In response to Steve Radics

If you have no knowledge of women’s health issues, you should not write letters that show your ignorance.

For your information, women who take contraceptive pills may not be having any sex. Women may take them to regulate heavy or irregular periods, treat menstral [sic] cramps, PMS, amenorrhea [sic], acne, endometriosis, and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. Contraceptives also lower the likelihood of anemia, endrometrial [sic] cancer, ovarian cancer and ovarian cysts.

That’s more information than you and Rush Limbaugh will find in the dictionary under “slut” and “prostitute”.

Ann Hammond, R.N.

Pawleys Island

Relegate religion to “dustbin of history”

What makes it morally imperative that religion – and all irrational belief systems – be relegated to the dustbin of history as rapidly as possible?

Ignore for a moment religion’s narcissism and its wishful thinking. Focus, instead, on this: Reason is the only tool available to lead us to better, more rational lives. Religion dooms us because it celebrates a disbelief in reason. All religions rely on a sacred book that dictates how to act and explains why not to think about those commandments. While reason can never provide a justification for killing another person, religion finds it easy.

With reason out of the way any heinous action can be condoned simply by alleging that it is undertaken in support of one’s faith (aka abandonment of reason). Kill a doctor who performs abortions? Makes sense to the faithful. Damn a president because he’s not an evangelical? Unless reason gets in the way, this obscenity wins votes. Mass pedophilia? Ignore the children’s screaming, we can buy our way out. Burn your daughter alive for having been raped? Do you dare to question our religious tradition? If this form of madness is perpetrated by people not professing godliness, they are quickly locked in asylums.

With Islamic fanatics killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan following an accidental burning of Korans, even the famously secular commentators on MSNBC found they “could understand” the actions of the Moslem faithful. Really? That drivel is printed matter, people. Does it makes some kind of perverse sense that innocent Americans should die to satisfy Afghanis’ atavistic sense of having been violated? Have you taken the trouble to research the insane origins of the book itself, the fairy tales that comprise it, or the character of the illiterate pedophile who claimed to have written it? Only by beginning with the position that “reason is off limits here” is it possible to conclude that “understanding” is a sane response to mass lunacy. Religious sensitivities? The lives of innocent people are what matters here, not some butcher’s wholly fabricated, dark-ages delusions.

Is it not a further abandonment of reason for a presidential candidate to claim that our Constitution does not require separation of church and state? Actually there’s no contradiction here if you toss out reason and facts and replace them with religious insight. Since religion professes to be all good all the time (except when it beheads people and dictates their personal choices and lies to them and takes money they need for food and constrains women’s lives) wouldn’t we want it to govern us? After all, for millennia the church has been collecting taxes, fighting wars, waging political battles, and pursuing other such governmental activities.

Documenting all the ways religion has violated reason over the past 2,000 years is a task beyond the capacity of America’s limited paper supply. But perhaps it’s instructive to point out that reason, science, logic, and skepticism have led to countless life-enriching discoveries in the past two hundred years. Religion? None. That suggests that it’s no longer reasonable to bark up the religious tree and that a better paradigm for leading useful and effective lives is available if only we’d abandon fiction and embrace reality.

Terry Munson

Pawleys Island

29th Annual Murrells Inlet Fourth of July Boat Parade 2012 Art Contest

The Murrells Inlet Fourth of July Boat Parade Committee has announced the theme for the annual art contest. This year’s theme is “Red, White & View!  (sub-headline- Inlet-style Tried and True).

Student artwork will be used for Fourth of July tee-shirt designs, and for advertising for the Parade. The Boat Parade will be held at high tide at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 4th.

Students in grades K-12 in Horry and Georgetown counties are invited to participate. Designs should be drawn in pencil or pen and ink on a sheet of unlined 8 1/2 X 11 paper and should be received by noon on Wednesday, April 4. Call Page Mimms 843-237-4233 or by e-mail PMIMMS@we.gcsd.k12.sc.us for delivery/drop-off details.

For additional information, contact Gini Abee, Publicity Coordinator, Murrells Inlet Boat Parade Committee at 651-1224.

Gini Abee

Art, TV and Yearbook

St. James Middle School

Myrtle Beach?