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(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
"Human" and Other Questionable Ideas
We "domesticate" animals, which is a polite way of saying we render them easy prey (cattle and chickens) or we make them companions and/or servants (dogs/cats). Were we to do the same thing to humans, it would be called slavery. But we don't think twice about admiring or even coddling a beautiful horse, though in order for one to be tame enough to ride or put to the plow, it must first be "broken." It's a nice word, "broken," frank and unashamed. What we "break" in a horse or dog is their spirit, their innate sense of freedom.
Thomas J. Hubschman
To turn someone like Jesus into a God is to diminish him. That is what Christianity has done. It transformed an itinerant preacher by the name of Yehoshua ben Yusef into a man-God, but instead of making his words more compelling, the Church did just the opposite, enabling itself to be their arbiter, and by divine commission, put forth its own interpretation beyond question under pain of eternal punishment.
Thomas J. Hubschman
I was upset because I've spent most of my adult life with a severe case of Inattentive ADHD, never seriously attended to it, and–now headed into my 70s–don't exactly have much time left to benefit from fixing it or to do what I can to help address a politically polarized country in which both sides appear addicted to alternating between distraction and outrage. Instead, I was walking through downtown on a very cold day looking for a rally that I might have mis-located or mis-calendared in my misguided attempt to "do something."
Marko Fong
