What Makes People Tick?

BBC News reports earlier today that Dutch experts have been given limited access to some of the bodies of the victims of the rocket attack against Malaysian Airlines flight #MH17. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose country lost 193 people, said all political and economic options were on the table if access to the crash site remained unsatisfactory.  "We want our people back," he told parliament in The Hague. Source: MH17 plane crash: Dutch experts examine bodies , BBC News

I am autistic. To be precise, I have Asperger's Syndrome. Autism comes in many varieties, shapes and sizes. You can't always see on the outside what someone is like on the inside, which is often quite true for autism. This means that many people think of me as someone who is reserved, shy or quiet while that's not the case at all. This BBC - My Autism and Me YouTube video explains autism in a simple way and shows several different autistic children. It looks at different gradations of autism and how people cope with being autistic, feeling different and living in a non-autistic world.  Source : The "AustismAssociationS" channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejpWWP1HNGQ Rosie who presents the video has Asperger's Syndrome just as I do. As she explains, having Asperger's "means that my brain works a bit differently."  Yes, it does indeed.  I very much recommend this video as (for the most part) Rosie explains her own au...

Apparently, when two people love each other and want to get married to seal that love, this man's idea of the Christian God gets angry and punishes an entire country. Why? Read on at the BBC website .  "[UKIP councillor David] Silvester, from Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, defected from the Tories in protest at Mr Cameron's support for same-sex unions. In the letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: "The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war." Religion fascinates me in all its ways, shapes and forms. Religious people also fascinate me, as do their actions, reactions, responses and modern-day interpretations of (for instance) Old Testament stories. How do religions adapt to modern-day society, if they do at all? And how do religious people adapt, if they do? ...