For the love o’the Lord, could we please not use hyperbole?

Let’s see how long it lasts.

Signaling an indefinite halt to executions in Texas, the state’s highest criminal appeals court late Tuesday stayed the lethal injection of a 28-year-old Honduran man who was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday.

The reprieve by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was granted a week after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider whether a form of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred under the Eighth Amendment. On Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in to halt a planned execution in Texas at the last minute, and though many legal experts interpreted that as a signal for all states to wait for a final ruling on lethal injection before any further executions, Texas officials said they planned to move ahead with more.

As a result, Tuesday’s ruling by the Texas court was seen as a sign that judges in the nation’s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off imminent executions.

I really do love atheists. I have a deep admiration for people who believe enough in humanity’s inherent goodness that they don’t think a god is necessary for it.

And they’re often right in their critiques: too many religious fundamentalists misuse God.

But, again, I think the trouble is less with religion and more with ideas of transcendence, which, I believe, are fairly inescapable. If you believe something is bigger than yourself (peace, justice, freedom–just about everyone believe in SOMETHING), you’ll usually give your life (or someone else’s life) for it.

The other critique is one of power: people use whatever they can find to justify their claims to power or resources. That’s true, but religion is not unique to this–the same is true for democracy, peace, safety, justice, whatever. So, whether you’re doing something for the transcendent or for the power with transcendent as a cover, you’re capable of evil. This is not unique to religion!!!

Polls suggest that 13% of British Muslims regard the 7/7 London bombers as blessed martyrs. Neighbors and friends expressed bewilderment that such nice, gentle, kind, youth-clubbing, cricket-loving young men could do such terrible things. But once you understand what they truly and sincerely believed – that it was Allah’s will that they blow up buses and subways – it becomes all too easy to understand.

It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.

The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

A new movie about abortion.

The first thing you should know about the documentary “Lake of Fire” — an unblinking look at the violent fight over abortion in the United States, including those homegrown religious fundamentalists who kill in the name of God — is that it was made in black and white. This is critical. Because the other thing you should know about this fascinating, discomfiting, at times unpleasant, confused and confusing film is that it sets off extremely graphic images of actual abortions against a notorious photograph of a woman who died after an illegal motel room abortion, visuals that are inflammatory if, for the most part, also germane.

Who is the Bruce, for real?

To walk back from this impasse, we need to see Springsteen’s persona for what it really is: Jon Landau’s middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity. Does it derogate Springsteen to claim that he is, in essence, a white minstrel act? Not at all. Only by peeling back all the layers of awful heartland authenticity and rediscovering the old Jersey bullshitter underneath can we begin to grasp the actual charms of the man and his music. A glimpse of this old bullshitter was recently on display when Springsteen inducted U2 into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame on March 14. Springsteen had recently caught the new iPod commercial featuring the Irish rockers.

Get in while they’re young:

As concern over student debt levels rises, lawmakers and campuses nationwide have turned their attention to credit-card issuers and marketing practices aimed at students. California, Oklahoma, and Texas recently passed laws restricting credit-card marketing on public campuses, joining 15 other states that already had such restrictions in place. In California, credit-card marketers can’t lure students with free gifts; in Oklahoma, colleges can no longer sell student information for credit-card marketing purposes; and in Texas, on-campus credit-card marketing was curtailed, permitting marketing only on limited days and in certain locations.

However, beyond the recent legislation, another type of state-sanctioned credit-card marketing escapes serious scrutiny: affinity card contracts and marketing. Virtually every major university boasts a multimillion-dollar affinity relationship with a credit-card company. Under these deals, the university can receive $10 million or more in exchange for offering credit-card companies exclusive access to students, alumni, and professors at school athletic events. In some cases, the deals require schools to provide student e-mail addresses and phone numbers to the card-issuing bank. As state funding shrinks for public universities, such deals grow.

I know this stuff is crazy.  People caring about kids?

