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4 votes
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What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology?
9 votes -
Americanisms the British public can't bloody stand
14 votes -
The metastasizing cancer of the Southern Strategy
12 votes -
People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?
11 votes -
This land was our land: The Mississippi Delta's history of Black land theft
7 votes -
The actress who left the stage to become an American Civil War spy
8 votes -
Inside Robert Ballard's search for Amelia Earhart’s airplane
4 votes -
Community size matters when people create a new language
9 votes -
Marxism, Buddhism and socialism
8 votes -
Agora
6 votes -
One American import we could do without: hard-right religious conservatism
14 votes -
Losing my religion at Christian camp: The way a decade at Christian summer camp both shaped and condemned views of faith and girlhood
16 votes -
The family that shrank France | Map Men
9 votes -
Ancient technology: Saxon glass-working experiment
5 votes -
Hajj 2019: live updates as pilgrims begin rituals in Makkah
Hajj 2019: live updates as pilgrims begin rituals in Makkah Hajj 2019: the Islamic pilgrimage to Makkah explained Every able-bodied Muslim is meant to do the Haj once in their lifetime. Why? What...
5 votes -
The ‘warspeak’ permeating everyday language puts us all in the trenches
12 votes -
Excerpt from "Myth and Ritual in Christianity" by A. Watts
... The very insistence on the one historical incarnation as a unique step in a course of events leading to the future Kingdom of God reveals the psychology of Western culture most clearly. It...
... The very insistence on the one historical incarnation as a unique step in a course of events leading to the future Kingdom of God reveals the psychology of Western culture most clearly. It shows a mentality for which the present, real world is, in itself, joyless and barren, without value. The present can have value only in terms of meaning—if, like a word, it points to something beyond itself. This "beyond" which past and present events "mean" is the future. This the Western intellectual, as well as the literate common man, finds his life meaningless except in terms of a promising future. But the future is a "tomorrow which never comes", and for this reason Western culture has a "frantic" character. It is a desperate rush in pursuit of an ever-receding "meaning", because the promising future is precisely the famous carrot which the clever driver dangles before his donkey's nose from the end of his whip. Tragically enough, this frantic search for God, for the ideal life, in the future renders the course of history anything but a series of unique steps towards a goal. Its real result is to make history repeat itself faster and more furiously, confusing "progress" with increased agitation.
—Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity. 1954
11 votes -
Lawyer argues that Humanists — who believe in good without a God — get short shrift in Nevada prisons
5 votes -
Grenada’s revolution at forty
7 votes -
Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor
4 votes -
Sweden to return remains of twenty-five Sámi people after more than half a century – historic event aimed at mending ties with the community
7 votes -
The anti-medical dogma of Christian Science led my father to an agonising death. Now the church itself is in decline – and it can’t happen fast enough.
9 votes -
Study uncovers unusual method of communicating human concept of time
10 votes -
Swedish authorities have refused a prominent researcher's request for access to official Hammarskjold-related documents
5 votes -
Meet the Macaronis: During the 1770s there emerged a new type of fashionable fellow, whose style was frequently and easily lampooned by cartoonists and the media
7 votes -
The birth of the semicolon
16 votes -
Camp Century – Secret Cold War base shifts through Greenland ice
6 votes -
How a historian uncovered Ronald Reagan's 1971 racist remarks to Richard Nixon
15 votes -
Politics complicate the hajj spiritual journey for some Muslims
8 votes -
The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look
4 votes -
What’s in a name? A little-known patchwork of bureaucratic boards are tasked with deciding when to change the names of geographic places
9 votes -
Third Crusade - The Beginning
5 votes -
Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly went undercover in 1887 to expose the horrors of an insane asylum
9 votes -
Georgia Gilmore, who fed and funded the Montgomery bus boycott
5 votes -
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture
8 votes -
The West seems unaware that Africa’s future is urban
8 votes -
China orders halt to history tests for students seeking credits for US university courses
9 votes -
The disappeared, the dead, and the damned: Inside the Church Of Scientology
8 votes -
Why are there so many different types of “R”?
9 votes -
The last days of John Allen Chau, the American missionary who was killed in November 2018 by the uncontacted tribe on North Sentinel Island
11 votes -
As mayor of Cedar Key, FL in the 1890s, Billy Cottrell reigned as a tyrant until U.S. forces chased him away
4 votes -
The perilous trip of Iboga, Africa’s premier psychedelic
5 votes -
Tainted by association: Would you carve a roast with a knife that had been used in a murder? Why not? And what does this tell us about ethics?
17 votes -
Female warrior long assumed to be a Viking may actually be a Slavic warrior woman who migrated to Denmark from present-day Poland
6 votes -
Getting dressed in the 18th Century
Getting dressed in the 18th Century - Women Getting dressed in the 18th Century - Men
5 votes -
Border collie trained to recognize 1,022 nouns dies
11 votes -
History of Hong Kong (Pre-History to Colonial Period)
15 votes -
Many US prisons deny Muslim inmates halal food and proper prayer
13 votes -
Study finds positive bias in human languages
4 votes