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Our country is in their hands

Did you know that many of our top officials from the US Attorney General to ambassadors to other countries hold Israeli passports as well as American passports?  Nothing against Israel, but what if Israeli and American interests are ever in conflict?  How will they honor both?  Will they pick America over Israel?  Do they know?  Can we know? 

We are all global citizens – country lines and even family lines are blurring.  For example, my stepson belongs to two families – it’s not hard to imagine people belonging to two countries.  However, while countries still go to war, I think having people in positions of power who have this conflict of interest can cause problems.  We wouldn’t ask our son to take sides in a disagreement between families.  I don’t want our diplomats to be torn like that.  Who knows whose side they will take?  They represent America but what if they decide they need to defend the other side?  Can we trust them to resign?  Should we even ask them to be in that position?

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Atheism, Catholism and numbers

Reading America’s Atheists, Believe it or not, the fact that surprised me wasn’t that 30 million Americans claimed "no religion," but rather that Catholicism is America’s largest Christian denomination.  Growing up Catholic, I never felt like I was in the majority (except when we lived in Spain,) and I’m still surprised to find out that friends are Catholic.  I wonder why that is?

The same article also said the United States’ problem with religion is:

  • over-aggressive proselytising in the armed forces,
  • undermining science
    or AIDS programmes,
  • alienating minorities at home and Muslims abroad

and suggested that if America’s atheists were more politically active they could help fix those problems.

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Corporate personhood

I’ve often said "companies aren’t people!" when trying to explain to people why companies make some of their decisions.  Companies are made up of people, run by people and for people (or at least for people’s profit) but a company is not a person.

Well, in the eyes of the law, thanks to a lot of lobbying, companies are often treated like people.  That’s a mistake because a company is not a person and a company doesn’t behave like a human individual – so we need to treat a company differently than a person.  Here’s a good article by Thom Hartmann that explains how that happened and what it means.