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Advice For Your Kids

Some of the advice is good.

My Bad Hair Day Model

Our New Year's Day movie was "Up In the Air", starring George Clooney. It was both entertaining and topical. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a top critics score of 91 percent, beating Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, and The Blind Side. Clooney was also an inspiration to me for my bad hair days, as we are both of that certain age between youth and decrepitude.

Happy New Year!

An elegiac version from "Waterloo Bridge".

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we'll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we'll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

Palin's Metaphor

Palin had claimed her phrase death panals was metaphoric and accurate.

"To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not of receiving some government-controlled coverage..it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death."~ Nov 17 interview with National Review

"The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally," said Palin (same interview)."

Is it possible for a metaphor to be accurate?

A metaphor suggest that X is akin to Y. It doesn't mean that X is Y. For example, Shakespere, in saying that "all the world is a stage" does not mean that the physical world is a physical stage but rather there are qualities in a theatrical stage that transfer to our realm of existence. In that sense, the metaphor is accurate and illuminating.

The problem with Palin's self-described metaphor is that it is not accurate, in that it is an inflamatory projection of right-wing extremist paranoia. All hospitals use insurance utilization experts that define to the dollar and the day acceptable limits of resource expenditures for patients. The free-market model of health care presupposes rationing based on your ability or the insurance company's ability and willingness to pay the hospital for services rendered and also their fear of law suits. It is disingenuous and dishonest to accept the rationing and triaging that is a function of capitalism while demonizing rationing and triaging that is a function of socialized medicine.

Mariner of the Seas At Christmas

With two teenage boys, the Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas was the ideal Christmas vacation for us. They enjoyed rock climbing, ice skating, and their teenagers-only clubs, Fuel and The Living Room. There was plenty to do and the food was first rate. It is more adult-oriented than the Disney Magic with its casino and drinking venues. However, the smell of smoking rarely penetrated the more public areas. I also appreciated its well-stocked library.





I thought their food was equal to if not better than Disney. However, there is no availability of food on the swim decks and they charge for colas. I enjoyed the buffet on Windjammers and the more Asian food in Jade. We had wonderful dinner partners at our dinner table in Rhadsody in Blue.

Entertainment was inconsistent as compared to Disney. The singing and dancing was polished and the ice skaters were terrific. However, the comedy stylings sometimes fell short. The exception was Yakov Smirnoff, who was touched me in his love for the ideals of America. Later, we with 24 other couples took a seminar directed by Smirnoff "The DNA of Happily Ever Laughter". It was his effort to salvage from the wreckage of his own divorce how to build an enduring relationship. DNA stands for discovering how we are sometimes performers or audience, notice each other's needs ("Happiness is when our needs are met"), and agree on a way forward. It was a rare combination of both of insight and and humor.






Another special moment was when we danced on stage with Rock and Roll Hall of Famers The Coasters ("Yakyty Yak" , "Charlie Brown").

We enjoyed the European spa and I had "frangipani scalp treatment", that I had won in a raffle.

A much apprecated moment of pure sentiment is when we joined the staff and officers in singing Christmas carols on the Grand Promenade with an enormous Christmas tree in the background. That next morning in a nearby lounge, we opened our presents.

We had a tiny cabin on the second deck. It took some creativity to squeeze our luggage into that room, but we were able to do so.

Crowd control was generally efficient. This was true in getting on and off the ship, and in the use of a conveyer of tenders at Cabo San Lucas. Things got hectic at Windjammers in midday and we were were sometimes displaced to a later seating for the ice shows.

We enjoyed visting Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallerta. Cabo is the most Americanized and touristy, and the people who live there are not embarrassed to hustle for our dollars. Mazatalan, a city of 400,000, is a combination of squalor and affluence. Our boys played at the El Cid resort. But my favorite Puerto Vallerta. We took a bus trip into the hills away from the beach to see a different side of Mexico and its people. The mountains and gorges were lush and verdant and the people who lived their were friendly. Strung over those gorges were fourteen ziplines. I and the boys enjoyed zipping hundreds of yards through the air from platform to platform.





On the 1,000 mile return trip, the ship headed into a stiff wind. However, I sensed little movement in the ship because of its size.

Upon leaving the ship, we found we left a pillow behind. Although we didn't have success in retrieving the pillow while we were at the terminal, we subsequently got a call from Royal Caribbean saying they had found the pillow and promising that they would mail it to us. When it comes to customer service, they did walk the walk.

All in all, I thought this was a wonderful vacation and I think the Mariner of the Seas is an excellent choice for other families.

Mariner of the Seas

The next few postings will be about our trip to the Mexican Riveria on Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas

Here is a review from Cruise Critic and general information about this ship.

Here are some pictures that someone else took on this ship.



Mariner of the Seas

Tenting Tonight

When I was a teenager, I used to collect old phonograph records from flea markets, garage sales, and antique stores in Bucks County, Pennslvania. Some of these were from the 1920s and 30s. They were fragile and sometimes etched on just one side. Here is one such record.

The Politics Of Employment

Whern it comes to staying employed, this is not the time to be complacent or to rest on your laurels. Managers are no longer people-oriented. They are tough and exacting and are expected to make ruthless calls that effect large groups of people.

While it is impossible to shape decisions three levels above you, it is possible to position yourself so that you are perceived as a valuable employee. This is especially important for people in staff positions that don't have a direct impact on profits and people who are consultants.

My conclusions:

1. Discern the real organizational chart in distinction to the paper organizational chart. It is important to have face time with those who have real decision-making ability as to your long term viability as an employee. I do this by meeting bi-weekly with my managers. Recognize the power of the spoken word. Learn to control your behavior and shape the behavior of others by your behavior. Act the part.

2. Never let anyone else define you in a way that is at odds with what has really happened. Respond aggressively to wrong information about ypu. Protect your reputation with facts and truth.

3. Play to your strengths. Repair weaknesses.

4. Don't operate under the radar. This has the effect of making you stand out negatively.

5. Strive for Janus-like duality and flexibility. Work hard at what is in front of you but also plot your next move, try to see the big picture but also be detail oriented, be a technocrat but also be a generalist, work within your role but also across and outside your role. Don't allow yourself to be labeled. Cogs are expendable.

6. Survival is more a function of personaility and psychology rather than knowledge and hard work. Try to understand motivations and feelings of the main players.

7. Courtesy and integrity are power plays. Drain off grievances, admit mistakes, and give spiritual strength and affection to others when appropriate.

8. Information is reality. Perception is reality. Psychology is reality. The trick is to integrate information, perception, and psychology in such a way to protect your career.

9. Cover yourself. Document everything. Translate effort into metrics. Advertise or the sheriff will do it for you.

10. Get honest feedback on your performance. Make sure your performance is in alignment with managerial expectations and goals. Put in extra effort to make his happen.

Techno Chicken

Caesar's Bust Is On The Shelf

I don't feel so great myself.

Since Thanksgiving eve, I've been fighting acute viral nasopharyngitis, more commonly known as the common cold. My symptoms include coughing, runny nose, sore throat, nasal congestion, pink eye, headaches, fatigue, and malaise. I don't have a fever (more associated with influenza) and my appetite is fine-- good news for this Thanksgiving holiday. Now into my fifth day, the only remaining symptoms is a sore throat, some coughing, and a croak. I treat these symptoms with rest, lozenges, and Robitussin.

Wikipedia: "The common cold is most often caused by infection with one of the 99 known serotypes of rhinovirus, a type of picornavirus. Around 30-50% of colds are caused by rhinoviruses. Other viruses causing colds are coronavirus (causing 10-15%, human parainfluenza viruses, human respiratory syncytial virus, adenoviruses, enteroviruses, or metapneumovirus."

A lack of sleep and vitamin D definciency is also causally related to colds.
The best way to avoid a cold is thorough and regular washing of the hands.

At our Thanksgiving eve service, a large man was positioned near the door to the church to shake the hands of everyone who comes in. It is hard to resist such a friendly greeting. However, there is no doubt that such person to person contact is a vector for the common cold. I would like to see etiquette develop so that we can express welcoming warmth to others without touching them.

Lost In Space

The best sci fi theme ever. I loved watching this show as a kid.

What I'm Thankful For

What I'm thankful for. My blessing list. 1. Family and friends. 2. Health. 3. Home. 4. Fun. 5. Awesome children who are on a good path. 6. Church. 7. USA. 8. Work. 9. Meow. 10 Nancy!!!

Winter Thoughts

It surely isn't easy to face up to the realities of aging and death. Speaking only for myself, my inclination is to do as the Johnsons did. In November 1979, I was distressed to learn that she was dying. Elsie wrote that "the prospect of death does not distress me, but the prospect of becoming a helpless invalid does. Therefore, should this rare cancer of mine speed up the inevitable a bit, I would think I'd be grateful. If you find this hard to accept, it may be because you don't have to face the alternatives." Two months later on January 4, 1980 Elsie died. At the memorial service for Aunt Elsie, Aunt Viola said "Ray seemed frail and worn. Ray took his relatives and us to a cafeteria after the service. After we got home, he got right into his pajamas and slept for several hours. His children don't expect that he'll live long without Elsie." Six months later after Elsie died to the day, Ray died. "I was with my father when he died of a heart attack after a weekend of reminiscing," writes his son Ray M. Johnson, Jr. "Death was instantaneous and appeared to be painless, at least for him." The Johnsons' love for others than went beyond their death when they left their estate to 22 different people and their bodies to science.

Having friends in medical school and knowing of the disrespect that students sometimes show to donated bodies, I tried to discourage my aunt from donating her body. She acknowledged the possibility, but insisted the good to future students outweighed the bad behavior of other students, cheerfully endorsing this essay from Author Unknown:

"At a certain moment, a doctor will determine that my brain has ceased to
function and that, for all intents and purposes, my life has stopped. When
this happens, do not attempt to instill artificial life into my body by use
of a machine. And don't call this my 'deathbed'. Call it my 'bed of life,'
and let my body be taken from it to help other lead fuller lives.

"Give my sight to a man who has never seen a sunrise, a baby's face or love in the eyes of a woman. Give me heart to a person whose own heart has caused nothing but endless days of pain. Give my blood to the teenager who has been pulled from the wreckage of his car so that he might live to see his grandchildren play. Explore every corner of my brain. Take my cells, if necessary, and let them grow so that someday a speechless boy will shout at the crack of a bat and a deaf girl will hear the sound of rain against the window. Burn what is left of me and scatter the ashes to the winds to help the flowers grow.

"If you must bury anything, let it be my faults, my weaknesses, and all
prejudice against my fellow man. Give my soul to God. If by chance you
wish to remember me, do it with a kind deed or word to someone who needs you. If you do all I have asked, I will live forever."

My mother read a tribute I wrote for Aunt Elsie. "Over the years I've saved some of her letters," I wrote at the time. " 'This morning's mail brought the enclosed letter from Lillian about Uncle Otto's death in Ipswich ... another link broken in the family circle,' Aunt Elsie wrote me several years before her death. 'As we grow older, I think we accept death more-not only because it's inevitable but also because limitations to a life span become more acceptable. But that doesn't diminish the deep sadness and sense of loss when someone who has been a part of one's life for as long as one remembers anything at all-suddenly is no more.' Eased by a flood of happy memories-hiking through the Grand Tetons, boating down the Snake River, trying Japanese food-I feel the same sense of sadness." And now, two decades later, I see that Aunt Elsie's great gift to me was that life need not be a vale of tears, but a joyous smorgasbord of wonder and challenge and a striving for excellence and empathy as well as travel, theatre, books, cooking, museums, children, seminars, and music. With her great moral and common sense informed by a deep humanity and a supple and sensitive mind, Elsie Wik Johnson taught me as few others have.

When I was on the beach in Hawaii last spring, I gave Ben a teaspoon
of philosophical reality. I stamped my foot into the wet sand and
pointed that footprint to him as the surf washed over it. In a second,
the indentation was gone, as if it never existed in the first place.
That, I said, is our life on earth. It is but a vapor in the eternal
vastness of oblivion, a barely noticed flash on that endless ribbon of
time. As the preacher in Ecclesiastes said: "To every thing there is a
season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be
born, and a time to die." In the local cemetery, I came across a
ninety year old grave marker that had toppled over. As I turned it
upright, I wondered if anyone today even knows or cares that person
lived or died. And I realized that the day will come that no one will
know or care if I or anyone else for that matter lived or died. Man is
not the measure of all things as I'm reminded of Shelley's poem
Ozymandias.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

While my faith takes me to a belief in the afterlife, it doesn't mean that our life here on earth is much more than a ripple from a pebble tossed into a boundless ocean, a twig swirling into oblivion. That said, our response cannot be cloud-dwelling morbidity as life is to be lived, and it is our awareness of death that gives life poignancy and urgency. We are always hearing time's winged chariot hurrying near, and it is this knowledge that brings us closer to what and whom we cherish. For me, this means spending less time with tele-marketers and tele-politicians and more time with my family and friends, and less time worrying
about stuff I can't do anything about and more time enjoying the stuff that makes up my life.

The Darkside of Facebook

BROMONT, Quebec – A Canadian woman on long-term sick leave for depression says she lost her benefits because her insurance agent found photos of her on Facebook in which she appeared to be having fun.

Los Angeles, California (CNN) - The beating of 12-year-old boy by a group of classmates at a Southern California middle school may be linked to a Facebook posting encouraging kids to target redheads, authorities say.

"The Heart Has Its Reasons . . .

which reason knows nothing of."

Pascal

The Ontological Argument For God's Existence

To be clear as to exactly what the ontological argument says, one very simple form goes as follows:

1. God is the greatest possible being.
2. It is possible that God exists.
3. If God does not exist, He would be inferior to a God which did exist.
4. If (1), (2), (3) then God exists.
5. Therefore, God exists.

It just happens that people have made this argument much more rigorous. For instance, Godel created a version of the ontological argument using modal logic that proceeds as follows: For those inclined to work through how this argument functions, it's available here:

http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2009/06/godels-ontological-argument-step-by.html

I find the ontological argument unpersuasive once effort is made to understand it. The casting of the argument using model logic cannot whitewash its flaws.

Here is my breakdown.

1. God is the greatest possible being. To better understand the fallacy of this argument, let's start a parallel argument.

A. Pegasus is the greatest possible flying horse. The word possible is the operative predicate, indicating that there are none better horses, flying or otherwise.

2. It is possible that God exists.

B. It is possible that Pegasus exists.

On what basis should I concede that? It seems to me that the moment that you have a ground for a possibility that X exists, it must possibly exist.

3. If God does not exist, He would be inferior to a God which did exist.

C. If Pegasus did not exist, He would be inferior to a flying horse that did exist.

Now, I'm not expert in modal logic, but this seems gibberish, as an attempt is to prove existence in the using the negative subjuctive: "If X does not exist, therefore Y must exist." By assertion, we are creating the existence of flying horses.

4. If (1), (2), (3) then God exists.

D. If (A), (B), and (C), then Pegasus exists.

5. Therefore, God exists.

E. Therefore, Pegasus exists.

I don't think that follows.

A response from a reader:

Well, it is the consensus opinion that there are severe problems with the ontological argument. I should note that I do not believe in the ontological argument (in fact, I don't believe in God at all.) However, the reasons which you have cited are not the faults which are usually found with the ontological argument. In fact, if I understand your reasons correctly, then much of modern analytic metaphysics is unquestionably false. Given that this is a large body of serious academic work, it is worthwhile to at least try to understand some of the orthodox responses to your comments. I reserve neutrality as to my own position on this statements; I am merely pointing you to the accepted answers, not whether or not I personally accept them (though I do think they would be difficult to properly refute.)You seem to find fault with the modal notion of "possible" (which is sometimes also refered to as "contingency", though that has a slightly different meaning.)

