A Roads Scholar

Map5

Some amazing maps of the US from Ben Fry:

An image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population. This began as an example I created for a student in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly.

Faith Beyond Fundamentalism

Every now and again, a writer gets an email or a letter from a reader that makes his day. I guess some will consider this self-indulgent, but what the hell:

I, a 55 year old raised Catholic, turned Christian woman had my world rocked by your book. I had been wondering for some time about my political whereabouts. I thought I was a Republican and was comfortable with it. I thought I was a Christian and felt somewhat comfortable with it. Then George Bush came along with his faith, which I thought was a good Tcs2 thing at first, until I began to see the party as hypocritical, or as I call them Pharasitical. After experiencing a Bible Study that I increasingly felt uncomfortable with I decided to stop attending.

Unknowingly then, I had put myself in a fundamentalist prison. Subject by subject you helped shake me out of that box. But now what to do with what I had lived and what I have just learned. I savored each page and slowly unpeeled myself from the fundamentalist box I was in.

A thought came to my mind about the administration’s fundamentalists’ thoughts on homosexuality. If Jesus were to come upon a homosexual in the streets I believe from the scriptures that He would embrace him as He did us all. If the scriptures reflect Jesus’ loving attitude, then how can the fundamentalists judge and treat them they way they do? Don’t they realize they are grieving the Father?

The beautiful message I got from your book was align myself with the work Jesus did for us and continues to do through us if we let Him. And we can’t let Him if we are judging others.

I like your chapters on life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. So much that I am now reading the essays from Thomas Jefferson. You opened my eyes to several philosophers that I would like to read more on. The message I got there was: enjoy God in your life and don’t push God on others – just live it.

The book is about politics, but its core subject is really faith. In my head, I’m sketching a book devoted entirely to Christianity, and what a modern person with eyes open and head cleared can truly still believe.

Einstein Writes

An Atlantic classic, Albert Einstein’s 1947 article on the atomic bomb where he proposes a world government, an idea with some currency at the time:

I do not hide from myself the great difficulties of establishing a world government, either a beginning without Russia or one with Russia. I am aware of the risks. Since I should not wish it to be permissible for any country that has joined the supranational organization to secede, one of these risks is possible civil war. But I also believe that world government is certain to come in time, and that the question is how much it is to be permitted to cost. It will come, I believe, even if there is another world war, though after such a war, if it is won, it would be world government established by the victor, resting on the victor’s military power, and thus to be maintained permanently only through the permanent militarization of the human race.

On a related note, also from the archives, here’s a first-hand account of the bombing at Hiroshima.

Losing Faith Through Reason

From the achieves, Philip Wentworth’s 1932 article on how college destroyed his faith:

It is no accident…that the groups which are demanding ever more stringent laws to regulate our private lives are identical, almost to a man, with the religious groups in the population. It makes no difference whether they are Protestants clamoring for stricter enforcement of prohibition or Catholics agitating for stricter legislation regarding the dissemination of birth-control information. In both instances increasing pressure is being brought to bear upon government to take over the practical functions of religion–and for the obvious reason that religion, in its decay, is no longer able to do its work in the world.