Off The Beaten Track

KIRKDURSTON.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1952: "Islam is a natural religion in which *God's miracles are the very law and order of nature*."] ARTICLE: To try and avoid Stephen Hawking's potential for God, atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss published "A Universe from Nothing." In it, he attempts to explain how the universe might have come out of "nothing". But Krauss' "nothing" is not absolutely nothing at all. His "nothing" is actually "something". Krauss' "nothing" still requires the existence of *laws of physics* ... It fails to provide a rational explanation how these came into existence in the first place. Cosmologist Don Page closes his review of Krauss' book by stating, "To me, as a fellow scientist, it appears Krauss has swung far wide of the goal, striking only the air with his philosophical speculations that do not address the truly deep questions of existence." As Page also points out ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- VIA SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah,1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science ..."] When I was young, physics seemed to offer answers to all of the mysteries of the universe. It felt authoritative and unequivocal in its explanations of nature and the origin of the universe. In that sense it was the perfect religion for my teenage self as I went through an atheist phase, probably provoked by popular physics books such as Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." Those books were always so dogmatic like the Catholic Sunday school I went to. Over the years my view of physics has evolved significantly. At the end of the day, the existence of multiverses and the anthropic principle are really religious viewpoints wrapped up in scientific jargon. This is not science, not testable, with no more legitimacy than believing that God created the universe. ...

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THEATLANTIC.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: A long, but outstanding article, although we feel experiments with new forms of communal, family-like living -- "forged families" -- to replace what we have lost, are best suited for special situations rather than as alternatives to traditional, familial relationships and bonds.] ARTICLE: If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We've made life better for adults but worse for children. We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children). The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor. This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought. It's time to find ways to bring back the big tables. ...

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IFSTUDIES.ORG -- David Brooks' masterful essay on the history and state of the American family is so good that I am making it required reading in my family ethics class. However, Brooks' "forged family" can already be found in the local church -- not the abstract "the church." Families need families, but research shows that parents nestled in a church community are more likely to thrive, endure, and promote an ecology of personal and social flourishing. This is not coincidental: the Genesis portrait of marriage is one of culture-formation, not just home-formation. It's why faith and healthy marriage go together. Furthermore, the church can also be called the forged family for the unmarried, for single parents, and for the fatherless. There is much ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science for keeping the human soul like [sic] the ocean with the Divine wisdom and power."] ARTICLE: During my undergraduate years, I read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. That book incited a quest to determine whether I was an accident of nature or created by God? Many religious leaders attempt to harmonize evolutionary theory with their faith, but they fail to realize that evolution, as taught in most academic settings, denies any possibility of guidance or intentionality. Then, in 2016, I attended the Summer Seminars and a turning point in my career. Even more striking was evidence from multiple disciplines demonstrating that scientific materialism is hopelessly inadequate. I can never forget participants' shock at the disparity between what the public is told about the state of evolutionary science and what leading researchers now know to be true about the actual data from ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- The deadline for U.S. applications to the "Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design" is March 4. The Seminars is a FREE, week-long program (July 10 to 18, 2020), held in Seattle, for current undergraduates and graduate students. It includes course materials, lodging, and most meals for accepted students. Travel scholarships are also available. A previous graduate, Beth, wrote how her life was changed. "I was 19 and a junior at my university when I was accepted to The Seminars, a gathering of philosophers, paleontologists, biologists, and astronomers all in the same room. If you want to discuss the great questions of biology, I strongly encourage you to apply for this all-expense-paid event. I haven't met one alum who wasn't grateful to come. Set aside a couple hours for the application. You won't regret it." Learn with the star scientists and scholars of the ...

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NEWYORKER.COM -- The lesson from, New York Times bestselling author, Philip Tetlock's book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?", is that experts on television or quoted in newspapers are no better at making predictions than the rest of us. Specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. In fact, those who spend their lives studying the world are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys. And the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. Tetlock teaches at Berkeley and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began 20 years ago. He got a statistical handle on his task and measured his experts on two ...