You wrote:

2. It is possible that God exists.
B. It is possible that Pegasus exists.

On what basis should I concede that? It seems to me that the moment that you have a ground for a possibility that X exists, it must possibly exist. Strikes me as nonsensical.

In modern analytic metaphysics, X is said to possibly exist if we can form consistent propositions about it. Unless the notion of pegasus is somehow contradictory we must accept that it possibly exists precisely because, and only because, it is non-contradictory. We are not usually entitled to say that X has necessary existence only in virtue of its possible existence, and this is something that is strange about the ontological argument. Usually, philosophers find it sufficient to say that if they can imagine it, then it exists at some possible world (which is equivalent to saying that it is a non-contradictory notion.) In other words, if we can imagine it, then it is possible. Contradictory notions, meanwhile, are termed impossible. Modal logic gives us the ability to quantify over these varies different modes of existence - necessary, possible, and impossible. Therefore, modal logic is the formal tool that we need to express sentences containing various different modalities (i.e. modes of existence.)I should note that there are many things which are possible but do not exist in our world. I think it is non-controversial that Pegasus is an object of that kind (i.e. Pegasus is possible, but does not exist in our universe.) Of course, there are philosophers who believe in all kinds of things, so you can find philosophers who identify themselves as "modal realists". They believe that all possible worlds are real, whatever that might mean. This is different from the multiverse theory, though there are some who believe that these are the same thing. Most philosophers feel that these ideas are silly. I therefore will not spend more time on them.

What you wrote, while ultimately at odds with philosophical orthodoxy, is not entirely different from one of the standard refutations of the ontological argument. Personally, I like to formulate a parallel argument using the "ultimate taco":

1*. The Greatest Taco is the greatest possible taco.
2*. It is possible that the Greatest Taco exists.
3*. If the Greatest Taco does not exist, it would be inferior to a taco which did exist.
4*. If (1), (2), (3) then the Greatest Taco exists.
5*. Therefore, the Greatest Taco exists.

Now, the flaw here cannot be that the argument is invalid. After all, it is a simple modus ponens argument and its validity can be trivially shown. What we are concerned with is its soundness. I think it is non-controversial that the Greatest Taco does not exist. Therefore, we can conclude that the taco argument must make a mistake somewhere.

How is this different from the Pegasus argument? It's different because I did not attack the ontological argument on either the grounds that you cite (i.e. your problem with modality or your problem with negative subjunctives. You might be wondering why I did not give the orthodox response to your worry about negative subjunctives. I have to confess that I am not familiar with the formal fallacy that you are indicating if, in fact, such a fallacy exists.) Rather, this is simply a reductio argument showing that something must be wrong with arguments of this kind; the exact error is not specified.There is a problem with this counterargument (and so we begin the counter-counter-argument!) The first problem is that it does not tell us where the issue occurs in arguments of this kind. Maybe there is a Greatest Taco, greater than any other taco and perhaps Pegasus exists as well. We doubt that these two statements are true, but on what grounds do we come to believe them? Perhaps an evil demon is tricking us into believing that super tacos and flying horses don't exist. Egads -- we've been deceived our entire lives! But most people are willing to think that this response is probably false, at least on the basis of inductive evidence.The second problem with this counterargument is the possibility that Anselm meant something else, something more subtle. Examine premise (1*) of this argument and premise (1) of the ontological argument. These premises are slightly different:1*. The Greatest Taco is the greatest possible taco.1. God is the greatest possible being.In premise (1), what is a "being"? And, in particular, what exactly did Anselm mean? If he just meant object, thing, or entity, then this is very different from saying that God is the greatest possible "supernatural man with a beard". It's not that God is the greatest possible god; it's that, of all things/objects that could possibly exist, God is the greatest. So, pick out any object in the world and God will be greater than that object. Toasters? Yep, God is greater. Laptops? Yep, God is greater. Janet Reno? Yep, God is greater. Burger King? Still, God is greater. I think you get the picture.But this is not true of premise (1*). Here, we are told that the Greatest Taco is the greatest possible taco. Maybe toasters are superior to tacos for some reason. I don't why that would be true, but bare with me. The idea is that proposition (1*) only speaks about possible tacos and not the full set of possible objects. Thus, we should be able to identify objects, either possible or actually existent, which are superior to the Greatest Taco, if, in fact, no possible taco is the greatest possible object.Unless, that is, we change premise (1*) to read:1**. The Greatest Taco is the greatest possible thing.Now, we claim that premise (1) and premise (1**) are equivalent modulo the name of the greatest possible thing. One might think, on a variety of different grounds, that there can only be one greatest possible thing (i.e. "greatest possible thing" is a unique object.) If this uniqueness claim holds, then God is the Greatest Taco and the Greatest Taco is God. You might object here on the grounds that relating God to tacos is clearly absurd. But what this really shows is that any object, when it is given the status of "greatest possible thing", must have the properties of God. We can imagine a taco that is the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most good, the most merciful, etc, possible. Such a taco doesn't really have the properties of taco-ness; it has the properties of Godness. We probably wouldn't call such an object a "taco" since it does not have the properties we expect tacos to have. Just the same, if (1**) is true, then God and the Greatest Taco are identical.In case you're sceptical about the uniqueness claims, one simple way to argue for the uniqueness of the greatest possible thing is just to state that a non-unique thing is always inferior to a unique thing. Therefore, the greatest possible thing must be unique in virtue of its being the greatest possible.Another problem that you might cite in the ontological argument is the vagueness of the term "greatest". In virtue of what is God said to be the greatest? He obviously isn't the greatest evil. He's also not the greatest womanizer or the greatest misogynist. On all of these qualities, God seems to be the polar opposite (at least in the conception of God that mainstream Abrahamaic religions profess.) Yet, if we just say that He is the greatest possible in all categories, we are left with deducing clearly false propositions like this. There do exist solutions to this vagueness problem in the literature; however, none of them are really satisfying to me.There is another problem, though it is much more technical. In the ontological argument, the property of existence is ascribed to God. Further, He is said to be the greatest possible at existing; i.e. a non-existent deity is inferior to an existent deity. However, this is at odds with how existence is normally understood in the philosophical and logic literatures. In the literature, the orthodox position is that existence is a quantifier. But if existence is a quantifier, then it is not something which can be ascribed to an object. -- i.e. there would be no such thing as an existence predicate. However, it is impossible to formulate the ontological argument without an existence predicate. I understand that this last counterargument is still controversial. I also understand that there exists the position that existence is a second order predicate. I do not know very much about this last position nor do I know how it relates to the ontological argument.

A description of the problem of having existence be a predicate (at least as formulated by Kant) is available here:

http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/the-ontological-argument/st-anselms-ontological-argument/existence-is-not-a-predicate/

As for why the ontological argument cannot be formulated without having existence as a predicate, we have to turn back to examine what exactly it is that the argument says. Let's consider a modified form of the argument that I already gave:1. God is the greatest possible thing.2. It is possible that there exists an x such that x=God.3. If God does not exist, He would be inferior to a thing which did exist.4. If (1), (2), (3) then God exists.5. Therefore, God exists.However, premise (3) now has problems. First, I note that premise (3), as currently expressed, cannot possibly be coherent if existence is a quantifier since it was in that sentence as a predicate. Namely, proposition (3) is a sentence of the kind "x is p" (expressible in predicate logic as ). Now we look for a way to suitably alter (3) without changing it's meaning.Consider the sentence "If there does not exist x, such that x=God, then there exists some existent t such that God is inferior to t." We might formalize this as: inf where G is God, t is a thing which exists. and inf is a order relation such that if AinfB then A is inferior to B. But why would this proposition be true? Since we have existentially quantified over G, and not attributed some property to it, there is no property by the lights of which G is inferior to t. In other words, the relation tinfG returns false whenever A=G and B=t. But that's not at all the idea that we wished to express; we wished to express the idea that a non-existent God would be inferior to an existent God.

Russell's Sets

This graphic explication of the ideas of Bertrand Russell are getting good reviews.

This and That

A few quick takes on current events that strike my fancy. (What is my fancy? Probably that which is next to the cockles of my heart.)

Obama's falling approval ratings probably relate the weakening job picture: "Joblessness rose in 29 U.S. states last month compared with 22 in September, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Michigan had the highest jobless rate at 15.1 percent, followed by Nevada at 13 percent and Rhode Island at 12.9 percent." A comparative shows that Obama's polling foots with Reagan's polling.

Palin is booed by her supporters. What is it about this women that is catnip for so many people? Her supporters will claim that she is an average American beset by media elitists whereas her detractors will claim that she is a serial liar and a shallow and shrill opportunist. My view is that she is consequential on the political scene, an unelectable but canny player who will make a difference, but will ultimately be toxic to national Republican ambitions.

Guys notice another woman's smile, hair, cleavage, and skin. Hey, they got my number! I would also add voice.

So former Miss California Carrie Prejean has eight porn tapes to explain away. Say, Carrie, you cannot have it both ways-- be a spokewomen for wholesome Christian values while continuing to lie. "In interviews last week, Prejean claimed she became 'really serious' about her Christianity when she was 18." Right.

Will those CERN egg heads create a black hole that will suck all we know into oblvion? Stay tuned.

I'm not impressed by the student protests at Berkeley. The forceable occupation of a student building violates the rights of other students, and there are better ways to seek for a redress of grievances. (I feel like I'm in a time warp back to 1968.)

"Let his days be few." Christianism at its worse.

Satanism: The Toothless Tiger

Of all the religions that are practiced today, the most pathetic must be Satanism. It seems to essentially be Ayn Rand light and in its social Darwinism sounds like the very flower of the Grand Old Party. No black masses, no human or animal sacrifices, not even a belief in the existence of their deity. It seems to be more about Oprah-like individual empowerment. People who appropriate symbols of strength are usually weak.

Here are some of their beliefs:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/satanis1.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaVeyan_Satanism

A response from a reader.

There are different forms of "satanism." - both as a philosophy and as "a practicing religion." ... mostly: it is a philosophy that "man is his own god" and "ought to act and live that way."

Then there is the insideous occultic philosophy of "Luciferianism." - namely, that Lucifer is actually the god of this world and is greater than Yahweh or any other god. According to this mindset: lucifer is 'a good guy' who just wants us all to "be free" to pretty much "do as we please" and NOT be shackled by MORAL RESTRAINTS of religion or GOD. - this group has LOTS of adherents, ... many of them in secret and occultic societies.

Wittgenstein's Truth

Truth is an abstract idea. Abstract ideas are generalized from particular cases. From particular cases we can generalize an abstract “family resemblance” from all of the cases.

To see how this works, let's look at another popular example of an abstract idea from Wittgenstein; games. To teach me what games are, you cannot simply hold up a photograph of two people playing chess and point to it. For, I could easily take a game to be just that, a photograph. Only after giving me enough examples of games, “this is a game, that's not a game”, can I heuristically abstract all these particular cases into a vague and generalized idea of what a game is....
This is the distinction between object language (things) and metalanguage (meanings). Similarly, when we pick out true statements, we don’t need an idea of truth. We are picking out a certain physical event. We are referring to the physical event in object language with the label “true statement” but this should be taken as shorthand, just as “lion” is shorthand for “big growling thing with sharp teeth”. We pick out true statements, not by first knowing what truth is but by noticing remarkable features about them that, taken together, have a family resemblance. Fortunately for us, the abstract idea of truth isn't as spread out as games. There are essentially two kinds of true statements. That is truth by definition and truth by correspondence with reality. For example, consider the following two true statements.

1. All bachelors are unmarried
.2. All copper wires are electrically conductive.

The first (1) is true by definition of what the words “all bachelors are unmarried” mean. The second (2) is true by corresponding with reality.
Some remarkable features of the first kind of true statement are that it’s obvious, trivial and redundant. Any true statement of this kind will implicitly contain one term inside of another. The term “bachelor” contains the term “unmarried”, for a bachelor is simply an unmarried man. The statement is therefore true by definition of what the words mean. We are pointing out the same thing twice and comparing it to itself, i.e. redundant. ...

So, what is truth? Truth is a correspondence relationship, either between the terms within a statement or between a statement and reality. The statement, “the cat is on the mat” is true because the cat is in fact, on the mat. The statement corresponds to reality. The statement, “all triangles have three sides” is true because the term "triangle" is defined as something with three sides. Having three sides is [i]how we point triangles out[/i], so of course they are going to have three sides. The terms correspond to each other making the statement true as well as redundant.

That's truth, in a nutshell (comparatively speaking).[/quote]

Wittgenstein has clearly influenced you and I also agree with your epistomology. A non-tautological proposition must have some kind of correspondence to the natural world. "A cat is on the mat" has truth value for both "cat" and "mat" whereas "A angel is in my living room" has meaning only in so far as there is a living room that is mine. "A ffblgg is on the xxrsrr", however, has no meaning and thus no truth possible content outside of my own imagination. The test of correspondence of subject and predicate to what is in the world that we can jointly apprehend is a low standard but a necessary one that eliminates even the need to ask unanswerable and undefinable metaphysical questions.

Is a process of verification still necessary to discerning whether there is really a correspondence between subject and predicate? What if it just "looks" like a cat? Also is this definition of truth not subject to languistic convention. Whose definition of cat are we using. If I say kitty, pussy, Felix, or el gato does the subject begin to shift. Would it be better to say cat like thing. But, that would only be a family resemblance. Not that particular cat. What about the mat? Is it a small rug, a cloth rectangle, a laying thing, a tiny two dimensional floor cover? How does subjective interpretation impact the truth statement. Is truth only objective?

You make a good case that truth is not only objective. However, we try to attach unreal symbols to something real, which we then call truth when it really might be my truth. There are many kinds of cats, as the Wikipedia disambuguation suggest. In the case of felix catus, the best we can do is to state that the entity on the mat corresponds to a form that we agree is a domestic cat. The entity "domestic cat" doesn't exist any more than the entity "5" exists. But just as there are five people, five stones, five cars, and so on, the set of all "5"s constitute what we agree is "5". The same is true with our feline. So long as it corresponds sufficiently to that which agree is a "cat", it must be a cat. However, that agreement whether it be by humans or machines still involves subjectivity-- a disonnect between the thing in itself and the thing as I, you, or a robot sees it.

Cats may refer to:

Cats (musical), an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats (film), a video version of the musical Geelong Cats, an Australian football league team Jacob Cats (1577–1660), Dutch poet Felis catus, the domestic cat Felidae, the taxonomic grouping of all cats Catalytic converter, A shortened term for

The acronym CATS may refer to:

CATS (software), electronic design automation software CATS (trading system),
Computer Assisted Trading System, an automated trading system developed by the Toronto Stock Exchange
CATS pipeline, a natural gas pipeline in North Sea
CATS, a character from the 1989 video game Zero Wing known for speaking the phrase "All your base are belong to us"
Canadian American Transportation Systems, a defunct Fast Ferry company serving Rochester, New York and Toronto, Ontario. Central Autónoma de Trabajadores Salvadoreños, a trade union in El Salvador Charlotte Area Transit System, the regional transit authority for metropolitan Charlotte, North Carolina,
USA Chicago Area Transportation Study, the former metropolitan planning organization for the Chicago region
Citizens for an Alternative Tax System, a national tax reform public interest group in the United States
Commonwealth Accountability Testing System, the assessment process for K-12 schools in Kentucky,
USA Computer Active Technology Suspension, an automotive technology that controls the movement of the wheels
Credit Accumulation and Transfer Scheme, a scheme used by many UK universities to evaluate modular degrees
Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, an annual awards event in Scotland
C.A.T.S., fictional Home Office team from C.A.T.S. Eyes, a British television series aired between 1985 and 1987

Science Project Ideas

This is funny. These kids are asking good questions.

"Will there be minorities in heaven?"
"Crystal meth: friend or foe?"

