guide. “Retirement Heist” is a concise and alarming look at how—in the span of a generation—the 1 percent has looted the futures of the 99 percent.
½ cup strawberries
servings: how hungry are you?
“Are you interested in seeing a vibrant, healthy, large-scale eco-village / eco-town on the Colorado Front Range? Come on in!
We’re building a critical mass of empowered future villagers to trigger the building of that eco-town. We believe everything is here and ready to easily build this project.
So what’s holding it up? The “market” is not sure there’s enough people who want green homes.
Well, we’ve talked to 1000s of nice folks and many tell us that they agree that there is. Our goal is to build an “actionable” database of 3000 to 7000 pioneering folks. And we’re growing it everyday. “
Whether this is true or not, we have no way of knowing. But, given the Catholic Church’s frighteningly irresponsible history of dealing with clergy sexual abuse, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Consider the kinds of things William Lobdell uncovered. Lobdell is a former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and author of Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America and Found Unexpected Peace. In a public talk he related the story he covered of a teenage girl who was repeatedly gang-raped by a pack of Catholic priests.
And my parents wonder why I’m an atheist and secular humanist.
To this day the Catholic Church doesn’t know how to deal with sexuality in anything but a pre-modern, pre-scientific way. It’s institutionally incapable, it seems, of ceding any authority to other forms of (actually valid) forms of understanding. Just like the Bible is not a guide to cosmology or astronomy, physics or geology, so too is it a basically worthless guide to understanding human sexuality. But, don’t expect the Vatican to suddenly find enlightenment outside of its holy book, because this would mean that others might be able to do so too, and to the power-hungry celibate monarchs in the Vatican, this would be the gravest of sins.
Compared to Jupiter’s moon Europa, our planet is practically a desert, as this NASA image shows. It’s a computer visualization showing Europa and a dried-out Earth, with the volume of all their water represented by blue spheres.
(Details at APOD: 2012 May 24 - All the Water on Europa)
Does anyone remember the baby beluga song? It’s lyrics began,
Baby Beluga in the deep blue sea, Swim so wild and you swim so free, Heaven above and the sea below, And a little white whale on the go…
Little did I know, but the singer/songwriter Rafi is also a powerful voice for the environment outside of music, as his essay makes beautifully clear.
Long live Mother Nature!
Eight months after a repeal of the military’s “don’t ask , don’t tell” policy, the U.S. Air Force Academy today graduated its first group of openly gay cadets.