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LARVATUS.COM -- My topic for today is speculation in media. Why is it so ubiquitous? Is it because people want it? I don't think so. Consider the advantages of speculation from a media standpoint. Speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television. Almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff. Just get the talking host, book the talking guests and you're done! Instant show. No reporters around the world, no film crews on location. No deadlines, no footage to edit, no editors...nothing! Just talk. You can't lose. You are never accountable. The audience does not remember yesterday, let alone last week, or last month. And it's not confined to the media. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- How can serious scientists or philosophers convince themselves that their own consciousness "doesn't exist" or is a "mistaken construct"? What, exactly, is thinking the thought that their consciousness doesn't exist? I want to understand what makes the consciousness of an intelligent human being deny, with a straight face, its own existence. What kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? Short of assuming that they are insane, fantastically stupid or dishonest we have an authentic and rather baffling mystery in our hands. My present opinion is that materialists are so fanatically committed to materialism that they ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- When the history of modern materialism is written, it will be a catalogue of almost incomprehensible folly. The striking irony is that many of the most strident claims by materialists are not merely empirical and logical nonsense; much of materialism is self-refuting. The widespread assertion by educated public "intellectuals," like evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, that we are meat-sacks without free will is self-refuting gibberish. Consider his assertion that free will doesn't exist and that all human actions are fully determined by material processes--biochemistry, neurophysiology, evolution, and such. Meat can metabolize and secrete, but it can't argue. Meat has no opinions. Meat is neither right or wrong. Denying free will is denying the ability to deny. Yet Coyne's assertion ...

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NYTIMES.COM -- America's public schools are still promoting devices with screens -- even offering digital-only preschools. The rich are banning screens from class altogether.... Parents say there is a growing technological divide between public and private schools even in the same community. While the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley executives, eschews most screens, the nearby public Hillview Middle School advertises its 1:1 iPad program. ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- Recently published brain scans of young children demonstrate the effects of reading versus using screens (televisions, computers, smartphones, digital tablets and video games). In the scans of children who spent more time with books than screens (less than an hour of screen time a day), white matter was concentrated in the center of the brain. In children who spent more time with screens (more than an hour a day), white matter was scattered. This is significant because white matter makes up the brain's neural connections -- the pathways for brain activity. Concentrated white matter means thoughts and commands travel faster and invariably results in better cognitive performance in kids who stay off screens: they focus better, learn faster, and show greater mental flexibility and creativity. Adults give their kids screens because it's easy ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Origin of Life and Evolution of Life are two very different issues. Origin of Life is about how life have *started*. Evolution (Darwin's theory), is only about what happened *after life started*. Current theories for both issues have serious scientific problems which can be understood by anyone.] ARTICLE: Despite decades of work, origin-of-life theorists are at a loss to explain how life arose. In 2007, Harvard chemist George Whitesides was given the Priestley Medal, the highest award of the American Chemical Society. During his acceptance speech, he offered this stark analysis: "The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe.... How? I have no idea." Many other authors have made similar comments. Massimo Pigliucci (an outspoken critic of creationism) states: "[I]t has to be true that we really don't have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means." According to conventional thinking among origin-of-life theorists, ...