The Breakup of Conservatism

It’s official: the conservative movement is splitting into two parties

That's not quite right. The GOP is shattered into more than two pieces.

1. The Oglaboogla wing. These are the anti-abortionists from the Bible belt who hate the ...

2. Liberterians. They want no government intrusion, including on the issue of abortion. They hate the ...

3. Wall Streeters. These are the Enron and hedge fund types who steal from their shareholders and ship jobs overseas. They hate ...

4. Main Street USA. Normal Americans who want to live their lives as best as they can. They hate the . . .

5. Neocons. They want to send the sons and daughters of Americans overseas to die. They hate the ...

6. Isolationists. They believe in Fortress America. They hate the ...

7. Mink coat set. They are the jet setting and opera going sophisticates who want to keep their trust funds intact. They hate the ...

8. Paleocons. The neo-nazi, skin head contingent, who hate ...

9. Everyone.

And so it goes.

The Heresy of Speaking in Tongues

"I am teaching what Jesus and Paul taught. What is it that you think I teach that does not agree with the Bible? You believe what you have been taught about the Bible as most Christians do instead of believing what the Bible says and obeying. Jesus tells us when we seek we will find: if you would obey: you would find what I am teaching about."

You have a distorted and incorrect view of what Jesus and Paul taught. I think Dr. Younce in post one hit the nail on the head.

"I have never spoken in tongues. After examining the Scriptures, I am sure that I never will, because they are not for today. Isn't it amazing? I have everything in Christ, and more, without speaking in tongues than those who claim tongues."

(Face To Face With Tongues
A Verse by Verse Examination and Exposition On the Subject of Tongues

By Dr. Max D. Younce, Pastor)


To which you said: "But does this person have everything that Christ has taught? or is it just claimed because he has not understood and acted on the scriptures? When Jesus taught that when we believe: that the power to heal; the power to cast off devils the utterances are given to pray and worship with will follow us when we believe and he does not have this following: does he really have all that Christ has for us or has he been deceived, and just thinks he does because he is too proud: being a pastor, and does not want to pretend that he doesn't even have the baptism with the Holy Spirit that will give us this power because the One with the power in 'in us'?

Jesus taught in Mark 16 15-18: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. AND these signs will follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak with new tongues: They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them: they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

So does this person 'really' have everything in Christ or has he been deceived by believing that what Jesus taught is a lie if he does not believe it?"

Here is a case where you are reading and teaching the Bible without understanding it. Is it really your contention that we should fondle rattle snakes or send people home from the hospice after the laying on of hands or drink Jonestown joy juice in His name or preach to all creatures including rabbits and dogs? Does any of this define what it means to be a Christian?

Let's be honest with each other. No one really knows what the phrase "new tongues" really means. If there is one thing that comes through in totality in the writings of Paul, and that is his commitment to logical exposition and to communication. There are no verses in the epistles that look like this: "Iglede biggle de booj blabety bigglety woo." And for good reason, and God has given us reason as well as faith to find the truth so that we can separate truth from falsehood rather than just blindly accepting whatever nonsense a preacher from a soapbox or pulpit may claim.

The Bible is a dangerous book, because in the wrong hands as interpreted by false prophets, it becomes a door way to cultish heresies, where people abandon their loved ones or people turn on the government with armed force. The Heavens Gate folks and the Branch Davidians defined themselves as devout Christians and read from the same Bible that you do, but the consequences were their deaths.

Finally, could it be that some of the writings of Paul and culturally and temporally bound, appropriate for the church of the Acts but not today? This is why I am skeptical about modern day miracles, especially as performed by televangelists. Our Lord performed miracles to validate His authority, but at the same time made it clear that he was bound by natural law. We see this in the rebuke to Satan when Satan asked Jesus to abrogate the law of gravity in the desert (Matthew 4, Luke 4). ("If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written: "He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.") I cannot say dogmatically that there are no modern day miracles, and I admit I will be impressed if I saw an amputee sprout limbs. But what is it that these evangelists are really trying to do? They are essentially making the claim that they are the conduit of God's grace. Thus, if you trust them enought to send them "seed" money, in return they will intercede with God on your behalf to bring you health and wealth. The fallacy of this is that they falsely believe that they mediate between you and God, that usurping the role of Jesus as the only mediator between you and God. In their cynicism, lies, greed, and manipulation, these people are not Christians but Satanists.

"The serpent that we will be able to 'pick up' or have no danger of is satan in the scriptures that Luke 10 clearly shows us."

Ah, yes. You reveal yourself finally as a liberal cafeteria Christian. On one hand, you take literally "talking in tongues" as a sign that you are "in His kingdom" while at the same time claiming that the fondling of snakes is a metaphor for Satan. Friend, you cannot have it both ways-- using literalism to support your dogmatic interpretation of the Bibe and the using figuratism to support your dogmatic view of the Bible.

Here is a daring thought. Perhaps those verses in Mark are nothing more than an injunction to show extraordinary faith and not a command to start babbling gibberish if what very well might be Polish curse words.

Cat Names

A list.

Children's Books Philosophy

The best philosophy comes from children's books. Here are some of my favorites. "Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get ther someday." (Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne). "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" (Alice's Adventures in Wondereland, Lewis Carroll). "And he puzzled three hours till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! 'Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. 'Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means little bit more.'" (How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Dr. Seuss). "Ooooooooo! I absolutely love Christmas!" (Elolsie at Christmastime, Kay Thompson.) "After all, what is life anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that." (Charlotte's Web, E.B. White.) "All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only being the cover and the title page: now at least they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." (The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis).

When the Old Man Died

An elegiac tune.

Happy Halloween!

We enjoyed "trunk and treat" at church on Saturday, where families decorated the backs of their vehicles with Halloween themes and there was a chili cookoff and lots of fun for the kids.

Ben carved the '2 Much Candy' pumpkin.

The Problem of Pain

"I've been reading through your comments again as I work on my assignment. This time I am wondering if I can explore these comments with you as part of my ownexplorations.

"Having read your own email in response to mine, I will understand if you do not wish to comment or explore them. It would be exploring them as issues rather than specific to your mother's death though I guess any comment may reflect on that.

"While I have noted these comments from what you have written, they are not comments that are unique to what you have written. They are comments I have heard from others as well.

"I must have done something terribly wrong to be suffering this pain".

"I believe that was a comment of your mothers and I have a recollection that I heard her say that too. I am sorry now that I did not explore that with her.

"The other question is one that is implied and you yourself commented that the question is as old as Job: Why should the good (the nice) suffer?

A similar question is found in "Why should bad things happen to good people?"

You ask some big questions. While Nancy makes dinner, I'll try to pound out my thoughts for what they are worth.

(Some of the contents of this essay comes from interactions I have had with several people going back many years.)

As regards to mom, I heard her make that comment, but it of course needs to be contextualized in the pain and depression that she endured, so I don't give it any weight at all.

"Tell me about your God of love," an atheist wrote to me a few years ago, "forall that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14." Never let it be said that atheists haven't read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit thatI too I have trouble squaring God's command to "slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" with the One who said "Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.

Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. "When I was eight yearsold, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died," she writes. "The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry."

A 16 year old had a question for an advice columnist: "When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block makingfun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls andgo out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was bornwithout a nose-although I'm a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. Ihave a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people-even myself-so I can't blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me,but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn't do any beforeI was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn't know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don't believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?"

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He isnot God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish tomake his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to dowhat He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn't exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It's a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust-that Hitler was God's punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

"Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have childrento do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say,perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh,Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just,O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept tha tharmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking atthe mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protectmyself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear,kind God'!"

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man's spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, therewould be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. This reply to suffering makes sense only if weassume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible, just as I must be responsible if I allow my child dies after I let him to play in the traffic. If those actions are bad, then God must be fundamentally evil and also the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated tohumanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life-dealing withwar, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God's self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

It is commonly said that God is omnipotent, having the power that admits of no bounds or limitations. The word itself doesn't exist in the Bible, which firstly makes the claim suspect. There are certainly many references to God the creator, that the winds and the sea obey Him, that Satan is bound by His will, and that "in Him we live and move and have our being." All of this is true. But it doesn't follow that God is all powerful in the sense that God intervenes in natural law. We see this is Jesus rebuke of Satan when when Satan tried to tempt him in the desert (Matthew 4). I also believe that God constrains Himself when it comes to consience and will. We say this with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Our Lord said "Not my will, but thine be done." I read that to mean there was nothing preordained about the choice that Jesus made.

My boys brought home their report cards yesterday with almost all As and a few Bs. They are the best answer I can think of to the problem of pain. Their intellect is to a great extent than perhaps I would want to admit mere chance--that mystery of DNA alchemy as well as the accident of birth that put them in community with great schools and teachers that mades them who they are are with their unique minds, temperaments, and appearances. The smallest chemical inbalance could have made both children profoundly retarded and barely sentient. Let us say that my children were disabled. Can we really say that the enabled children are blessed by God and the disabled are cursed by God? But what isn't luck are the chain of choices Ben and Zach will take in the future with the power and the potential to be a a physician or a porn site web master. And this, I believe, is where God comes in-- not in orchestrating the rain that falls or whether we like or don't like vanilla ice cream, but in inspiring and sustaining us to to live up to our full intellectual and emotional potential. I see the converse of this in what I call atheist infomercials, those annoying but strangely fascinating televangelist shows that purport to make you rich and healthy if only you will send in your contributions to a sliver-tongued man of the cloth. What is perhaps even more heritical are those who ascribe to God such soveriengnty that they decline to take commonsense medical precautions on behalf of their children, such as blood transfusions. Whatever these people may profess, they are by their actions the walking embodiment of evil. For by their actions, they are practical atheists in the worst sense, as they reject the existence of a God that can gave us doctors and medicine and our minds to make such decisions.

My view accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14,the boy looked like an old man. "An aching sense of unfairness" ledKushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to GoodPeople. Kushner argues that bad things didn't happen because God wants topunish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. (In mymother's case, what possible lesson or opportunities for personal growthwould be imparted as she lay on her broken back starving to death?) Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky-not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn'tquestion ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect andunfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundreds of people "acts of God", but they use God's name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this somewhat of a sterile argument that doesn't address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of thetwo million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw ofthe Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it's a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: "As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the otherday, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words "If the dead rise not, let useat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, stillretaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and willspring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovelin bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot theiryoung, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge."

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child,my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives hadbeen at no purpose leading us to chuck our ethics. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the classic Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain that I mentioned earlier. You may remember the movie "Shadowlands", played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had acrisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end ofthe day, there are no satisfactory answers-only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in"Shadowlands," we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears.

Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job-without an explanation but with the existential experience of God-turns for questioning to wondering silence: "I will lay mine hand upon my mouth." In this fragment of time on this island in space,we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and sufferingis inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that "My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." It did not say, "My tragedy comes from the Lord."

The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

"There seems to be a very thin line between a "tough love" God and a "not there / uninterested" God. How do you distinguish which God version correctly explains the human situation? Faith alone?"

I cannot say that I've nailed the question of theodicy. But it is my attempt to reconcile what may very well be irreconcilable-- the existence of an imminent God to the more deonstrable existence of nature bloody of tooth and claw.

You're certainly right about that thin line. Perhaps one way to analogize it is look at our relationship to Our Father in Heaven to our father on earth-- parents and their relationship to their children-- not when thir kids are able to harm themselves by playing in the street-- but as adults themselves-- making what we hope are sensible choices at the university but with us there only in spirit to guide them. Could it be that God expects that level of maturity from us, not to expect magic tricks, a hand on the back of the bicycle, or checks in the mail but to look within ourselves and to others to make the right decisions and take the right actions?

H1N1: Shall We Get Innoculated?

1,000 Americans, including 100 children, have died because of the swine flu, according to news reports.

Obama Declares National Emergency

Like any parent, I want to do the right thing. But what is that? I've been innoculated for flu before and I have never been so sick.

In 1976, up to 50 people died because of reactions to innoculations for the swine flue "epidemic".

My grandfather died in the pandemic of 1918. Is this a replay?

If we get injected and then the flu mutates again, will that invalidate the original innoculation?

Is it better to forgo an injection completely?

I will be especially interested in hearing from medical professionals on this topic.

Here is some good advice.

It seems new to us. Well, in actuality it's got the same risk factors as every other innoculation, and it's been well tested. Most of the stuff against it turns out to be unfounded or by an agendicized, quack source.

I thought alot about it, and someone pointed out "risk vs Benefit". That's what I'm going to consider: Risk vs Benefit. Right now, it's better to get the shot than to leave yourself open for the flu.

Deliverance: A Mean Banjo

I Want These Cats

I'm In A Box

I'm In A Box - BALLOON BOY PARODY - watch more funny videos

Today's Google Factoid: Results 1 - 10 of about 399,000,000 for i'm in a box. (0.20 seconds)

Quine's Empiricism

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

In his book from which you quote, Quine rejects the analytic (true by the meaning of the words) -synthetic (true by virtue of facts) distinction. The fact of a physical object is not subject to falsifiability while theories that contain those facts are. I think Quine is suggesting a cautious or humble approach to facts as the selection of those facts may be just as dubious as the theory that Thor controls thunder.

Spinoza's Monism

"Great spirit and monist, now considered atheist, Spinoza used the term God to refer to the total of Being and Nature which constitute the only one substance that exists."

There is a curious verse in the Bible that also seems to suggest monism.

Acts 7:28: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being."

California Dreaming

Except for the traffic and the politicians, California is wonderful.

Here some pictures of our Spring break trip to Southern California.

I wrote this to my father last week.

It is Friday night when I’m writing this letter. We just came from a late-evening trip to La Jolla, a seaside town near San Diego. We had an ice cream and then walked to the beach in the dark. The ocean breakers crashed against the cliffs sending up sprays of water and foam.

We left Sunday morning for California at about nine am. I drove for the first four hours and Nancy drove for the remaining three hours. It was interesting to see the whirring windmill farms. We arrived at the resort at about four and then drove to Oceanside, about twenty miles away, where we had a dinner at Ruby’s, a restaurant on the mile long pier.

The Lawrence Welk Resort is beautifully situated amid golf lawns and lakes and under hills studded by large boulders. Monday was misty, overcast, and chilly. We went for a timeshare presentation where we traded in our Scottsdale property for the Welk property. We felt this would give us more trading power for less money. That evening, we drove to Culver City near LA. On Tuesday, Nancy appeared on The Price is Right at CBS. The show will be shown on December 17th.

On Wednesday, I drove Zach to a charter school where he took his PSAT. It was a fairly grueling three hour test, but he thinks he did OK.

On Thursday, we drove 90 miles to Knottsberry Farm. Nancy enjoyed the Pony Express ride while I was thrilled by the Silver Bullet and its four corkscrew turns. We let the boys enjoy the rides while Nancy and I walked around Downtown Disney. Saturday we see a play “The Andrew Brothers.”

We hope you continue to be well and you remain in our fondest thoughts and prayers.

Band Kids Rock

The Best Cat Scratcher Ever

For more than a decade, we have watched out cat demolish our furniture. Good money has been spent on one solution after another. But we finally found something that delivers. Here is a cat scratcher from Petsmart that costs $20. It is made of corregated cardboard and included catnip. Kitty goes nuts over it.










(I'm not associated with Petsmart. I'm just passing along good information.)

Obama's Nobel Prize: Gilt By Association

Yes, Obama's Nobel prize is premature. But the committee was trying to make a statement of encouragement-- that multilateralism is to be preferred over unilaterialism and that the soft power of diplomatic and culutral influence must come before hard power of bullets and bombs. It was also a rebuke to neo-conservatism with its theory of preemptive war, nation buliding, and international crusades.

