Secular Café Archive

[quote=""Greatest I am""]Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. Eleanor Roosevelt[/quote] This epigram was not attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt until 1987, and no primary source supporting the assertion that she is its author has been ...

[quote=""Greatest I am""]You might want to listen more closely to what is said about liberals and conservatives and their attitudes and which group is more worthy of leading, which is neither as both groups have gone too far into the left and right.[/quote] Where did those goalpo...

[quote=""Greatest I am""] Your morals are nearly as disgusting as Christians morals. Nearly? How disappointing. I had hoped my morals were on par with those of all Christians. Which troubles me not at all, as long as it is I who gets to line them up against the wall, not the othe...

[quote=""Greatest I am""]Your morals are nearly as disgusting as Christians morals.[/quote]Nearly? How disappointing. I had hoped my morals were on par with those of all Christians. Which troubles me not at all, as long as it is I who gets to line them up against the wall, not th...

[quote=""Greatest I am""]The only good Christian is a Gnostic Christian. True or false?[/quote]
False. The only good Christian is a dead Christian.

[quote=""dancer_rnb""] I think this is going to be a serious problem for the remainder of our democracy; we seem to only want celebrities, CEOs, or exciting new "fire-brands" for president. Calling someone a "politician" in a presidential debate is considered ...

[quote=""praxis""] I think this is going to be a serious problem for the remainder of our democracy; we seem to only want celebrities, CEOs, or exciting new "fire-brands" for president. Calling someone a "politician" in a presidential debate is considered to b...

Bugger. I was hoping your important, partisan offices gave you enough leverage to winkle copies of them out for me. So far I have only seen a few excerpts that surfaced via those email leaks via Podesta's hacked laptop in 2016.

We can haz copies of all transcripts of speeches Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs staff and other Wall Street bankers, perlease, or would that be ?

Musical goddesses? Harrumph. Well, OK, sort of works as a metaphor, I suppose. Some of my favourites have already been listed, but by no means all. With great regret I observe that nobody has mentioned the little sparrow. Q3Kvu6Kgp88 Or the voice that could have brought the walls of Jericho down. Pr...

[quote=""Politesse""]France did produce some very passionate Jesuit missionaries, back further in US history. Was recently reading the letters of one Pierre Biard, S.J. in connection with some other research, it was a fascinating bit of historical drama. One cannot deny that they...

[quote=""MattShizzle""]I wonder how many "nonpracticing Catholics" are nonbelievers who were inducted into the church as children but just never happened to get excommunicated. I know you see high numbers for members of the official church in Scandanavian countries with...

[quote=""Politesse""]I have never known them to be a deeply religious nation.[/quote]Perhaps that is because in your lifetime France was not a deeply religious nation. Look at the figures for 1967. 91% of the population was at least nominally catholic. Only 25% of the population ...

Every time a survey includes "no religion" without further subdivision I wonder how many people that fall into that classification believe in chakras or some other form of supernatural mumbo-jumbo. The percentages of the 1966, 1991 and 2016 censuses in Australia were Christian: 88.2 - 74.0...

[quote=""Jobar""]Personally I think that the conservative contenders for the Papacy probably all had scandals of one sort or another too closely tied to their coattails. Francis had a reputation of financial probity, and given the furor over the Vatican Bank, that overwhelmed any...

[quote=""MattShizzle""] If you're by yourself and a lion decides it wants to eat you you're pretty much fucked. unless your name is Daniel. https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/daniel-in-the-lions-den-leonardo-digenio.jpg And you're in a fictional ...

[quote=""MattShizzle""]If you're by yourself and a lion decides it wants to eat you you're pretty much fucked.[/quote]unless your name is Daniel.

Here's one that should work: Whenever you are on a safari, bring a telephone booth with you. If a lion seems to get threatening, hop inside, shut the door and ring a lion tamer. Just hope that the lion tamer is not an accountant who recently decided to embark on a new career and confuses lions with ...

[quote=""plebian""] I am not religious at all and I can understand politesse' point. The 'character' of god is a 'character'. It is how we tell stories. Surely you can see allegorical wisdom in the story of the fall. To start with, I regard almost everything written in the Bible ...

[quote=""Politesse""]You are also, in a very curious fashion, citing the phenomenon of "nominal" Christians without apparently realizing that many nominal Christians don't necessarily believe everything conservative Catholics think they "ought" to.[/quote] Oh,...

[quote=""Politesse""] What matters is that for the vast majority of the 2.4 billion individuals who (at least nominally) subscribe to Christianity the central point of the Gospels is that a real god sent his real son to earth to be really sacrificed in order to make atonement pos...

[quote=""Koyaanisqatsi""]JTFC [/quote]
Ah. The good ole Joint Task Force Commander rejoinder. Wish I had thought of it.

[quote=""plebian""]I am not religious at all and I can understand politesse' point. The 'character' of god is a 'character'. It is how we tell stories. Surely you can see allegorical wisdom in the story of the fall.[/quote]To start with, I regard almost everything written in the ...

[quote=""MattShizzle""]That seems unclear on the concept...[/quote]I forgot to mention that the explorer was Irish. Sorry.

The alleged poacher could have saved his life had he heard of the technique used by an explorer who got away. He told me that whenever he is out exploring the wilds of Africa he carries a 50 kilogram bag of sand on his back. When chased by a pride of lions he jettisons the bag, which enables him to ...