The Language of Puritans & What to Tell the Kids?

A couple great pieces came out today written by some of our favorite Buddha-killers.

On our dear sister-site The Revealer, Scott Korb has an intriguing essay about what Tea Partiers have to do with ethical eating. Hint: it’s in the vocabulary.

Pollan [about food] and McGrath [about the Tea Partiers] don’t write without judgment. They just tend to be judgmental about the same thing: ignorance of the workings of nature and of our own human nature. They seem to understand that, despite the stupidity that we regularly have to pound our heads against – say that John McCain is a Communist or that for a domesticated chicken “the life of freedom is to be preferred” – as Pollan wagers, the “choral voice” of traditional and cultural wisdom often has a great deal more to teach us “than the voices of science and nature and government.”

Over at The Providence Journal, Alex Rose proffers a new look at the Bill of Rights in his op-ed, “How about a ‘freedom from religion’ in the First Amendment?”

If freedom from religion strikes you as anti-democratic, ask yourself which is the greater right — that we be allowed to indoctrinate our children with our own belief system, or that children be equipped with the ability to see the world clearly enough to make their own decisions once they are old enough?

Read on, friends…