Chaparral v. Horizon v Streaker

My boy and I were watching the marching band play during the halftime. My other boy plays in the band, and it was impressive to see the chorographed marching and excellent playing. But the military precision was interrupted by a moment of anarchy when a streaker dashed across the field and into the darkness. A student next to me said about this moment of unsolicited entertainment: "Dude, that three dollars was totally worth it." The upshot is that the student was expelled.

http://utep.scout.com/a.z?s=366&p=2&c=907389&refid=400

Rio's 2016 Olympics

One fact to remember before you book your flight to the games. Last year, there were 2,069 murders in Rio.

Jesus Holding the Constitution

Impressive Christianist realism.

Writing A Conservative Bible

Who knew that Marxists wrote the NIV? The Conservative Bible Project is an effort to re-write the Bible to reflect conservative political bias, sometimes by removing verses to which they object.

"The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34:[7]

Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

How To Fix the Leno Show

It needs fixing.

Objections To Proofs That God Exists

Here is a run down of my objections to so-called proofs for the existence of God.

Cosmological. If God was the theoretical catalyst for existence, it doesn't follow that God still exists and nor does it answer the question as to why there cannot be a predicating cause to the first cause.

Telelogical. The complexity and order of the universe merely defines what the universe is and perhaps always was and will be. We cannot logically infer from that complexity God. If that complexity always was, then it would follow that God would not be necessary and will not be necessary.

I was once seduced by the ontological argument, but then came to see it as Platonism. God might not merely be a conceptual bucket-- an intellectual abstraction-- but could also psychological projection of our fears and hopes. We certainly cannot make the leap that a "being greater than that which cannot be conceived" exists. Also, we have no way of knowing if God is a being.

If the basis of our belief in God is the Bible, we can only assume that God is what is stated: spirit or Logos, and not being at least as we normally conceive a being.

I'm skeptical of the moral argument-- that a belief in God is necessary to moral law and order, as there are countless godless people and legal systems who root their ethics in something other than a belief in God, for example, in the categorical imperative or in custom.

Testimony as evidence is worthless for many obvious reasons.

One of the stronger arguments (although it still seems weak to me) is the prevelence of the belief in God(s). It seems that humans are generally wired to believe in God for some reason.

I asked why wife why she believed in God, and she simply answered: "My eyes." That's not a bad argument-- the miraculous ability to see and also the things we do see. But I can also see how one can be a hard atheist and at the same time get a sense of numinous in looking at a new baby or the Grand Canyon.

Why is this problem unsolvable? It is unsolvable because the question "Does God exist" is not logically and linguistically meaningful. It I was to ask the question: "Do cats exist in the universe?" it would also be unanswerable. Why? It is because the subject "cats" is definable whereas the predicate "universe" is undefinable. If you were to ask" "Is there a cat on my desk?" it is answerable because both subject "cats" and predicate "desk" can be apprehended within the natural world. Until we define "God" and "exist" within the context of the natural world, we can never prove that God exists in the natural world.

So what is the resolution? For me, it is to simply accept Genesis 1:1 at face value: "In the begininning God . . .". We must accept or don't accept God's existence as axiomatic.

But why choose as an a priori "The God of the Bible is"? I think the choice must be of necessity a leap of faith which we must then road test by personal experience. While personal experience proves nothing, it does prove everthing to those who are looking for confirmation that a belief in God's existence as an operating and organizing principle for life is sound.

The bridge between belief and non-belief is not reason but faith in Jesus. If the essence of Christianity is faith and if God has revealed Himself by appealing to a facility in men and women other than reason, then argument is not enough. Apologists for Christianity use one rational argument after another, only to find as Locke said “as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly: and where it fails them, they cry out, ‘it is a matter of faith—and above reason.” It’s an illusion that we can arrive through reason at a belief in God, as the ground for that belief must be reason itself. Thus, the person who can discern through reason that God exists has only discerned that Almighty Reason exists, since reason is what that person ultimately trusts. “God can no more prove His existence than He can swear,” Kierkegaard said. “He has nothing higher to swear by.” The goal for validating the existence of God must be on meaning rather than reason.

I believe for the same “reason” that monkeys scramble up a tree to avoid the teeth of a hungry lion.

Bonhoeffer wrote that we can only speak "of" God, we cannot fruitfully speak "about" Him. I didn't get this at first but now I find this is true. We must speak of God in the way God wants it. We must stay close to scripture and to honesty and to wisdom. Conversations like this have God reaching down from Heaven. But conversations "about" God pull Him down on our level and we toss Him around like a basket ball. We must be aware that God is holy, and without seeking holiness we cannot progress in knowing God. See, try to imagine someone who wants to have peace with God. He cannot have peace with God on his human terms ... he must allow God to make peace with him, the human, on God's terms. God wants everything to start at the cross where He can restart lives on His terms and with His vision.

Beautifully expressed. In talking"about" God, I think Christians are in error by using as a chief justifier reason just as I think they are in error by using science as a chief justifier about the Bible. It puts us into a position of chasing a God of the gaps while losing sight that the chief gap may be within.

I’d be interested in why you think this is true. It seems to me that if we posit "Either God exists, or He does not" then we can reach a well grounded conclusion."

Why? What if we ask the question: Does glghrr exist? Can we really have a well-grounded conclusion as to whether glghrr exists? How so?

"Which, of course, doesn’t address evidence for the existence of God, at all. It simply says "I like my explanation better than yours". He then proceeds to change the subject from Design to Evolution, begging the question."

Evolution at least can be decomposed into units that be be analyzed, refuted, or confirmed. A statement that "God created the Grand Canyon" can be believed but it cannot be refuted or confirmed.

"You seem to be implying that Christians hold an irrational belief simply by saying God is Personal."

I don't suggest Chrsitians are irrational if they believe in a personal God. I am saying that such a belief is arational, not subject to principles of induction or deduction. It doesn't follow that the subject of their belief doesn't exist.

"What is your ‘idea of truth’? Truth is a characteristic of a claim: either it corresponds with reality (true) or it does not (not true).."

There are different kinds of truth, including spiritual truth and aesthetic truth. But truth as commonly understood pertains as you suggest to correspondence between what is subjectivly apprehended and what objectively exists. This is an ethical as well as an epistemlogical principle, as when I asked my child: "Did you or did you not take that cookie." The resolution is only yes or no. In the case of God, it is not enough that God is in our heart but that God exists outside all hearts. I believe that is true. I only contend we cannot know that is true through reason.

"Going back to the original statement, let me explain my reservations. By the way, thanks for clarifying that you do not advocate Logical Positivism. However, leaning on Wittgenstein and Ayers, both Logical Positivists, lends some difficulty in distinction."

(Wittgenstein is one of the few philosophers I've tried to understand.) It isn't accurate to say that Wittgenstein was a logical positivist, although he influenced logical positivism.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Logical_positivismHis writings also lend no credence to the view that Wittgenstein disclaimed belief in God. To the contrary, I came across the following in his "Notebooks". "How things stand, is God. God is, how things stand. To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that life has meaning. To believe in God means to see the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." Compare this last statement to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Chapter One: "The world is everything that is the case" and you have Wittgenstein's acognosticism-- a category other than theism, atheism, and agnosticism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein closes his Tractatus with: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Into Wittgenstein’s silent category go statements such as “Personal encounter is the only sure avenue to truth.” Since these are neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, they are meaningless. (Edit: This also applied to the statement: "Only emperically verifiable statements are meaningful"! Doen't all synthetic a priori truth-- all what Kant calls transcendental forms-- fall into this category? ) Of the “Last Judgment,” Wittgenstein writes that “I couldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the statement that there will be such a thing. No ‘perhaps’ nor ‘I’m not sure’. It is a statement that does not allow for such an answer.” It is meaningless to affirm or deny that God exists or even to raise that question. It is not a meaningful question to raise, because God is in the realm of value, and the world is the realm of fact. What Wittgenstein tried to do was to refocus philosophical debate away from questions that elicit meaning to words as they are used. For example, "what is time" is exceedingly difficult to answer, whereas it isn't so hard to answer the question "what is the time." I think Wittgenstein is correct in his repudiation that the spectrum of belief is merely theisim or atheism, or theism, agnosticism, or atheism, as if these were all embracing and mutually exclusive categories. Consider the sentence: “Jesus is God.” Wittgenstein would say that such a statement cannot be affirmed or denied or even addressed any more than we can evaluate the sentence “@#$ is %^&.” We cannot even suspend judgment on the question as we have no basis for any kind of a judgment. This is not to say that "Jesus is God" cannot be an article of faith and that Jesus is God" is an irrational statement or is false.
"I’m not sure at all why you think the question meaningless: it certainly seems like a question that has value, and can be answered."
It is certainly and often intensely personally meaningful. It is just not logically and linguistically meaningful. (Edit: I have often noted in rligious and philosophical debates long discussions that fall and rise on the meaning of words, as we struggle to associate English with the presumed reality behond that English. It is I think an erroneous assumption that the words we use corresponds to the reality we are trying to describe or define.)

"Why, certainly it can be answered. All I have to do is find a cat. I actually don’t even have to do that. I can ask for a measurable definition of ‘cat’ then find a reliable report of a cat from a trustworthy source."

Not so. I would not quarrel with you identification of the entity "cat". (I dropped off such a not especially happy furry entity at Pet Mart's cat spa this afternoon.) But, speaking not in the venacular but as strict logicians, we cannot assume that the "cat is in the universe" until we know what the "universe" is-- some kind of domain of reality of which the cat is a part. We cannot assume that the cat is in the universe like we can see that the cat is on the desk. It is perhaps no more meaningful to ask ourselves whether or not "a cat has a soul" or whether "a cat has a ghrty" or whether or not a "hyrt has a tq$4." Without some reference to Wittgenstein's world of facts, we are left wandering in a Jabbocky universe where cats "gire and gimble in the wabe."

I presume that you use the term ‘natural world’ in the sense of ‘all of creation’. "

The natural world is the world that you and I live in. (Edit: It is the exterior world, the world that is not a projection based on abnormal cognitions. For example, there can be no overlap between the world of facts and solipsism or nightmares or mirages or delusions.) I grant that there are people with intuitions beyond other people and creatures that can see colors and hear sounds that humans cannot not. But my bar for logical and linguistic permissibility is extremely low, but it nevertheless exists. The subject and predicate must be apprehended in some way from something or someone other than ourselves. It is the distinction between "I believe in angels" and "I see angels in my living room." I have no brief with the first statement as a conviction. As to the second statement, I don't think it is inappropriate that exceptional claims require exceptional evidence and if it can be proved, it must be proved.
In my earlier post, I made this point. You tell me what this entity "God" is and I will tell you whether or not this entity "God" exists. Only on the surface, is this question an easy one, for the word God is one of those words that everyone uses but no one really defines. When politicians say that we’re one nation “under God”, the question becomes exactly what is it precisely that we are under? If the answer is: a supreme being, the question then ecomes, what exactly is this supreme being and how do we know that it is interested in us or if it even exists? The Bible isn’t clear as to whether God is a “being” and if “supremacy” is a quality of God. It surely rejects the notion of the old man with the white beard and the deep voice, as God is defined as spirit (John ), fire (Hebrews ), light (1 John 1:5), love (1 John 4:8), and logos (John 1:1). The Church of England defines God as “living, without body, parts or passions” but I certainly have trouble picturing a life that is without body, parts, and passions, like an autistic the Friendly Ghost. If God is spirit, is God therefore emotion-- a chemical reaction or firings of neurons? Does God exist in the same way that my cat exists or in the same way that my love for my cat exists? Is God a metaphor for what we don’t know or cannot know? Is God real in the same way that Santa Claus is real? Is God a sewer that flushes away the waste and the worst of this world? Does God exist in the same way that a unicorn exists? What is it that distinguishes the reality of the Christian God from, for example, the unreality of Zeus? Can we believe in God if we cannot define or describe God? If God is consciousness, is that consciousness human consciousness, which would die when all humans die? Is God nature, as the Deists believe, or the sum of all natural laws, as Albert Einstein believed? Is God all that which is not—all that which is outside an imaginary circle drawn around all that exists? Is God localized in persons, places, or things—the Buddha, volcanoes, or money? Is God someone playing with her retarded sister in a playground while both giggle with delight? Are we, as some New Age religionists believe, God? Could God not be noun at all but a transitive verb— like the loving relationship of my boy to his worthless but comforting teddy bear? Does God care about us? Is our Father in Heaven a reflection of our fathers on earth—a cruel and distant father on earth makes us believe in a cruel and distant God, a loving and tender father lets us believe in a loving and tender God? Is God numinous—the awe we feel when we look at a sunset or a baby? Is the word God a mental bucket—a meaningless word that only gains meaning when we fill it with meaning? Is belief in God animated only by the fear of our death and the fires of hell? Is belief in God a utilitarian decision-- because the majority of people are theists, our lives will be easier if we are theists? Is belief in God a kind of celestial bet? Is God a projection of our hopes, a mass delusion, or a part of our biological wiring? Do we believe in God because our fathers and their fathers believed in God? Is God as Karl Barth said ganz Anders—wholly different? Is God the absolute, all matter and all force, swirls of atoms and hurricanes and galaxies, the first cause and the end of history, the alpha and the omega? Is God not here, not yet, evil, impotent, a crutch, a drug, a clown, asleep?

I hope by now you see the problem.

Why does the existence of a moral law require a law giver? Because that is the nature of imperatives, mandates, laws: they carry authority only because they are mandates from a personal being. Your description (along with other problems) doesn’t justify the ‘oughtness’ of moral laws (to borrow from another). "

I fail to see why a moral rule: "That shalt not kill" requires either a belief in God or God. Humans from the beginning of time have had such a prescription for their own self-preservation and the preservation of their tribe. This is true even in the most bloodthirsty of peoples, such as the Vikings, Mongols, or Mayas. As a utilitarian device, they combined this moral rule with their theism to give their moral rule legitimacy. As law became more secularized, legitimacy found its roots not in theism but in the consent of the governed or in godless totaliterianism. Arguably, with this has come greater morality generally-- for example, less tolerance for child abuse and labor, the subjugation of women, and slavery. The mandate "Thou shalt not kill" carries authority because its violation tears asunder the fabric of society, not because an Thor or Yahway said "Thou shalt not kill." Such a mandate doesn't come from an assumed supreme being but all normal beings.

We Continue To Talk

1) Moral licentiousness and decay weakens a society
2) The left champions moral licentiousness and decay
3) Therefore, the left champions policies that weaken society
If you want to deny the conclusion you must deny one or more of the premises.

Which premise(s) do you wish to deny?

I deny both premises. As to #1, and speaking as a father of two teenagers, I think exposure to moral licentiousness and decay are not unmitigatedly bad as it exposes them to the real world and thus innoculates them for the real world. Of course, exposure to such is not the same as consent to such. I take a quasi-Nietschean, social-Darwinian view that a world without evil is a world without struggle and a world without the potential for good.

As to #2, I see that as neither a premise or a fact. To the contrary, who do you suppose it is that owns and manages the vast and effectives engines of moral corruption but rightist business people, most of whom are conservative Christians? Why? Because it is in their financial self-interest to do so. Fox is a stirling example. O'Reilly, who I admire for his tough-minded (albeit wrong-minded) independence of thought (in contrast to Beck who is a lunatic and Hannity whom is a GOP apparatchik) nevertheless almost always has a needlessly salacious segment on his show. But drill down a bit more. Who do you suppose are the people who are having abortions, the people who are getting divorced, the mobsters, the pediophiles, the murderers? They are not just generally Christians but conservative Christians, and repeated statistical studies support this. The denial of this ("No true conservative Christians are morally depraved") is of course the No True Scottsman fallacy, which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

The problem with this argument is that it derives an unproved predicate ("puts sugar on porridge") from the subject ("Scotsman"). The move is from a synthetic-contingent proposition (one that can be falsified by facts) to an analytic-necessary assertion (one that is true by definition but has no relationship to the facts). Now, sometimes the argument is valid as when the predicate derives from the subject, as in "no true vegetarians eat beef".

