Word: sin
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Holy cow! It looks like the Pope has really gone overboard this time. His latest encyclical contains a list of sins so sweeping that it is now practically a sin to be a human being. Paul Hoylen Jr. Deming, New Mexico...
...then run for cover: Abba was not just the top-selling group of the '70s; Andersson and Ulvaeus created the smartest, most buoyant body of work from any pop group since the Beatles. Their gaudy gear, with the spangles and spandex, made them easy to deride, but their real sin was that they lacked "depth," which is to say they didn't pretend to be miserable. Instead, like pop performers from an earlier age, they pretended to be happy. Their music did too. The lyrics to the song Mamma Mia confess to erotic obsession and serial masochism, but the perky...
...inspired to write this because of the tsunami of December '06. In the wake of that there was all this bloviating by religious people from imams to leading evangelicals about whether there was some sin that people were being punished for where the tsunami struck. What struck me is that there was this assumption that God must be all good and all-powerful. For a long time on earth humans didn't worship good Gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek Gods, the Hindu Gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that...
...Scare Machine," as Kutner puts it, is more of the same. Like nuclear war - or like the more fantastical possibilities that Kutner imagines, such as a robot uprising or an unleashed super-plague - global warming will be an apocalypse of our own making. End times stories are tales of sin punished, and climate change is no different. It's just bigger - we're all digging our own graves, with every mile driven and every last bit of air conditioning...
...imposing its style on everyone. The notable exception was the quarterfinal match with Italy, but that, too, marked this Spanish team as special - locked into a defensive mud-wrestling match, Spain resisted its historical urge to attack at any cost, even at the risk of committing the cardinal sin for a Spanish footballer: being boring. In its semifinal against Russia, Spain had sat back for the first half, maybe to see if the Russians had anything new to offer since Spain destroyed them 4-1 in a group game earlier in the tournament. Nope. So five minutes after the interval...