The notion that the Bible prohibits abortion is more recent than the invention of the Happy Meal.

In 1968, Christianity Today (Billy Graham’s magazine) pointed out that Leviticus 24:17 commands capital punishment for murder, but Exodus 21:22–24 lays out a specific scenario under which, if a fetus is killed, the offender must pay a fine to her husband. The author concluded that, according to the Bible, a fetus does not have a …

Links for October 20th

Planet Money: What If We Paid Off The Debt?Back in the good old days—before President George W. Bush, before fighting two wars, before September 11th, before a huge tax cut paid for with debt—it looked very much like the entire debt would be paid off by 2012. In producing the final Economic Report of the …

Links for August 27th

MSNBC: Santorum—GOP not ‘anti-science’Good for Jon Huntsman for acknowledging that the first step to getting the Republican Party out of the intellectual wilderness is to stop being anti-science. (Anti-science is anti-facts, and being anti-facts doesn't work for long.) Unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum says that his party isn't anti-science. He claims, by inference, that Huntsman asserted that …

Links for August 25th

Bloomberg: Climate-Change Scientist Cleared in Closing of U.S. Data-Altering InquiryThe National Science Foundation has completed its inquiry into UVA/Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. They have entirely exonerated him, finding no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. That's the same result as Penn State's investigation, the NOAA's inspector general's investigation (which was done at the request of …

Links for June 27th

WordPress Publisher Blog: A complete publishing system on WordPressThe Bangor Daily News managed to turn WordPress and Google Docs into an entire newspaper publishing system, by using a bunch of plugins to create an editorial workflow. Having written a lot of code to perform this very task, I'm really impressed by this. Better still, it …

Links for May 30th

New York: How Not to Talk to Your KidsPo Bronson summarizes research on self-esteem, praise, and children. Kids who are praised for their intelligence freeze when faced with tasks beyond their intelligence. But kids who are praised for their effort quickly learn to relish challenges, and their learning improves accordingly. I was definitely in the …

Links for April 13th

iWatch News: White House visitor logs riddled with holesThe Center for Public Integrity compared a list of publicly known visitors to the White House to the visitor logs that the Obama administration released. Funny—basically none of them are listed. Rahm Emanuel is listed as having hardly any visitors. Less than 1% of visit in the …

Links for March 29th

BBC News: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relicsSeventy ancient books, made out of lead, have been found in a Jordanian cave. The text is in encoded Hebrew, little of which has been translated. Scholars are debating whether they are of Jewish origin or—far more tantalizingly—very early Christian origin. Village Voice: Women’s Funding Network Sex …

Is “conservative nightlife” an oxymoron?

The Washington Post is in a bit of trouble for disparaging Lynchburg, although really it’s for disparaging religions conservatism. A freelancer promoting Lynchburg wrote of her low expectations, writing that “its reputation as home of conservative Christian-oriented Liberty University and the late Jerry Falwell hardly bodes well for style, culture and night life.” The ombudsman …