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DISCOVERY.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: The serious scientific problems with the Theory of Evolution simply means a new and better theory is needed, nothing more or less. Whether that new theory involves a Designer or not is another question altogether, one that only evidence can allude to.] ARTICLE: Is it true that there are "no weaknesses" in evolutionary theory? This article cites dozens of papers from the technical scientific literature by credible scientists which, taken together, pose strong scientific challenges to core tenets of modern evolutionary theory. Defenders of Darwinism commonly assert that legitimate scientific objections to their viewpoint do not exist, and that the only criticisms which remain are based upon religion. Clearly, this is not true. In fact, the attempt to re-label criticisms of neo-Darwinian evolution as religion is typically a ploy to dismiss scientific criticisms without addressing them. Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- Artificial Intelligence based facial recognition technology tends to misidentify members of minority groups: "it is particularly bad at recognizing African Americans and other ethnic minorities, women, and young people, often misidentifying or failing to identify them, disparately impacting certain groups." Microsoft president Brad Smith revealed the giant turned down a request from law enforcement. Smith said the technology could lead to a disproportionately large number of women and minorities being held for questioning. According to a draft paper, the European Commission wants a temporary ban on facial recognition software of five years. France and Sweden have stopped schools from installing it on their grounds. San Francisco banned the technology by police and city agencies. However, Microsoft ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- In October, while Google announced some breakthroughs in quantum computing, it startled observers by claiming "quantum supremacy." While the firm made real advances, the quantum supremacy part, closely examined, is hype. Google claimed that its algorithm, which took 200 seconds to perform on a quantum computer, would have taken 10,000 years on a classical computer (the kind you and I use). IBM published a response soon after that showed that the algorithm does not take 10,000 years on a classical computer, but instead can be done in 2.5 days. Another question is whether or not ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- Umar Nasser is a doctor in London, currently training to be a psychiatrist. Dr. Nasser and his website, Rational Religion, make videos with a great sense of humour and, in a new entry, he asks a Londoners whether they think they have a soul. Or is the mind no more than electrical signals firing through an agglutination of meat and chemicals? What's interesting is that almost everyone says yes, he or she indeed has a soul. As Nasser points out, and as these people seem to intuit, the fact that we experience free will and a spirit operates in cooperation with the brain. Materialism asks us to deny the evidence of this near-universal, dualist -- the material brain and the immaterial mind -- experience. ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2017: "Our good fortune is that our faith is a faith of the intellect, in the sense that the practice of our faith tells us to learn more and more about Allah's creation. This means that as you live in the physical world, *your intellect lives in another world*."] ARTICLE: The brain can be cut in half, but the intellect and will cannot, says Michael Egnor, Neurosurgeon and Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Stony Brook University. Some of the earliest evidence came from neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, the pioneer in epilepsy surgery. "When I caused a conscious patient to move his hand by applying an electrode to the motor cortex and asked him about it. Invariably his response was: "I didn't do that. You did." Neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry studied scores of split-brain patients. He found, the operation had little effect and each patient was still one person. The most remarkable finding was that a person's intellect and will -- what we might call the soul -- remained undivided. In the past decade, British researcher ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1965: "Left-wing attitudes tend not only to destroy the Faith of a man towards his religion but also the respect of one individual towards another. When the Faith is broken down everything goes with it: the family, society, the individual, the intelligence."] ARTICLE: One of the top sources of people losing their religion is leftist politics. A December 2019 study of 2,561 found Democrats brought up in religious households are roughly 3 times more likely (23% vs. 8%) to leave religion than Republicans. The study also found a high parental faith commitment is the most likely to be passed on. 93% of children of parents who show a "very high" commitment to religious practices (such as religious education, reading scripture at home, and church attendance), remained in the faith as adults. "Americans with very high levels of religious involvement during their childhood are about 10 times more likely to pray or read with their children (87%), attend worship services with them (84%), or send them to Sunday school (80%)." The survey also found ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 2003: "[Education] must also stimulate students to consider a variety of perspectives on some of the fundamental questions: ... 'What are my duties to my fellow man, to my country and to *God*?' "] ARTICLE: For over a century, we've accepted the fiction that public institutions can be religiously neutral. The result has made secular atheism the dominant religion of American public life, all while pretending it wasn't happening. Either we all are allowed to educate our children according to our religious beliefs, or some get to impose their religious beliefs on others. There are no two ways about it. There is no such thing as a school that does not teach religion, but only a school that teaches that religion is unimportant, false, foolhardy, unrelated to "real life," or not worth considering. These are all religious teachings -- or antireligious teachings. Whatever you call them, they are not religiously neutral. They are religiously biased. According to young Americans ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- The bacterial flagellum has become an iconic example of the evidence against modern Darwinian theory as well as the evidence for intelligent design. Stephen Meyer, Scott Minnich and others scientists and scholars explore the facts about this amazing piece of nanotechnology, first made famous by biologist Michael Behe when he coined the phrase irreducible complexity. ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: First, watch the video "Irreducible Complexity Explained," we also posted today, if you're not familiar with this key idea.] ARTICLE: On a classic episode of ID the Future, we interview Steve Laufmann about Dr. Howard Glicksman's 81-part Evolution News series, "The Designed Body." Mr. Laufmann is a consultant in the field of enterprise architecture, dealing with the design of very large, very complex, composite information systems that are orchestrated to perform specified tasks in demanding environments. Hey, that sounds like the human body! Listen in as Laufmann reflects on the body's fight against equilibrium, the Goldilocks principle, and more! ...

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ARTOFMANLINESS.COM -- For many of us, our smartphones have come to feel like another appendage. We carry them wherever we go, fondle them during meals and conversations, and sleep with them next to our pillows. Wherever one is, so is the other. However, our feelings about our smartphones often tend to be downright negative. To modify that relationship, it's helpful to develop some concrete habits that tangibly shift the place of your phone away from the center of your life. Here are 5 we have field-tested and heartily recommend: 1. Don't ...