The family was generally in accord with that stipulation. This is a good example of the vast spread between principle and application and where deeply held principles are chucked in favor of situational ethics. We clearly don't see eye to eye on the pro-life issue although we are in accord with the general principle of an undivided reverance for human life. It is the application in real time under the fog of crisis that is the rub. At the time, I was disappointed at my family for thisi decision, although I've tried hard not to conceptualize in in legals terms such as homicide or suicide. I can conceive of a situation where it may be acceptable to remove nourishment from me if I was in my mother's place. However, I would never want this to happen if I was still conscious, as was the case for my mother, and nor should such decisions be compelled one way or another by the legislature. These kind of decisions are difficult, which is why I am suspicious of moral absolutist claims of any kind as compelleing as they may seem at the time. Such people who make them simply have not lived enough life or thought deeply enough to make them in my opinion.

I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you on this. The account of your mother's late life and death is very moving.I take it that your family, supposedly pro-life as it was, was in accord with the stipulation to withhold nutrition and hydration?It is my own view that extraordinary measures may be withheld when it is pretty clear that a person's natural life-expectancy has reached its course, but that basic necessities such as nutrition and hydration should never be intentionally withheld. Those things, I believe, are the right of any human person, if they are available. So I think I'm with you on this one, and I am truly sorry for the suffering your mom had to endure at the end of her life, and I'm sorry that you had to witness it. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm sure it is not easy.

Do you see my mother's death in terms of either suicide or homicide?
I think many Kantians (although not Kant!) claim to be moral objectivists rather than moral absolutists. I see no incompatability with situational ethics or utiliterianism and Kantianism so long as the former is rooted in moral objectivity.

I agree there is a distinction between utiliterianism and deontological ethics in that the former considers consequences while the latter does not. However, there can be an overlap as well, as they both try to root moral rules in something other than God or feelings. In the case of Bentham's utiliterianism, it is happiness for the greatest number and Fletcher's situational ethics, in which agape love is the great goal, and in the case of Kant's categorical imperative, it is to treat others as an end rather that as a means to an end. I'm aware that both Bentham and Kant tried to turn their principles into absolutes, but that need not be the case. Consider for example Kant's discussion in Grounding for the Methaphysics of Morals on suicide: "A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels sick of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether taking his own life would not be contrary to his duty to himself. Now he asks whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. But his maxim is this: from self-love I make as my principle to shorten my life when its continued duration threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction. There only remains the question as to whether this principle of self-love can become a universal law of nature. One sees at once that a contradiction in a system of nature whose law would destroy life by means of the very same feeling that acts so as to stimulate the furtherance of life, and hence there could be no existence as a system of nature. Therefore, such a maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and is, consequently, wholly opposed to the supreme principle of all duty." The contradiction is framed in terms of the conflict of universalizing self-love with self-hate. There are historical episodes when suicide has been regarded not just as a heroic act but as a moral act, as in the Masada deaths. In my mother's case, there is both ambiguity as to consequences but also good will by all concerned, not that that mitigates the act by my mother and the doctor. I disagree with the existentialists that suggest that the action is meaningless or the cause for that action so long as we act in good faith. I'm looking for more.

I don't know enough about the circumstances surrounding your mother's death to say whether it might have been suicide, homicide, both, or neither. I'm only pointing out that you can use those terms morally and not just as legal terms.As for Kant, the principles generated by the CI, whatever they may be, are supposed to be absolute principles. That's the whole point of their being universalizable.You may not see any incompatibility between utilitarianism (or situationalism, or whatever you wish to call it) and Kantianism, but Kant sure did. That was the whole point behind his so-called second formulation of the CI: "Now I say man...." It was to preserve the dignity of the human person against any calculations of utility, which is what he took Hume to be pointing at and presciently feared would become a widely accepted moral theory.There is a lot more to Kantianism than mere objectivism. Utilitarianism is an objectivist moral theory, and Kant was a staunch opponent of (what we now call) utilitarianism.Kant would not have struggled with the permissibility of terminating innocent human life. He would have said it was impermissible because he thought it could not be absolutized as a universal moral law.

If the principles in either of these systems are not taken to be absolute, then one has moved into a different system of ethics all together.

I feel like seconding William James' "damn the absolute." It seems that absolute principles of morality are both nonsensical (unless we want to endorse an application such as "death to all killers" and dangerous. My father, for example, is a wonderful man in many respects. But there is not the slightest doubt that having to make a false choice between Jesus and my death, he would choose my death, and fanatics make choices like that constantly. In the more sane world, we also have doctors and generals who struggle with difficult lifeboat choices that confound deeply held principles. I'm not quite as dismissive as you are toward existentialism, especially when such choices are attached to a spiritual goal. It seems to be based on a realistic view of man and society and it upholds the notion of man's freedom of to make choices, as does Kant.

I wouldn't say "there are no absolutes" (even in the metaphysical sense) is a credo of any existentialism of which I'm aware. It also seems to me that you greatly mischaracterize existentialism in your comment below and also incorrectly tie the philosophy to "pro choice" impulses.

The Existentialists are crass non-cognitivists with respect to morality.. They held that something becomes morally permissible simply on the basis of its being chosen by an agent, and no truth-values attach to statements about morality. This intellectually jejune and socially naive exaltation of will and "choice" in ethical decision-making is still alive and well. It allows people to resort to violence against the innocent when they deem it convenient to do so."

In my years of debate, I've encountered only one person who tried to argue that "everything is relative" and "that we can be sure of nothing" including even trivial facts of science, i.e. the earth circles the sun. In my view, it isn't even something worth debating as it is a variation of solipsism.

I was introduced to the existential imagination in a honors literature class in high school. My teacher Richard Delzingero (we called him "Mr. D.") was one of a small handful of those rare teachers who really pushed me to think and write. He later went on to become a Barnabites priest.

http://www.catholic-church.org/barnabites/b56vocn1.html

Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism, and his thinking came out of his critique on the Danish People's Church for its secularism, politicization, and hypocrisy, and attack that hasn't lost its relevancy. (If you haven't already, I recommend you take a look at his writing.) One of his key concepts is the "leap of faith" to God. I also have come to see theistic apologetics as arguing in circles and there is not a single proof for the existence of God that compels my respect at least. His "subjectivity is truth" statement doesn't mean that principled ethics are chucked. It does mean, as I understand him, that an interior quality of acceptance needs to take place before ethical action can commence.

Some people think that existentialism is devoid of faith, because of the anti-clerical writings of Nietzsche and atheistic writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, most existentialists were theists. I see the same false dichotomy between Christianity-- love for God-- and humanism--love for man. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book defining and defending Christian humanism Such belief are not in opposition to each other, and nor is existentialism necessarily in opposition to Christianity. Of theists who influenced existentialism, we must include Hegel, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and others. Unlike much of religious and modern thought that minimizes or suppresses the idea of man's free will, in existentialism man's free will provides the axiomatic backdrop that asks us to choose in a morally ambiguous world. Man defines himself by the sum of his choices, according to Sartre. Man is free. The coward makes him cowardly. The hero makes him heroic. Because God doesn't exist, Sartre says, man defines his essence though his actions. But I don't think this follows. Why should the non-existence of God have any bearing whatever on our actions? Why should it matter if our death results in nothingness, heaven, or reincarnation, so long as we act morally and authentically today? It makes as much sense to say: Because God exists man defines his essence through his actions. Bad faith emerges when we attribute to God consequences to our actions, or when we allow a creed to dictate our life rather than our conscience. As Dostoyevsky says: "Thou shalt love life more than the meaning of life."
The architects of the Cambodian genocide studied the existentialism of Sartre in the Paris of the early 1950s. Were Satre's children correct to make the leap from life is meaningless tohumans are worthless? Can we attribute the veneration of any kind of choice, no matter how willfully ignorant or immoral it is, to Kierkegaard? To me, that makes as much sense as blaming Hiroshima on Thomas Jefferson. All that they heard was that life is absurd, reality nauseating, and that man was free of commandments and obligations, while entirely forgetting the dimension of hard moral choice and hard moral courage. While Sartre was a Stalinist fellow traveler, he certainly wasn't advocating the abdication of morality that would result in pyramids of skulls under an Asian sun. The syllogism is not that since all is absurd, every act we take is absurd, including the claim that all is absurd. Rather, these are starting points to allow us to find meaning in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. I cannot deny that in existentialism we find nihilism and violence for its own sake. E. M. Cioran defined the case for total pessimism: "Life is a passionate emptiness, and intriguing nothingness" He writes that "I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton's finger" but also says that "I fall back on God if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot. Since all life is futility, the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all." But what the existentialists generally emphasize about man is that is a decision-making creature blessed or cursed with the freedom to choose among a number of possibilities in a mysterious. Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity for the soul to be free, but discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom, it led him into tragedy and evil. To be truly human, must man must accept this freedom by a commitment to authenticity. That authenticity can translate into either acts of immorality or acts of morality, but the act rests entirely with in our hands. This message can be become bracing in the religious version of existentialism in which choice is directed at a transcending spiritual goal.

Meaningful Questions

We invest great effort in trying to answer moral questions. But the wrong kind of questons can result in wasted effort and mental dead ends. They can also have deadening moral consequences as well.

So what are the right kind of questions?

I would suggest the following rules. These rules will lead inevitably to a resolution or to Ludwig Witttgenstein's "silence". ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

1. A intelligible question can only be formulated in which both subject and predicate are present in the natural world. Thus, the sentence "does my cat exist?" is unintelligible as the subject cat is part of the natural world while the predicate exist is not. To make this clear, consider the question "Does my cat exist in the universe?" Until you can define "the universe", that question is logically meaningless. However, "does my cat exist in my house?" is intelligible and thus resolvable as both "cat" and "house" either are in the natural world. "Does my cat have a soul?" or "Do souls exist?" are both meaningless truth statements as "soul" is not part of the natural world. This is not to say that questions outside of the natural world, in which subject/predicate don't correlate within anything that we can see, feel, or touch are not worthy of contemplation or debate. Of coure they are, and they will ever be. It means only that we must accept that such questions are unresolvable.

2. The next test is: Does the question concern the human world? This is not to say that animals and automata are not subject to acts of morality or immorality. I merely posit that humans are the only actors to which we can fairly evaluate.

3. The corrollary to proposition two is: How do those human actions manifest itself? Thus, our investigaton must strictly be on consequences of actions, not or any presumed interior state such as faith, hope, or love. A person's interior states are by definition subjective. Further, two people with the same interior state such as good will can result in diametrically different behaviors. By focusing on actions and consequences rather than cognition and conscience, we have a natural-world baseline to evaluate whether that behavior resolves itself into either true or false or good or bad.

4. By focusing on actions, we may state as a rule that actions that conform to custom are ceteris paribus to the good. We define good strictly in terms of collective utility: does it pay or does it not pay. Pragmatic behavior is moral behavior. We do well by doing good.

5. Ethical choices is a result of both a act of partciularizing and universalizing. Thus, "humanity" does not exist. Only people-- Tom, Mary, Mohammed, etc.-- exist. Our capacity to abstract indivudals into tribes (communists, atheists, republicans etc.) is a capacity lacking in all lower animals and accounts for our violence against our own species. By particularizing, we allow for nuances and exceptions to guiding principles, and it is this leap of empathy that allows us to make morally correct applications and adjudications. However, by attempting to universalize, we put our mind outside of ourself by considering how our actions would be regarded in the context of all humanity. Kant's categorical imperative to be the benchmark:

"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law".

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.

"Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends." [

6. The premise behind this schema for asking meaningful questions is that first we can ask such questions. That is to say, we have cognition, and we have the freedom to choose and the freedom to act. This does not presuppose that all people are rational and freedom-seeking. To the contrary, a rational view of man must presuppose that many people are not rational and all people are never always rational. However, we have a duty to ourselves, consistent with the categorical imperative, to harmonize our own ethical behavior with the world as it is. And, by so doing, we can indeed ask and answer moral questions.

Necromonicon Rocks

Moral Licentiousness

1) Moral licentiousness and decay weakens a society
2) The left champions moral licentiousness and decay
3) Therefore, the left champions policies that weaken society

If you want to deny the conclusion you must deny one or more of the premises. Which premise(s) do you wish to deny?

I deny both premises. As to #1, and speaking as a father of two teenagers, I think exposure to moral licentiousness and decay are not unmitigatedly bad as it exposes them to the real world and thus innoculates them for the real world. Of course, exposure to such is not the same as consent to such. I take a quasi-Nietschean, social-Darwinian view that a world without evil is a world without struggle and a world without the potential for good.

As to #2, I see that as neither a premise or a fact. To the contrary, who do you suppose it is that owns and manages the vast and effectives engines of moral corruption but rightist business people, most of whom are conservative Christians? Why? Because it is in their financial self-interest to do so. Fox is a stirling example. O'Reilly, who I admire for his tough-minded (albeit wrong-minded) independence of thought (in contrast to Beck who is a lunatic and Hannity whom is a GOP apparatchik) nevertheless almost always has a needlessly salacious segment on his show. But drill down a bit more. Who do you suppose are the people who are having abortions, the people who are getting divorced, the mobsters, the pediophiles, the murderers? They are not just generally Christians but conservative Christians, and repeated statistical studies support this. The denial of this ("No true conservative Christians are morally depraved") is of course the No True Scottsman fallacy, which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

The problem with this argument is that it derives an unproved predicate ("puts sugar on porridge") from the subject ("Scotsman"). The move is from a synthetic-contingent proposition (one that can be falsified by facts) to an analytic-necessary assertion (one that is true by definition but has no relationship to the facts). Now, sometimes the argument is valid as when the predicate derives from the subject, as in "no true vegetarians eat beef".

Okay, so you deny both (1) and (2). Then at least we are clear on where we disagree.

As for the rest, you've simply slipped back into your confusion of description about what people do with what is really at issue here--what people OUGHT to do (or not do, as the case may be). Ethics is a prescriptive enterprise, not descriptive. I'm a moral philosopher, not a sociologist. You're never going to get at how people ought to behave by cataloguing how they do behave.

No. I'm using facts and logic to buttress what all people ought to do, with such implicit rules as:

1. Thou shalt not bare false witness against liberals or consderatives, democrats or republicans.
2. Thou shalt strive for truth in all things though the heavens fall.
3. Think and feel what thou wilt, but above all act and do ethically in all things.
4. Thou shalt embrace reason and live.
5. Tell the truth without fear or favor and let the chips fall where they may.
6. Thinking is hard work, but it is the hard work we must do.

There may be a few others, but the moral rules are mainifestly there.

The Decline of The West

When these debasements that the cultural left champions become mainstream, the society is weakened through moral decay.

This is an opinion that goes back to Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and well beyond that, such as during the corruption of youth trial of Socrates. It could alternatively be argued that it is those cultures that do not embrace ideas with sufficient vigor-- that are insular and conservative-- that are destined to struggle or fade. (A good example is the American Indians and a modern example is the difference in quality of life between South Korea and North Korea.) I'm more persuaded by Toynbee's "creative minorities" argument than Spengler decline of the west pessimisim.

Given the debasement of premise agument, what then? If someone's response is to write books and start ministries, I would say good for them. But if their desire is to take control of public education and legislative policy, are they not embracing that premise that liberals embrace: that social uplift can by obtained through legislation and education?

Consider Yourselt At Home

A wonderful musical. But Jack Wild lived a sad life. Wild, the actor who found fame as the Artful Dodger in the film Oliver! at 16, was a millionaire at 18 and an alcoholic by 21, died after a long battle with oral cancer, aged 53.

Tea Baggers

The teabagger's pledge.

