More on child witches in Africa

Jesus loves money
Notes from a Common-place Book: "Jesus loved money too!": Hanna Rosin looks for connections between the recent housing crisis and the 'prosperity gospel' in Did Christianity Cause the Crash? The short answer to her question is, of course, 'No, Christianity didn't.'Approximately 50 of America's 260 largest churches are prosperity-gospel churches. And 66% of all Pentecostals and 43% of 'other Christians' believe that 'wealth will be granted to the faithful.' Clearly, these American believ

Pedant's corner: soldiers and troops
Grammar-cop alert.This is a soldier:This is a troop:

Commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall
Of all the activities to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, this one seems the most appropriate.Palestinians tear down chunk of wall - Yahoo! News:RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) – Palestinians tore down a chunk of Israel's West Bank separation barrier on Monday in a protest staged to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall came down.A truck was used to pull down the wall section to the cheers of an estimated 150 Palestinian activists and foreign supporters near the Qalandia refugee camp just outside Ramallah.Israeli troops used tearga

Blogging blind
With the death of Amatomu and Technorati, I feel a great lack in the blogosphere.Both seem to have died from the same cause -- someone decided to tinker with them to make "improvements", and broke whatever was working before. There's a lot of truth in the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."Amatomu used to be a fairly good guide to South African blogs. You could see who was blogging about what, and the latest posts in various categories. It also gave fairly interesting statistics on one's own blog, showing which posts got the most readers and things like that.Now I sud

Saving the Soul of Secularism
Recently someone sent me, quite unsolicited, a link to this article Saving the Soul of Secularism:Since February 2003, millions in the U.S. and around the world have participated in marches, rallies and varied protests, making a bold, ethical stand against U.S. military aggression. Citizens have engaged in persistent resistance to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S troops.While numerous humanists have and continue to be actively involved in the anti-war movement many others are too narrowly focused on issues such as church-state separation