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NATIONALREVIEW.COM -- KATHERINE TIMPF -- Alot has happened in the last decade -- including a lot of things being called racist, sexist, offensive, or insensitive. Here, in no particular order, are 24 of the most absurdly politically correct moments of the decade: 1. A college diversity-training course taught that it was culturally insensitive to expect people to be on time. 18. Oxford University law students were told that they didn't have to learn about rape or violence law if they found it too triggering. 12. A group of Berkeley students insisted that they could not take their in-class exam due to their lack of privilege. 15. Lecturers were warned that capital letters might scare students and that they should avoid using them. 16. A campus-wide email told white students to ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- This past year, we have seen a change in the tide for the design debate. Increasingly, scientists are realizing, or gaining the courage to publicly acknowledge, that the evidence challenging scientific materialism can no longer be ignored. Scientific advances demonstrating both the limitations of evolutionary processes and elucidating the evidence of design in biology have been dramatic. In 2019, James Tour exposed the fraudulent nature of the evidence presented to the public that life arose through undirected processes. And Michael Behe's 2019 book "Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA that Challenges Evolution" demonstrates how the mutations that most often spread degrade or disable genes and, thus, limits evolution's creative potential to relatively minor changes of existing traits. Many top academics have expressed support ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- If you look at Jerry Coyne's blog "Why Evolution Is True", you will find his rebuttal to what Coyne calls an argument from incredulity. We have taken Coyne's rebuttal, deleted the inessentials, and placed in bold all of the inferential steps, credulous guesses, and other leaps of imagination. It is astonishing that anyone would think the result a scientific argument, or, even, an argument at all. "Let's take the larval wasp ...

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THEFEDERALIST.COM -- When you are a parent, you worry about all sorts of things. Porn probably doesn't top that list. Or at least until articles brought to light the pervasive, horrifying, and all-too-common modern problem of preteens accessing hardcore porn online. Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa wrote about her 11-year-old daughter's exposure not just to porn but to rape porn, and her daughter doesn't have a smartphone. In her article, Sloane Ryan highlights a fictional 11-year old child she set up, and the screenshots are stomach-turning and vile. "Over the course of one week, over 52 men reached out to an 11-year-old girl," Ryan wrote. But you're not powerless. Every family around you ...

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AMGREATNESS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: A long but critical read. As the author, who once thought the dangers were over-hyped, now says "I have become deadly serious" about this.] ARTICLE: On line porn is a massive experiment on our brains. A critical way today's porn is fundamentally different from yesterday's is that, unlike a Playboy magazine, online porn provides infinite amounts, everywhere, 24/7, immediately. As we consume more and more porn, our brain is rewired so what triggers the reward system, that is supposed to be linked to sex, is no longer linked to sex but to porn. And given that we know the younger the brain the more plastic it is, it is a near certainty that whatever porn addiction does to adults, it's also going to do to minors -- only much worse. Study after study after study show porn also affects relationships. One review of no less than 135 peer-reviewed studies found "consistent evidence" linking online porn addiction to ...

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EVOLUTIONNEWS.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah, 1956: "The young Waezin should each try and find new arguments based on the discoveries in all branches of science for keeping the human soul like [sic] the ocean with the Divine wisdom and power."] ARTICLE: Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins said "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like." Understanding where this information came from is at the heart of modern origin-of-life research. Although chemical laws can hold the DNA molecule together, the *information in DNA cannot be explained by natural laws*. It would be like saying the information in a newspaper headline might arise from the chemical attraction between ink and paper. Clearly something more is at work. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) assumes information in signals from space requires an intelligent source. By the same logic, information in cells suggests an intelligent source. The Information Enigma ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- The confusing ways the word "intelligence" is used belie the differences between human intelligence and machine sophistication. That is why we can easily fool computers. A fire truck, for example, seen from head on, could be correctly recognized. But once pointed up in the air, and turned around several times, the same fire truck is mis-classified by the neural net as a school bus or a fireboat or a bobsled. An associate of mine quipped that we should refer to what computers do as "Superficial Intelligence" and not "Artificial Intelligence." "Artificial" carries overtones of the real item, "Superficial" correctly identifies the fact that Deep Learning has only the appearance of intelligence. Humans are intelligent. Computers only fake it. ...

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MINDMATTERS.AI -- So-called "white hat" hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool. Last week [2018] a group of researchers described a turtle they had 3D printed. Most people would say it looks just like a turtle, but an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm saw it differently. Most of the time, the AI thought the turtle looked like a rifle. In another test a computer scientist at UC Berkeley subtly altered a stop sign with stickers. It fooled an autonomous vehicle's image recognition system into "thinking" it was a 45 mph speed limit sign. Humans could immediately recognize the stop sign, but the car did not. It's no wonder that autonomous car makers shuddered at the results. ...

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OZANVAROL.COM -- The coach of the first-ever Jamaican Olympic bobsled team told them: "A gold medal is a wonderful thing. But if you're not enough without one, you'll never be enough with one." I ignored this advice chasing one gold medal after the next. When success arrives, we get a dollop of temporary satisfaction, but return to our pre-success level of happiness. That dream job, coveted title, lavish apartment become the new normal. Then we up the ante. It's no longer enough to hit the New York Times bestseller list, you have to hit #1. Then you must stay #1 for weeks. Then months. If you're not happy now, you won't be happy when success arrives. You're far better off ...