I, ________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that

I shall strictly adhere to the following:

I will complain about the destruction of 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.

I will complain about the destruction of my 2nd Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights by legally but brazenly brandishing unconcealed firearms in public.

I will foreswear the time-honored principles of fairness, decency, and respect by screaming unintelligible platitudes regarding tyranny, Nazi-ism, and socialism at public town halls.

Also.

I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:

Social Security
Medicare/Medicaid
State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
US Postal Service
Roads and Highways
Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
The US Railway System
Public Subways and Metro Systems
Public Bus and Lightrail Systems
Rest Areas on Highways
Sidewalks
All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g., see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations)
Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)
Public and State Universities and Colleges
Public Primary and Secondary Schools
Sesame Street
Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
Public Museums
Libraries
Public Parks and Beaches
State and National Parks
Public Zoos
Unemployment Insurance
Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them)
Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions)
Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD's ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking
Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies
Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies

If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forego my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care

I will not tour socialist government buildings like the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

I pledge to never take myself, my family, or my children on a tour of the following types of socialist locations, including but not limited to:
Smithsonian Museums such as the Air and Space Museum or Museum of American History
The socialist Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Monuments
The government-operated Statue of Liberty
The Grand Canyon
The socialist World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials
The government-run socialist-propaganda location known as Arlington National Cemetery
All other public-funded socialist sites, whether it be in my state or in Washington, DC

I will urge my Member of Congress and Senators to forego their government salary and government-provided healthcare.
I will oppose and condemn the government-funded and therefore socialist military of the United States of America.

I will boycott the products of socialist defense contractors such as GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Humana, FedEx, General Motors, Honeywell, and hundreds of others that are paid by our socialist government to produce goods for our socialist army.

I will protest socialist security departments such as the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Department of Justice and their socialist employees.

Upon reaching eligible retirement age, I will tear up my socialist Social Security checks.

Upon reaching age 65, I will forego Medicare and pay for my own private health insurance until I die.

SWORN ON A BIBLE AND SIGNED THIS DAY OF __________ IN THE YEAR ___.
_____________ _________________________

Signed Printed Name/Town and State

D'Souza's Liberalism One and Two

D'Souza makes a distinction between what he calls "liberalism one" and "liberalism two" the the former relating to the rights of man and the later with western decadence. He then admonishes the West to show its traditional face as an antidote to Islamic radicalism. I have my doubts that such a distinction exists. For example, thanks to the freedom of the press, D'Souza publishes his books even while the pornographers publish their books. Further, I would argue, it is not foreign policy conservatism that brought the USSR to its knee and opened the PRC to trade. It was decades of cultural liberalism, especially Hollywood movies but also western-originating jazz and rock music as well as the underground samizdats. I think the People's Republic of China is making valiant efforts to separate political liberalism from cultural and economic liberalism, with, ironically enough, their tolerance towards the latter rather than the former, but I have my doubts as to whether this will last. Freedom is a fragile flower, and when you take away liberalism and liberalism two dies and vice versa. For me, there is a sort of "so what" quality to D'Souza's speculation. Even if radicals were motivated to take up arms against America because of MTV (instead of more plausibly especially if we were to listen to the words of people like Osama our Middle East policies), what then? Do we really want to reign in "liberalism 2" in reaction to extremists who hate us? Short of embracing Calvin's Calvinism as national policy, how in the heck can we?

Mary Travers: 1936-2009

Best Tennis Point Ever

Truthful Propaganda

The best propaganda is propaganda that is 100 percent truthful.

For example, if I was to get an e-mail from Joe that said "Obama is a space alien", because it obviously requires a suspension of belief, Joe can pass it along without an comment, knowing that we would get the joke.

It is quite a different matter if Joe were to send out an e-mail that said "Obama is a Moslem." If Joe were to caveat that e-mail with a preface: "I think this is rubbish, what do you think?" that is one thing. But lacking that caveat, I must conclude "Joe believes that Obama is a Moslem based on the evidence within that e-mail." If the evidence is dishonest, I then further conclude that "Joe is either dishonest or simple or too lazy to fact-check." The focus no longer is on Obama but on Joe, which was never Joe's intent.

In terms of personal credability and integrity, I think this is a huge issue, especially when we become complict in spreading viral lies. Look at the number of people on this thread to which this e-mail has gone. It cheapens the debate, makes the sender look bad, and it is unnecessary in that there is plenty of truth out there that can make exactly the same point.

I don't consider theological or political positions in themselves to be honest or dishonest-- although they can be right or wrong. How we arrive, for example, at a position concerning the death penalty or baptism for most people involves a lifetime of personal experience, reading, and reflection. However, how we promote such a position using either truth or lies can determine whether or not the conclusion that we are hoping to promote is undermined or even nullified.

I

The Permanent Minority party

Karl Rove once dreamed of creating a permanent Republican majority. As often happens to dreams that have their roots in hubris, the opposite now appears to be true. The Republican Party may now become the permanent minority party.

In national politics, nothing is permanent forever, although parties can remain out of power not for one or two election cycles but for decades. I think the Republican Party will enter a long, dormant phase. Much of the reason has to do with the ability of the Democrats to cohere around one common theme: a rejection of the policies of George Bush, combined with the Republican Party's inability to distance themselves from those same unpopular policies.

By contrast, the Republicans consist not of a single party but a half dozen factions, many of which contradict each other. For example, the pro-lifers are at odds with the liberterians, the neo-cons are at odds with the isolationists, the religious right is at odds with the atheist objectivists, and Main Street is at odds with Wall Street. And then of course you have the fringe-- the gun nuts, the militia types, the hospital bombers, the neo-nazis. All of this fuels the perception that Republicans are incapable of governance as they embrace a hashly negative world view-- anti-women, gays, immigrants, education, science, and common sense. It is this ideological incoherence that prevents a conservative leader tapping into the anxieties of traditionalists and translating those anxieties into power.

If there is any future with the Republcians, it will lies in the rise of the fiscal conservatives combined with the rejection of the cultural conservatives, as the latter hold to values that most Americans embrace while the former hold to values that most Americans reject.

It may well be that Republicans would rather be right than have power. But, if that is the case, Republicans may well be right and powerless forever.

Why Boxing Is Not My Passion

Boxers: Before And After The Fights

Killed For Holding A Sign

The Daily Kos has it right.


As does The National Right to Life.

Axiomatic Minds

As I flit from one forum to another across the political spectrum, I'm struck by the paucity of moderate views. Almost everyone writes with little desire to explore complex issues and by inviting dialogue so as to illuminate areas of dispute. Instead, you have people who have axiomatic minds looking for reasons to support their prejudices or reasons to ridicule the prejudices of others. And so we have the clash of ignorant armies on the darkling plain of the internet.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1851)

Innocent Human Life

You may be interested in a web page I built shortly after 9/11/2001. The page on the true believer was my effort to come to grips with the psychological causality of this event. (Skeptic though I may be, I don't embrace David Hume's skepticism on causality!) We may be like blind men around an elephant when it comes to finding the core truth of this event and perhaps there are multiple core truths.

http://www.mymallandnews.com/frame08war.htm

I was thinking about the phrase you mentioned on one of your Face Book responses: "innocent human life" as regards to a human zygote and wondering if that corresponded with something that was real. I have my doubts. It is human and it is life, although it is not a fact that life starts at conception. Rather, life is transmitted to create the union of two gametes from male and female. However, the quality of "innocence" is at best a projection. It is more accurate to say that the zygote is neither innocent nor condemned. It just is, much like my shoe or my cat. When we say the grass is green, we are making a claim to fact imputation asserting that what we see that grass has an objective quality of greenness to it. That I may be color blind is not relevant if accurate instruments are available to confirm the greenness of that grass based on light wavelengths. No such test is available when we come to value judgments as regarding human life. While a human zygote cannot be said to be innocent, nor can it be said that it is mere human life like my finger nail clippings, expendable and without regard to consequences. And here is where the voters, legislatures, and courts step in. And what they have said, broadly, is that because that zygote is potential human life, distinctions must be made to protect that potential human life based on gestation. A rule of no abortions after conceptions is like a rule of death to all killers-- illogical and unjust given the complexity of life. We may see the trimester distinctions as arbitrary and overly broad brushed, but that is our law, which is nothing but distinctions and exceptions. The distinction between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one dollar. The difference between legal abortion and infanticide is one day. The consensus behind that law may indeed change and perhaps the law relating to human life may change. But what most people see is that life is messy and filled with contradictions and paradoxes no matter how elevated there moral intentions are. I saw this rather brutally in my mother's self-termination last December, whose end was shepherded by militant pro-lifers. In a magical world where conservative shareholders would close down media outlets that create the entertainment that fosters casual sex, where poor women have the same access to information and options as rich women, where all fetus develop so that a mother's life is never endangered, where all children are wanted and are brought into caring, stable two-family households, and where deviance such as rape and incest ceases to exist, perhaps then will abortion be a thing of the past. But we live in the real world, and I think our inability to come to grips with the complexity of life, law, and morality leads to exactly that kind of fanacicism that I refer to in my essay on Hoffer's book.

I think you're confusing legal guilt with moral guilt. Of course the conceptus is not "guilty or condemned" in the legal sense: No judge or jury has pronounced a verdict on it. That's not what we're talking about. What we are talking about is whether or not the conceptus has acted morally (has chosen a mode of behavior) that constitutes rendering the conceptus in a state of moral guilt. (It hasn't murdered or raped or lied or stolen, etc.) It just is. Therefore, it is morally innocent.

But that is what I deny. Or, rather, I affirm that such a value judgment is unfounded. A zygote (let's call it Mary) has the potential of being rational, autonomous, and a full member of the human community after time has elapsed. But should we give Mary at one day the same moral regards-- the same imputation of morality to its essence-- as Mary at two years? You seem to suggest that the lapse of time is irrelevant. Zygote Mary and the toddler Mary are morally equivalent. I understand the passion behind that assertion, but I don't see the moral foundation to it beyond repeated assertions. Thus, I'm not prepared to accept your conclusion: "And since it is wrong to aim at the destruction of morally innocent human life, it is wrong to aim at the destruction of the conceptus."

"What makes the conceptus different from your cat or your shoe is that it is a human life, capable of free choices and moral deliberation. This, at least in part, makes the conceptus to be of infinitely greater value than either your cat or your shoe."

But zygote Mary is incapable for such to which we ascribe moral agency. I would argue that my cat and perhaps my computer are morally superior to zygote Mary.

"As bad as it may be to aim at the destruction of your cat or your shoe, it is of inexpressibly greater moral weight to aim at the destruction of a humanconceptus, a rational being."

We don't know if zygote Mary will be rational and nor does it matter, only that she is-- but from that point when she is no longer a fetus.

"If you deny that the value of the conceptus is in the thing itself and insist, instead, that we merely "gild and stain" it with value, as Hume would claim, then what you're saying is that it is morally permissible to aim at the destruction of one human life (in this case, that of the conceptus in question), but not others. But why do you "gild and stain" some human lives with more value than others? What if I "gild and stain" differently? What if I don't "gild and stain" you with value?"

This is the wedge argument. Thus, the implication is that if you abort babies, next we will be terminate the aged and then the mentally defectives. I gave you the answer--and that is that the law defines sometimes with precision what is permissible. As a citizen you can try to change the law. As a question of ethics and morality, if you cannot change the law, you must try to comport your own actions to your own conscience by never aborting.

"I think that subjectivist approach to value will make hash of ethics. Hume could make it look plausible because he lived at a time and place where shared values were assumed. In an increasingly multicultural world, a world where "value relativism" is gaining ascendency, I think we do not want to be promoting value subjectivism."

Agreed.

"You're not suggesting that value is subjective because we do not have the capacity to measure it empirically, are you?"

No. But lacking a capacity to objectively assess a value, it doesn't follow that I must accept your (what I believe are subjective) values.

"If you really think that a little baby in the womb is equally really blameworthy as, say, Charles Manson, well, then I guess it's at least good that we've cleared up where it is that we disagree."

Charles Manson is morally superior to zygote Mary, because Charles Manson made choices whereas zygote Mary has no capacity for choice. Charles doesn't have better morals than Mary, obviously. But he has the moral agency that Mary does not have.

“I'll explain AGAIN how it is that the conceptus cannot rightly be regarded as morally guilty. It has not chosen any course of action that is morally wrong. Therefore, it is not morally guilty of anything that would merit the death penalty. The conceptus is innocent of any such wrong. Now, perhaps, you will explain to me how it is that you deny this.”

I didn’t know what conceptus meant until you introduced me to the term. Wikipedia defines it thusly: “Conceptus (Latin is conceptio, derivatives of zygote) denotes the embryo and its adnexa (appendages or adjunct parts) or associated membranes (i.e. the products of conception) The conceptus includes all structures that develop from the zygote, both embryonic and extra embryonic. It includes the embryo as well as the embryonic part of the placenta and its associated membranes - amnion, chorion (gestational sac), and yolk sac.”

To answer you question and as I’ve said, the conceptus has no intrinsic morality at all. It cannot be innocent and it cannot be guilty certainly legally but also practically. Is it really your position that a women who takes a day after pill has committed homicide?

“I could say the same thing about you while you are sleeping, or while you are temporarily unconscious because your son threw the baseball at your head while playing catch. Are you suggesting that it would be morally permissible to "abort" you while you are in this state of being "potentially rational"?

Humanity encompasses more than thought. It also implies a certain element of autonomy and life experiences as well as protection and recognition by the community that the I am different from a zygote.

"The lapse of time is irrelevant. If you think the time a human being has been in existence is what constitutes the ground for its being accorded moral rights, then you flat out discriminate on the basis of what everyone agrees is an irrelevant characteristic--age. You're engaging in "ageism." You think the very young have no rights. If you really think this, you'll soon start thinking, if you're not careful, that the very old do not have any moral rights, either."

Human life have a sliding scale of rights, and this is without regard to whether they are living in tribe in New Guinea or in a Manhatten penthouse. I’m not saying that the right of a zygote is nil, but I cannot fathom why the right of a zygote must equal my rights.

"I'll try again:1) Mary is alive2) Mary is a human being3) Mary has done nothing to warrant the death penalty4) We don't execute human beings who do not warrant execution5) Therefore, we (morally) must not execute Mary.Let's just get crystal clear on this. Tell me which of these statements you deny."

I’ll be happy to concede 1-4 . But I reject the conclusion as it does not follow from the antecedent premises. There are times when we must execute ZM for any number of reasons, and our inability to execute with impunity and without guilt increases as ZM matures fetally. You are looking for moral clarity in an issue that rarely is morally clear. Further, you fail to extend that moral clarity to other issues concerning life, such as the death penalty and war. (Not all Catholics do, however. I was impressed by Cardinal Bernandin’s consistentcy on all life issues—he called it a seamless robe. )

I wrote this essay a few years ago.

Easy Answers

Beware when anyone has more answers than questions or answers hard questions with easy answers. For example, let’s consider two issues: the death penalty and abortion. I’m generally opposed to the death penalty, as it appears to me to be a perverse lottery that favors the execution of blacks, males, ugly and unpleasant people, the poor, and folks who live in Texas. On the other hand, I’ve never been a victim of a capital crime, and perhaps my feelings would go in another direction if I were. And I think it is true that the execution of the architect of genocide Adolph Eichmann in Israel and mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh was in some sense a moral victory.

Abortion is far more complex than merely making a simplistic dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice positions. Few doctors endorse abortion as a means of birth control and such a grave step should never be taken lightly. Doctors, perhaps for insurance reasons, sometimes scare the daylights out of mother-to-be about the health of their child. But doctors are sometimes wrong, and it’s important to trust ourselves in such matters.

