Dear Senator McCain, I'd like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude for your time spent in military service. You showed remarkable courage under extreme duress, enduring torture by the enemy while refusing an early release, or any special treatment. As a result, you've suffered from permanent physical disabilities after six years in captivity. I have enjoyed a lifetime as a free citizen in the greatest nation on the face of the earth, because of brave warriors like you. Thank you for your service, sir. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Secondly we, the people, recently learned the very serious news about your cancer diagnosis, and I wanted to convey my sympathy to you. Twenty years ago my father died from that exact same disease, a glioblastoma tumor in his brain, so I am well aware of the challenge you face. It was shortly after his retirement that my father began acting uncharacteristically confused and disoriented. He also complained of a constant headache. An MRI confirmed that he had a large brain tumor, a glioblastoma. The neurologist diagnosed him on a Tuesday, and he had surgery the following Monday, but never regained consciousness. About two weeks later, his life support was disconnected. I'm glad your surgery was more successful than his, and I wish you the best as you continue to recover. While I'm fairly confident that a sitting U.S. Senator such as yourself has access to the very best healthcare in the world (probably much better care than a retired serviceman living in Savannah, Georgia would ever get), I do not blame my father's … [Read more...]
Planning my own funeral
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you don't follow the links and listen to the music, it will be your loss, not mine. I'm listening to every song as I check the links in preview mode. There is a point being made with each song selection.] A friend of mine likes to wish me a happy birthday with the encouragement to have another pleasant journey around the sun. Thank you, Sir Charles, I believe that I will celebrate my birthday. But today I'd like to plan a very different kind of celebration. When I was young and foolish, I appreciated the cynical perspective of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd, expressed with a faintly similar ring in their classic song Time: So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older, Shorter of breath and one day closer to death. Unfortunately, it seems the older I get, the better I was. And now that I'm getting a little shorter of breath and closer to death myself, I don't play that song nearly as often as I once did. The lyrics remain brilliant, but they are also depressing as hell. Thanks for that reminder! On the other hand, death is...natural. The end of life is part of the life experience. There's no need to get all worked up about something that is guaranteed to happen. While I'm fully cognizant of my own mortality, I personally don't like to dwell on negative thoughts. I want to enjoy life to the best of my ability as long as there is quality, and I have been blessed with extraordinary genetics. But I have no desire to prolong the … [Read more...]
People who think they know everything
[FULL DISCLOSURE: Herman L. Mays, Jr. recently published a somewhat ruthless review of my book Counterargument for God, which may lead some readers to conclude this particular article has been written to gain some measure of revenge. However, after reading the rather vitriolic exchanges between academic/intellectual types such as Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier, I'm convinced that hostile rhetoric is now a perfectly acceptable form of criticism. Therefore, I won't be mincing my words, either.] Professor Herman L. Mays, Jr. teaches at Marshall University, and he's probably a very nice guy (Anybody who can make me laugh out loud can't be all bad in my book). And when I read the following sentence his review of my book, I literally burst out laughing: To say Leonard's book should be taken with a grain of salt gives undue credit to the power of salt to ease the swallowing of the foulest of meals. I have to admit, that's a pretty clever zinger. Could his rhetoric be exaggerated? That's not for me to say. Because my brain often works in strange and unconventional ways, when I read his little quip my mind wandered back in time to revisit an old installment of the comic strip Bloom County, in which Opus the Penguin wrote a scathing review of the movie Benji Saves the Universe. He described the movie as achieving "new levels of badness" -- could I be as equally untalented a writer? Given his perspective as an academic who earns his paycheck teaching evolutionary biology, it shouldn't be terribly surprising that Professor Mays took exception to my criticisms of Darwin's … [Read more...]
Dan Barker’s open Bible test
[Originally this article and the followup article that "graded" this test were published in my column when I wrote as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner.] We all have our weaknesses. I'm a sucker for a good challenge. And I am especially susceptible to books with eye-grabbing, thought provoking titles such as The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You To Read. Naturally, I grabbed a copy from the shelf of the Roswell Public Library and added to my stack of books to check out and read. The End of Faith by Sam Harris was my other nonfiction selection. My reading interests do not often match that of the typical Christian. The subtitle promised to be “An Enlightening Anthology by World-Renowned Theologians, Historians & Researchers that Exposes and Challenges Misrepresentations and Age-Old Beliefs!” My beliefs are not “age-old” so I didn't feel particularly threatened, and dead center in the book, on page 223, I discovered Dan Barker’s essay No Stone Unturned, which proposed an intriguing challenge. Mr. Barker is a former minister, now co-director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His biography claims Mr. Barker's IQ is above the 99th percentile, which sounds...smart. Perhaps I'll be biting off more than I can chew. And perhaps not. Ominously, his essay is followed by this warning: This article was copied and distributed around the country in many different forms. A lot of readers sent it to their area ministers and priests. Only two attempts at accepting the challenge were made and neither one of them kept to the terms, preferring to pick and choose … [Read more...]
Reincarnation, and the problem of an open mind
[AUTHOR'S NOTE: As a Christian, I will admit this is information that I have trouble reconciling with my religious beliefs, and it especially bothers me because it's something that wouldn't upset me if true -- it actually solves theological issues I have about sticky issues such as the premature death of a child. As a human being, curiosity got the better of me, and I've learned that I cannot simply reject the idea of reincarnation. Like Dr. Tucker, I'm merely more open to the possibility, in the light of evidence such as that I'm about to describe.] Little five-year-old Ryan from rural Muskogee County, Oklahoma began having nightmares involving a past life. Ryan claimed he had been a well-known actor who lived in Hollywood, had a sister who was a famous dancer, and once knew Rita Hayworth. He said that he had been really rich, married multiple times, loved Chinatown and Chinese food, lived in a house with a swimming pool on “rocks” drive, owned some sort of agency that changed names, and provided a host of other details about this mysterious "previous life." Ryan's father Kevin, a police officer with thirteen years experience, proposed that mother Cyndi should keep track of all Ryan’s past-life claims. To be precise, over a period of several months Cyndi documented 102 unique claims that her son made about a past life. Meanwhile, Ryan's nightmares continued to get worse. He would turn white and gasp for air, struggling for every breath. He talked about things that seemed gibberish, like a meeting in a New York graveyard with someone he called "Senator … [Read more...]