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DARIUSFOROUX.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah's "Philosophy of Happiness": "Learn to desire the thing that happens, and not try to mould events to their desires."] ARTICLE: I'll be happy when I make six figures. I'll be happy when I have a partner. I'll be happy when I move to a big city. I'll be happy when I have a rich social life. Can you relate to that? It's called conditional happiness. Modern society implies happiness is some kind of outcome -- something you can achieve. The problem with chasing happiness and other outcomes is that you create inner conflict. When you get what you don't want, you're unhappy. And when you don't you're also unhappy. The fix is simple: Avoid desires and aversions. What if your life is already good as it is? What if happiness is not a goal but a way of life? The Buddhist monk ...

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CNN.COM -- "The biochemistry of your brain is urging you to check in [with your phone]. That's really hard to change," said Dr. Larry Rosen. His research shows that young adults spend about 5 hours a day, or 35 hours a week, on their devices and glance at them 50 to 60 times a day. Apple's Screen Time app says I spent 36 hours on my iPhone last week and picked it up 75 times a day. That shocked me almost as much as learning I look at the damned thing every 6 minutes! Apps like Apple's new Screen Time won't solve tech addiction but, Rosen says, they'll make people aware of it. And that's the point. ...

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ARTOFMANLINESS.COM -- While putting certain access blockers on your phone can be a great help in breaking the smartphone habit, you have to take a truly holistic and intentional approach to maintaining a healthy relationship with your phone. Below I present such a plan, with all the tools and techniques you might consider implementing to get a handle on your smartphone habit. Let start with why you might consider limiting your smartphone use in the first place. Research shows that heavy smartphone use can have a negative effect on several different aspects of our lives. For example, simply having a smartphone in our line of sight causes us to ...

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DISCOVERY.ORG -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1987: "The industrialised world only rather recently has rediscovered that [many] questions engage not merely professional ethics and standards; they touch the deeply held convictions of a Judeo-Christian tradition.... Nations cannot assign these issues to a priesthood of scientists."] ARTICLE: On this episode of ID the Future, host Ira Berkowitz talks with Rabbi Moshe Averick about his recent Times of Israel article, "From the People Who Brought You the Hydrogen Bomb." Yes, it's pointed -- straight at scientists. It's about scientists who jump out of their disciplines, taking the place of priests and shamans and pronouncing upon the place of mankind in the universe. Averick is the author of Nonsense of a "High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism." ...

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TIMESOFISRAEL.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1987: "[Many questions] touch the deeply held convictions of a Judeo-Christian tradition, an idea of humanity that has challenged the prophets and philosophers for thousands of years. Nations cannot assign these issues to a priesthood of scientists."] ARTICLE: For those who lean towards secularism in the Western world, Scientists have taken over the role of priests and clergymen. Scientists are looked upon with awe and are conferred with something akin to a demi-god status. Many Scientists have a rather arrogant habit of assuming their scientific credentials confer upon them expertise and wisdom on fundamental questions of human existence. However, as Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman said: "When even the greatest scientist talks about things that are outside of his area of expertise, he is just as dumb as the next guy." ...

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DAILYSTOIC.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Mawlana Sultan Muhammad Shah: "A man's chief capital is time and if he wastes time, he wastes his greatest asset which can never be recouped."] ARTICLE: In his twenty-third letter, Seneca opens with a snark that is relatable to anyone who has ever been trapped in a banal conversation. "You were probably thinking I was going to open this letter with idle chit chat about the weather," Seneca begins, "but I'm not, because who has the time?" Certainly not Seneca, who spends the rest of the letter talking about the joy from the earnest pursuit of the art of living. Important ideas. None of these trivialities -- the weather, 'what have you been up to lately?,' 'how's your mother?,' 'reading anything good?' -- which he says are the refuge of people who are "at a loss for topics of conversation." They are not ...

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ACCIDENTALTHEOLOGIST.COM -- LESLEY HAZLETON -- Tarzan and Jane come up when I'm asked about interfaith gatherings, which I generally find kind of stilted. We tend to get together as me-Tarzan-you-Jane-we-friends. That is, me-Jew-you-Muslim-we-friends. We need to get beyond that. We need to see each other first as people. Talk about anything but religion. Eat together, two or three or four at a time, over our own dining tables. It seems ...

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