I’ve also met few absolutists on abortion, especially when they have to deal with the issue personally, as in a hypothetical in which a baby is an encephalic-- without a brain-- and the mother’s life in danger. Someone wrote to me saying that this “did happen to my closest friends a couple of years ago, and even more ironically, at the time, I was teaching an eight week course on Biblical ethics when the severity of her condition came to light. In a nutshell, she had four small kids at home, pregnant with her fifth, when she started having problems. Doctors said that: a) The baby essentially had no brain, his limbs were severely deformed, and other internal organs where malformed beyond hope. b) Because of some uterine problems, there was a very high chance that sometime in the ninth month she would suffer some major hemorrhage that could prove fatal to her. They of course, wanted to abort right away. She refused, and moreover, wanted to carry the baby full term and have a natural childbirth. (Initially, she actually wanted to give birth at home). For me, I saw the ethical question in a whole new light, now that it had a face on it. The baby had a zero percentage chance of surviving. For a staunch pro-lifer, it was a dilemma acknowledging that the right-to-life can't always be seen as an absolute. It didn't seem right that the mother should possibly lose her life, and four small children lose their mother, when the baby wasn't going to live no matter what. Fortunately, the mother decided to have a C-section at the earliest possible time. (32 weeks or something like that...don't exactly remember) She got through it okay. The baby lived for three days or so.”

God gives us minds and God gives doctors their skill. The point is not to look for rationalizations to support our actions but rather be prepared to acknowledge the complexity of life and that we must adapt moral principles to achieve the most ethical ends A one-size-fit-all principle that all life from conception on must be preserved at all costs can be immoral and even deadly, a principle, by the way, that anti-abortionists rarely extend to embracing military pacifism and mercy to criminals on death row. Especially immoral—and I use that word with precision—is the view that we should simply put our faith in God’s perfect will on all matters of health. Taken to its logical extreme, this claim should cause us to ignore car seatbelts and antibiotics for babies. Some sects have taken this position, bringing misery and death to those they claim they love.

"This implies that the law is arbitrary and that there is no actual moral difference between a law that, say, says it's obligatory to exterminate Jews just because they are Jewish and one that says it is impermissible to exterminate Jews just because they are Jewish. This kind of legal positivism is highly implausible. We do think there are just laws and unjust laws, and the reason we think this is because we do think there is such a thing as justice. Good laws approximate what is just, bad laws do not. Good law is based upon (comports with, reflects) morality. Morality is the basis of good law. If you lived in Nazi Germany, would you follow the law that says it's obligatory to exterminate Jews just because they are Jewish? Why not?"

There is a fallacy or argumentation that suggests any argument that invokes the Nazi era is automatically suspect because that time and circumstances was sui generis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

No matter, I’ll play. Law is far from arbitrary, and the consistency generally of law through time and culture suggest to me that natural law may be valid. I agree that morality informs or comports with good law. We differ however on what we regard as moral. He murder of Jews is categorically different than the killing of fetuses, not because of the laws in play, but because Jewish human and fetal humans are categorically different.

“Of course. You don't have to accept anything. But I assume you respect rational argument, and so the question is which positions are better justified rationally. “

I’m struggling to understand your rationale. I suspect it relates to Majesterium which in turn is based on some kind of a belief that morality derives from the sense that zygote Mary has a soul no less so than toddler Mary. But to me these justify nothing as a reject the Majesterium and have my doubts about the soul theory as least as it applies to a fetus.

Joe Wilson's Free Speech

WASHINGTON – In an extraordinary breach of congressional decorum, a Republican lawmaker shouted "You lie" at President Barack Obama during his speech to Congress Wednesday.

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., tried to call Obama to apologize in person, but ended up speaking to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
The contrite congressman, "expressed his apologies" to Emanuel, not the president at whom he had shouted a few hours earlier, Wilson's office said.

Wilson's website has crashed and looks like this:

This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.

Here is Wikipedia's talk page from this evening.

It certainly is different than a heckler at a political rally. The man is a US Congressman! This shout is of historic importance. Literally calling the President of the US a liar during a joint session of Congress is behavior that is, to my knowledge, completely without precedent. Anybody who argues that this event is insignificant is either being disingenuous or has completely deluded himself.RickDesper (talk) 01:54, 10 September 2009 (UTC)Rick

Wilson's website has since come up, and he describes his military background as follows.

"Throughout his life, Joe has also had a tremendous passion to serve his country as a member of the United States Armed Forces. After serving in the United States Army Reserves from 1972-1975, he also served in the South Carolina Army National Guard. In the summer of 2003, Joe retired as a Colonel, having served as a Staff Judge Advocate assigned to the 218th Mechanized Infantry Brigade. At the time, he was the only active Guard member serving in Congress.

Joe (has) four sons, all of whom serve in the U.S. military, and the proud grandparents of two boys and one girl. Alan, his oldest son, is a Major in the Army National Guard who proudly served for a year in Iraq; Addison is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and a physician who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq; Julian is a Captain in the South Carolina Army National Guard who served on a peacekeeping tour in Egypt; and Hunter is enrolled in Army ROTC at Clemson University and is a Cadet in the South Carolina Army National Guard. Their four sons are all Eagle Scouts."

I wonder what his children think of their father who calls his commander in chief a liar? I wonder what Joe thinks of his governor Mark Sanford's truth?

I think Maureen Dowd nails what really is going on here: "Joe Wilson’s outburst in Congress revealed one thing: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it."

Obama Punks the Rightwing

With the way some conservative bloggers were carrying on, you would have thought that Obama's speech to kids on their first day of class was an injunction to quit school and start cutting sugar cane for Fidel and the revolution. It is especially annoying that parents are pulling their kids out of school on that day lest their little one's eas burn with talk of socialism.

It is a perversion of education to permit your children to flee from words or ideas that might hurt their lila feeweeings. ;^) And, lacking such critical thinking life skills, such children become prime candidates for cults and bad behavorial choices, such as drugs and premarital pregnancy. Alas, my opinion is a minority opinion even in my family. I asked my two boys (one in middle school and the other in high school), if they would walk out of their social studies class if someone from the KKK was invited to give a rant. They both said yes-- the wrong answer in my opinion. Of course, in the case of Obama, it's 20 minutes of study hard, don't drop out, aim high platitudes. Big deal.

Here are the last two paragraphs of Obama's speech.

"Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

"Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America."

Liberal indoctrination? I surely hope so. As far as forcing our children to listen as if they were passive sponges, scarcely. As I tell my kids, question everything, but raise your hand.

I think the White House has punked the right-wing. At one time, conservatives stood for something, including a tradition of free speech, rigorous thought and discourse, and the disciplined search for for what is the truth. Now you have sound bites and wedge issues, viral e-mails and FoxNation. It is now the conservatives, not the liberals, who are the rioters and the shouters and the gun-slingers. They are not the vital center, the silent majority of America. Once upon a time, you had Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley and Friedrick von Hayek. Now you have Coulter, Palin, Hannity and all the other know-nothings-- the very flower of the paleo-conservative moment. This episode should show beyond any doubt how intellectually bankrupt the conservative movement has become.

My Left Foot

On Thursday, I took a nasty tumble and twisted my ankle so badly that blood vessels broke. My left foot ballooned with blood and then turned purple and black. It was quite painful. But I decided not to go to the doctor, because I didn't break any bones and I was betting that my body would self-heal. I wrapped my foot in bandages and took aspirin to thin my blood to prevent blood clots. I'm no longer limping quite so badly, and I'm thinking in a few days I should be back to normal.

About twenty years ago, I collapsed at work-- a syncope. I paid $50 for the trip to the emergency room. My son last year went to the emergency room when he had trouble breathing. We paid almost $4,000 for that visit. What accounts for that startling difference in cost?

No one has hymned the praises of capitalism louder than I have. But it is clear that we have a problem with our health system, when our first instinct is not to get professional medical help but to self-medicate. I buy my own insurance, but even with company insurance, there are expensive deductibles. What I see is a collusion between insurance companies and health providers, forcing a continual upward pressure on price, so that health care is rationed by price and the ability for others pay those prices.

As you enter a hospital under an insurance plan, an "insurance optimization specialist" is there to see that you die or are released expeditiously. Meanwhile, hospital management especially in the emergency room try to see if they can detect add on goods and services, much like a crooked car mechanic would do. Whether it is an ache in the ark or a squeak in the axle, the effect is the same: the ignorant but trusting consumer will pay what she or he is asked to pay until the consumer runs out of money.

What is animating this upward price pressure is in my opinion the results of massive law suits against incompetent doctors. That is why tort reform with caps on awards must be an indespensible aprt of any kind of health plan. Howver, since most congresmen are lawyers, I don't see that happening.

Unlike most other goods and services within the market place, there is little pricing information available to the consumer. It is somewhat like going into a grocery stores and filling up your shopping cart with food, but only finding out at the checkout counter whether or not six ears of corn cost one dollar or one hundred dollars.

There must be a better way.

500 Summers

This movie was a slow start featuring unappealing actors with incomprehensible motivations. But it had its moments.

500 Summers isn't the best movie for those with shaky relationships.

Rolling Puppy

Baby Snow Leopard

The week, a zoo in Tokyo allowed for the first public viewing of a baby snow leopard. His caretaker points out that the young cub still has blue eyes, which start to turn yellow at 4 months old, making the viewing extra special.

WATCH:

"You Remind Me of the Collyer Brothers"

When I say that to my boys to try to get them to keep their bedooms at least teenage-neat, this is what I mean.

On April 8, 1947, workman Artie Matthews found the body of Langley Collyer just ten feet from where Homer died. His partially decomposed body was being eaten by rats. A suitcase and three huge bundles of newspapers had covered his body. Langley had been crawling through their newspaper tunnel to bring food to his paralyzed brother when one of his own booby traps fell down and crushed him. Homer, blind and paralyzed, starved to death several days later. The stench detected on the street had been emanating from Langley, the younger brother.

Meow

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What's Wrong With the World

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,

G. K. Chesterton

Patient Zero and Ryan White

“Not so long ago, any form of sexuality not leading to the conception of children was seen as, at best, wanton lust, or worse, a perversion. One by one, the taboos have fallen.”
--Peter Singer

Among the many things I talked about with my father over the the weekend was gay civil rights. He takes the view that homosexuals choose to to be homosexual, that homosexual behavior is deviant, and that the government should not give them special civil rights as a consequence of their sinful choices.

I believe that homosexuality is largely a result of forces outside of choice such as genetics and that homosexuals should be given the same rights given to anyone else, including the right to enter into state-sanctioned stable life partnerships or civil unions.

Just as I think the church shouldn't intrude into affairs of state, I also think the state should not intrude into matters that are the domain of the church. Thus, I don't think the government should mandate that clergy should marry gays.

In the 2008 Arizona Proposition 102, I voted no to defining marriage as the union of a man and a wife in the Arizona constitution. My vote was driven by my sense that this was an effort to gin up Republican votes and that it policy contrary to a citizen's equal protection and privacy rights generally. But I was on the losing side, 56 percent to 44 percent.

Gaeton Dugas

The position that is held by my father is not uniformed. This Time, 1987 article personifies his anxiety in Patient Zero, Gaeton Dugas.

"Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, researchers have reasoned that a handful of people -- maybe even a single individual -- bore the unknowing responsibility for having introduced the disease to North America and its first large group of victims, the homosexual community. By tracing sexual contacts, officials at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in 1982 found a likely candidate: one man who, through his sexual liaisons and those of his bedmates, could be linked to nine of the first 19 cases in Los Angeles, 22 cases in New York City and nine more in eight other cities -- in all, some 40 of the first 248 cases in the U.S. The CDC acknowledged his role with an eerie sobriquet: it called him Patient Zero.

"Now Patient Zero is publicly identified for the first time in a stunning new book on the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On. Zero, says Author Randy Shilts, was Gaetan Dugas, a handsome blond steward for Air Canada, who used to survey the men on offer in gay bars and announce with satisfaction, "I'm the prettiest one." Using airline passes, he traveled extensively and picked up men wherever he went. Dugas developed Kaposi's sarcoma, a form of skin cancer common to AIDS victims, in June 1980, before the epidemic had been perceived by physicians. Told later he was endangering anyone he slept with, Dugas unrepentantly carried on -- by his estimate, with 250 partners a year -- until his death in March 1984, adding countless direct and indirect victims. At least one man indignantly hunted him down. Dugas' charm proved unfailing: he sweet-talked the man into having sex again."

I have had little contact with people who have identified themselves as gays, although it is likely that I have had gay friends over the years. Some of my thinking about how gays should be treated goes back to my days as a youth leader at the Willow Creek Commity Church in Barrington, Illinois. Another youth leader was stripped of his ministry because he “had the potential to sin”, which they implied but never quite stated that he was a homosexual. I was one of the youth leaders in Willow Creek’s young people group Prime Time during this shameful episode. While Matt was blubbering, a stalactite of mucus lengthening from his nose, I raised the obvious but unanswered question with Jon Bodin, the youth pastor: who among us does not have the potential to sin? As I drove out of the expansive Willow Creek parking lot, I thought to myself, “Where in all of Christendom are the Christians?”

In the Gospel of John, the crucifixion of Jesus is described in which the two Marys stood under Jesus’ cross. Sometimes, when we have friends in pain that is about all we can do: stand by their cross until the end. And that is what wife Nancy did for her friend David Mellner. You count your friends when you’re flat on your back, and Nancy was a friend to David from 1979. She was by his side when he went “code blue” and died of AIDS in 1988. David was 33 years old.

Much hatred is directed toward homosexuals, and I question the moral foundation for that hate. The Bible has verses that condemn homosexuality, but the Bible condemns a lot of things, not the least of which is hypocrisy. Some of proof texts against homosexuality are from the Old Testament, which also has verses that require us to kill our disobedient children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Leviticus 20:9, and more.) Furthermore, claims that Jesus is a “gay basher” forgets much of the message of the gospel that Jesus died for the least of us and for all of us, not for many or some of us (1 John 2:2, 2 Cor. 5:15, 1 Tim. 2:4-6, and more).

I might also mention that bigots throughout the history have used scriptual texts to oppress Jewish people, women, blacks, and other groups. Those verses do exist, and so the question then becomes: how should we evaluate such texts? My answer: through a clear understanding of the character of Jesus Christ, who was not an excluder but said: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The Apostle Paul also defines the transcending ethical imperative: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."

As much as I believe we can by force of will choose our destiny, I think nevertheless there is still much that we cannot choose. And one of the things I believe that we cannot choose is our sexuality. Maybe God made gays for the same reason He made blue birds and red birds. If it’s genetically based, we should no more criticize homosexuals than we should criticize people with black skins or blue eyes. If it’s environmentally based, it’s most plausible to believe that homosexuals were shaped by their early childhood family dynamics-- again a fact of existence that transcends personal choice. Some gays not coincidentally come from families with either absentee or weak fathers, fathers that were harshly moralistic, or families that are torn by divorce. They have grown up with poor parenting models.

I doubt the claim that people chose the gay lifestyle in the same way that people choose to go over the speed limit, because the consequences are so much more debilitating. The consequences are often the rejection by their family and church and ostracism by their community, including sometimes the loss of their job. Does it really make sense to say that anyone would freely chose any or all of that?

The final irony is that conservatives who rant most vehemently against homosexuals sometimes find homosexuals within their own families or are themselves homosexuals. And I think it’s only fair that conservatives that make an issue of homosexuality should open their closet so that all the world can see what kind of people and parents they are in how they treat their spouse and their children as well as their own fidelity to their marriage vows. They should make sure that there is no glass in their houses before they pick up those stones.

Ryan White

It is by the littlest hair from the littlest hamster that the scales tip positively for me on the question: does Christianity really matter? To re-frame the question, I ask: how does the Christian world view inform us as to how then shall we live? Is it relevant to how we behave, how truthful we are, and how we treat others, or is it irrelevant?