Only about 25 percent of Americans support the administration’s $190 billion war funding request; 70 percent want the proposed allocation reduced, the Post said.

According to the poll, more than seven in 10 support the planned $35 billion increase included in legislation that would renew the children’s health care program administered by the states. Twenty-five percent oppose the increased spending, the Post said.

Smart stuff, though I have a few caveats.  Later on Cardinal Dulles gives a bit too much credit to the intelligent design folks, making them appear much more scientifically respected than they are. I mean, sure we can get into a large discussion of how scientific respect actually works (conservatives LOVE this stuff on global warming) and there are a lot of great debates to be had on the postmodern critique of science. But let’s face facts: falsifiable, repeatable experiments might not show the TRUTH, but they at least show what has not yet been proven false over and over (for more on this, check out the works of Karl Popper, or more popularly, Nassim Taleb) and such science is our best bet for at least certain forms of reality.

It doesn’t really matter though: my criticism is insubstantial to Dulles’s larger point, that of the other two Aristotelian causes. Those are what matter, and those are what are being ignored.

Several authorities on these questions, such as Kenneth R. Miller and Stephen M. Barr, in their replies to Schönborn, insisted that one could be a neo-Darwinist in science and an orthodox Christian believer. Distinguishing different levels of knowledge, they contended that what is random from a scientific point of view is included in God’s eternal plan. God, so to speak, rolls the dice but is able by his comprehensive knowledge to foresee the result from all eternity.

This combination of Darwinism in science and theism in theology may be sustainable, but it is not the position Schönborn intended to attack. As he made clear in a subsequent article in FIRST THINGS (January 2006), he was taking exception only to those neo-­Darwinists—and they are many—who maintain that no valid investigation of nature could be conducted except in the reductive mode of mechanism, which seeks to explain everything in terms of quantity, matter, and motion, excluding specific differences and purpose in nature. He quoted one such neo-Darwinist as stating: “Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces rationally detectable.”

Cardinal Schönborn shrewdly observes that positivistic scientists begin by methodically excluding formal and final causes. Having then described natural processes in terms of merely efficient and material causality, they turn around and reject every other kind of explanation. They simply disallow the questions about why anything (including human life) exists, how we differ in nature from irrational animals, and how we ought to conduct our lives.

Seriously?  I mean, I know the writer works at AEI, but “no convincing evidence”?  And then, later, he tries to pawn everything off on Paul Bremer.  Er, who appointed Bremer?  Um….

to what is all this to be attributed? According to one highly publicized article in Vanity Fair, several leading neoconservatives put the blame on poor execution of their ideas on the part of the administration. This is not a very satisfying analysis. Complaints about government incompetence dog every administration, almost always with justice, and there is no convincing evidence that the functioning of the present administration has been worse than that of its predecessors.

You read it here first folks: it’s not as much fun to hook up with your friend as you thought it was going to be.

I only know this because I read about it here.

Seriously.

Fine.  Leave me alone okay?  Just read the article.

Yet relationships in which close friends begin having sex come with their own brand of awkwardness, according to the first study to explore the dynamics of such pairs, often called friends with benefits, or F.W.B..

The relationships tend to have little romantic passion, but stir the same fears that stalk lovers: namely, that one person will fall harder than the other.

Paradoxically, and perhaps predictably, the study suggests, these physical friendships often occlude one of the emotional arteries of real friendship, openness. Friends who could once talk about anything now have an unstated taboo topic — the relationship itself. In every conversation, there is innuendo; in every room, an elephant.

The research, conducted among Michigan State University students, confirmed previous findings that most college students report having had at least one such relationship. Although that is undoubtedly true of many couples throughout history, “friends with benefits” have become a cultural signature of today’s college and postcollege experience.

“The study really adds to the little we know about these relationships,” said Paul Mongeau, a professor of communications at Arizona State University who was not involved in the research. “One of the most interesting things I get from it,” he said, “is this sense that people in these relationships are afraid to develop feelings for the other person, because those feelings might be unreciprocated.”