While October may be the favorite month of thousands of humans, who excitedly plan their costumes of spooks, vampires and monsters, in anticipation of Halloween, cats, particularly black cats, have little cause for celebration this month.     I am no champion of Feline rights, but you may be interested to know that there are quite a few violent indignities that have been practiced on black cats at this time of year.      In...

    The Druids were the “wise men” of the pagan Celtic society.  Little is known of them with certainty; however it is thought that they played the roles of priests in the Celtic religion.     Most folks know that the holiday we call Halloween is derived from the Celtic festival of Samhain.  This was one of the great Celtic fire festivals and marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. The Celtic people...

 * To ward off evil on Halloween you should walk around your home three      times clockwise and three times counterclockwise * To see a spider on Halloween means it is a relative returning from the     dead to check on you * Knives were hidden on Halloween night so that returning spirits would     not come to any harm * If you place a turnip on your gatepost on Halloween then no evil spirits     can harm you or your home *...

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I’ve been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say that one is an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn’t have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or agnostic. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t...

It really pains me to admit this.  I seem to have fallen into that social group that has to check their social networking websites daily.  A very interesting phenomenon has caught my attention.  People whome you know or knew in the past,  initially accept your “friend” requests and then once they get wind of anything about you they no longer like they “DE-friend” you.  This is such a funny occurrence that it...

  Americans don’t need the government to tell them when or how to pray. Americans have the right to pray for whomever they want and in what manner they like. But we don’t need an officially designated government proclamation to do that. Our people are free to engage in worship whenever they want. Allowing government to set aside certain days for prayer and worship implies that the state has some say over our religious lives when it...