I think, for example, of how the Christians of Kokomo Indiana treated Ryan White who contacted AIDS through a blood transfusion. Ryan’s testimony before the President’s Commission on AIDS tells his story: “My name is Ryan White. I am sixteen years old. I have hemophilia, and I have AIDS. In 1971, when I was three days old, the doctors told my parents I was a severe hemophiliac, meaning my blood does not clot. December 17, 1984, I had surgery to remove two inches of my left lung due to pneumonia. After two hours of surgery the doctors told my mother I had AIDS. I contracted AIDS through my Factor VIII which is made from blood. I came face to face with death at thirteen years old. I was diagnosed with AIDS: a killer. Doctors told me I'm not contagious. Given six months to live a being the fighter that I am, I set high goals for myself. It was my decision to live a normal life, go to school, be with my friends, and enjoying day to day activities. It was not going to be easy. The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS. The school board, my teachers, and my principal voted to keep me out of the classroom even after the guidelines were set by the I.S.B.H., for fear of someone getting AIDS from me by casual contact. Rumors of sneezing, kissing, tears, sweat, and saliva spreading AIDS caused people to panic. We began a series of court battles for nine months, while I was attending classes by telephone.

"Eventually, I won the right to attend school, but the prejudice was still there. Listening to medical facts was not enough. People wanted one hundred percent guarantees. There are no one hundred percent guarantees in life, but concessions were made by Mom and me to help ease the fear. We decided to meet them halfway:

· Separate restrooms
· No gym
· Separate drinking fountains
· Disposable eating utensils and trays

"Even though we knew AIDS was not spread through casual contact. Nevertheless, parents of twenty students started their own school. They were still not convinced. Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me:

· I became the target of Ryan White jokes
· Lies about me biting people
· Spitting on vegetables and cookies
· Urinating on bathroom walls
· Some restaurants threw away my dishes
· My school locker was vandalized inside and folders were marked FAG and other obscenities

"I was labeled a troublemaker, my mom an unfit mother, and I was not welcome anywhere. People would get up and leave so they would not have to sit anywhere near me. Even at church, people would not shake my hand.”

Finally, Ryan’s family decided to move to the community of Cicero, Indiana. Cicero welcomed Ryan with open arms. He attended Hamilton Heights High School, where students had all attended an informational seminar on AIDS. Ryan continued to speak out against discrimination toward people with AIDS. On August 18, 1990, ten days after Ryan died, Congress passed Public Law 101-381, the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act. This Act was created to help states, communities and families cope with the growing impact of the AIDS epidemic.

The leading role taken by the Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians of Kokomo County was shameful, but they were afraid and fear was fueling their ignorance. They saw Ryan not as a courageous kid with brown eyes and light brown hair who liked Robo Cop, Debbie Gibson music, Star Wars, Andy Griffith, and his two dogs but as a sin that needed to be demonized and exorcized and a disease that needed to be isolated and destroyed.

I would say then in summary to try to be tolerant of those around you, even though you don’t necessarily understand or agree with their behavior. “Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 4:32).

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As I get older, my hobbies become cheaper but somehow more satisfying. In my 30s, it was about stamp collection, day trading, and boating. Now, my hobbies pretty much start and end with gardening, talking, and writing. In my wide circle of corresponders is Mark Descher, Nancy’s cousin who got his PhD from Oxford University in England, after getting his undergraduate degree at Wheaton College several years after me and then interning at Willow Creek at the time I was there. He has since become a Catholic, and I believe he is now a professor of philosophy in Oklahoma. On just about everything, we are on different sides of religious and political issues. But Mark has a strong and clear mind and understands the ground rules of civil debate, and so I appreciate getting his considered opinion.

Mark wrote:

Great to hear from you, and I truly relish the kind of quality, serious conversation that is possible with a person such as you. I read your post with great interest. There is much to say, but I'll let a few comments suffice.

First, religion in general and Christianity in particular are relevant to morality. This is so in at least two ways. First, if God and an afterlife exist, then that has enormous consequences for the question, "How then shall we live." If our highest good is friendship with God, and if friendship with God is obtained, at least in part, through the moral life, then we have gargantuan reason,tremendous motivation, to live the moral life.

Second, not only does God and an afterlife provide a source of added motivation to live the moral life, but God's commands might well be the source of at least some moral obligations, important ones at that, that would not exist apart from a God to command them. For example, is every human being to be accorded with a minimally decent morality--call it "human rights"--or not? If so, why would any equal baseline of moral treatment obtain for all human beings when human beings are empirically so unequal in every morally relevant way? Answer: God commands it. That's why it is not surprising that when there is a loss of sensitivity to the divine in a culture it tends to get more careless with the value of human life and with the seriousness of grave evil done to the dignity of human life. I think the correlation is not accidental.

Third, you're certainly right that Christians have failed miserably to live up to their ideals, but I ask you to consider the folly, not to mention the non-sequitur, of therefore throwing away the ideals. The ideals stand, irrespective of how many Christians do or do not happen to live up to them.

Fourth, if you're going to point to failures on the part of Christians to exemplify the moral life, then you most certainly can point to any other religious, ethnic, national group and point out all of their failures, too, since all of them have them. But what is the point of doing that? Shouldn't the focus be on what morality truly requires and not on how some or other group(s) fail to live up to it?

Fifth, I think there is a very common and equally egregious mistake made in the thinking of many folks today regarding the application of compassion. Nowadays it is seen as a mark of moral goodness and intellectual sophistication to have compassion on certain interest groups as a matter of public policy. This, I think, is a mistake. I would argue, for example, that it is not compassionate to homosexuals or to the wider society at large to mainstream homosexuality. It is a dangerous lifestyle (especially for male homosexuals) that results in inordinate addiction, suicide and horrendous physical diseases. In fact, the average life-expectancy of an active homosexual male is between eight and twenty years shorter than his heterosexual counterpart and this holds true also in the Netherlands, a place extremely accepting of homosexuality, so it is not attributable to heterosexual persecution or stigmatization. Therefore, to mainstream homosexuality and teach it as an "alternative lifestyle" to impressionable school children is not compassionate; it is the opposite. On the other hand, where compassion is good and morally required is with respect to individuals. Individual homosexual people should be loved as the people they are, because that is what God commands, and because there is so much good to love in homosexuals, just as there is in heterosexuals. I believe it is not a cliché but the truth that we ought to love the sinner while hating the sin. This, of course, goes for homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Much of what I believe is wrong-headed in our culture stems from this idea that moral goodness is constituted by having the right attitudes toward certain interest groups, but that it does not matter much how kind, generous, polite and civil a person is to the individuals with whom he associates. Our culture, I’m suggesting, is on the road to getting it exactly backwards. Compassion should be the basis upon how we treat the people we come into contact; it should not be the basis upon which we make public policy.

Sixth, on a different note, why do you think it is the case that people who make moral objections to the homosexuality are often themselves homosexuals in the closet? Is that Freud? Is that a clever ruse on the part of homosexuality to further their agenda by silencing opposition by labeling the opposes as being the very thing they oppose? I wonder, do you think that people who are deeply morally concerned about economic oppression are themselves secretly greedy oppressors? Do you think people who hate war secretly want to be shooting at the enemy from the front lines? Do you think people who have serious moral scruples about abuse of the natural environment are people who secretly enjoy seeing whales, baby seals and beautiful trees destroyed? Do you think those who oppose second-hand smoke secretly chain-smoke in their "closets"? Why is moral opposition homosexuality singled out for this dubious distinction?

Lastly, I became Catholic because I believe it is the true Church. The harder one thinks about the world, and especially about morality, one is driven inexorably either to the Catholic Church or to moral nihilism. Since the moral awareness of my heart is far too strong for me to buy into nihilism, I became Catholic. That has been the greatest blessing in my life. I'm sure you'll have plenty by way of response. I’m looking forward to reading what you have to say.

Blessings,

Mark

P.S. I've written a piece of late on homosexual marriage. If you want, I'll send it to you. I'd be delighted to get your comments on it.

(Excerpts follow.)

The historic Christian conception of marriage may be formalized as follows:

Is there really a historic Christian conception of marriage?

4) The proper context for sexual expression is the permanent bond of marriage
5) One of the purposes of the marital, sexual relationship is its complementary, unitive function of friendship and complete, mutual self-giving
6) One of the purposes of the marital, sexual relationship is its openness to procreation in every marital act

Let’s call 4-6 the ‘Traditional Understanding of Marriage’ (TUM) and those who endorse this understanding of marriage, TUMers.

I'm not sure I precisely understand some of the words used in (4) and (5). Point five may be a recent invention in the history of Christendom.
Point six strikes me as cruel, as it seems to create a caste of those who cannot have children. I question whether there is much scriptural foundation for such a teaching. I'm assuming you are right that it is Catholic dogma. But I see no warrant in assuming it is universally accepted Christian dogma. Sexuality is surely more than marriage and legitimately proceeds marriage and need not include marriage. I consider point six unfounded and reductionistic-- that marriage resolves itself into procreation with every marital act. I question whether TUMers even exists to any great extent. I guess hetros are just as capable of high risk behavior as homos, even they are to make every act of marital love a chance to engender children without regard to whether or not they are wanted.

My view is that homosexual expression is morally permissible to the same extent that heterosexual expression is morally permissible; however, they are not necessarily morally equivalent. On numbers alone, there never can be moral equivalency, just as there isn't moral equivalence between inter-racial marriages and other marriages. But that isn't an argument against the morality of gay marriages.

You seem to look at the consequences of dispensing with traditionally understood marriage (TUM) as a zero sum game, that with the advance of homosexual rights, there must of necessity be the recession of heterosexual rights. I see no basis for that.

As much as I admire the Catholic church for preserving the Bible through the dark ages and for her unmatched stream of intellectual thought, here is where the church disappoints me. It takes a certain sophistry to condemn birth control while venerating the institution of priestly celibacy-- both of which have no scriptural foundation whatever and are the source of much misery-- poverty in the first place and child abuse in the second place.

I consider it profoundly immoral-- and I used that word with precision-- to incite families to procreate if they don't have the material and psychological foundation to care for those children-- again, a beef I have with Catholic teaching. That mathematics (counting days) is moral whereas chemistry (the pill) is immoral strikes me as wonderously backwards.

While there may be other types of friendship that are genuine and intense, the friendship that involves the sexual uniting into “one flesh” of one man and one woman who stand before each other “naked and unashamed” with the possibility of producing offspring is sui generis. It is one of a kind.

Sure. But there are many ways to bring children into a family, including adoption and through birth. That a child is produced from one or the other of the dyad seems irrelevant. Lesbians can bring children into this world with no less efficacy that heterosexual women. And we can surmise that homosexuals can be no less effective, caring, and protective of their children than homosexuals.

The basis of discrimination in the case of cousins, animals, and polygamists is based on a state interest for reasons of genetic health, for reasons of law (poodles have no legal standing although trust funds for poodles do-- that the majestic equality of the law for you!), and for reasons of the protection of children. Equality is not a consideration. Homosexual behavior as manifested in marriage faces no such compelling state interest. Such behavior may rile up the right-wing, but there is nothing intrinsic in such behavior that is contrary to good governance.

I was waiting for you to invoke ontology. This strikes me as one of the better arguments for homosexual marriage-- that complementarity is resolved by the union of two souls that encapsulate differences without respect to physical sexual function. The opposite attract paradigm is as much true among hetrosexuals as homosexuals, again suggesting to me that gender is a trivial or a coincidental element in the equation.

Child abuse is surely the elephant in the room when it comes to Catholic teaching. Sure, pedophilia cuts across all faith. But the Catholic church does seem to have a problem in particular with this vice. I state this as a simple fact and I think the church is still struggling to come to terms with this. What is it about specifically about Catholic institutions and dogma that creates such a hothouse for depravity that has resulted in the bankruptcy of entire parishes? Could it be the creation of a mandarin caste of priestly celibates combined with female subordination that creates these conditions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases

I don't think you have quite made the case. The article seems to be an example of special pleading-- a sequence of somewhat dubious syllogisms that arrives at a presupposed conclusion of the immorality of homosexual marriage. I don't think you have shown that TUM exists or is held to the extent that you believe it is, that it is Christian scriptural doctrine, and that the depravity you think exists among homosexuals is organic to their nature.

I would argue that a homosexual marriage is not a new right but the extension of existing right by removing an irrelevant barrier to that right. The blacks that were liberated after the Civil War were not given new rights. They merely now had access to rights that were always available to them under the dictates of natural law.

The drive for universal tolerence especially among marginalized members of society is far from rhetoric. This is more than just a benign liberterian acceptance of disagreeable people or practices. It is the heart and soul of civil rights-- the slow and painful extension of those rights to people who have been denied those rights for illusory reasons-- and the Catholic church has a storied history in standing athwart such rights, be it in the realm of science, race, family life, politics, art, or religion.

As a pragmatic question, we might ask: what bad things will happen invidually or societally if there is gay marriage? Or, conversely, what good things will happen if there is gay marriage? That marriage is a stablizing force and a positive good in society is beyond dispute. What harm if that stablizing force and positive good good is extended to gays?

I see this debate also in terms of scapegoating, in much the same way Jews, blacks, and Catholic immigrants were in past generations. The purpose of this scapegoating? To maintain existing political and religious traditions and structures. In effect, anti-gay bigotry becomes a means to the end of political and religious discrimination through domination. But, as Kant notes, there is a better and higher way: "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end."

Thank you for allowing me to read your essay.

Thank you for the comments on my chapter. I appreciate you taking the time to read it.

Well, I must say that when I had in mind contacting you and updating you on my ecclesial status I never envisioned that our conversation would be of the nature that it has been. But I am really enjoying it; I enjoy your willingness to engage and your energetic approach. It's really good.

What got me into researching and thinking seriously about homosexuality was the incident last year with our Representative, Sally Kern. (I'm quite confident that you know about it. If not, do a quick Google of her name and you'll get more than you ever wanted to know?) Several professors from the university (we live in a university town in the shadow of Oklahoma State) started writing letters to the editor of the local paper attacking her. That got me starting to think about the issue and impelled me to defend her. It eventuated in that chapter that you just read.

I wrote:

As regards to your comment about been disappointed by Christians, I suppose there is some truth to that. As a missionary kid, I've been on the receiving end of the end justifies the means ethic for much of my early life, whereby the salvation of souls trumps family life. On the other hand, in a conviction that has taken decades to crystallize, I do believe truth is the highest good and that epistemology—is it true or false? is it right or wrong?-- is prior to all philosophy and religion in which I include of course metaphysics and Christianity.

I think you make some valid points, for example, in the Sally Kern controversy. (I confess I didn't know of the issue until you brought it up.) Wikipedia describes one such comment as follows:

"In March 2008, Kern made national headlines when she stated:

"Studies show that no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted more than, you know, a few decades. So it's the death knell of this country. I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam — which I think is a big threat, okay? Cause what's happening now is they are going after, in schools, two-year olds...And this stuff is deadly, and it's spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation."[9][10]

After receiving attention for the remarks, Kern said "I said nothing that was not true" and refused to apologize."

These are the kind of statements to which I apply my epistemological scalpel. As a first amendment absolutist, I would be the first to defend her right to make that or any kind of a statement without regard to consequences.

On the other hand, if truth is important to us, than we have a fundamental obligation to evaluate its truthfulness. I'm sure others have done so, so there is no need for me to weigh in. As a rhetorical technique, sometimes exaggeration has its uses. However, exaggeration has the danger of undermining credibility, and I think this is what has happened here.

Your're Just Too Good To Be True

The kids call this old people's music. Still love it.

The Last Music My Mother Heard

Before she died.

Babelfish Auf Deutsch

I am an uber awesomesauce mega pwnage pwner!

Ich bin ein uber awesomesauce großpwnage pwner!

Try it.

Don't know what pwned means?

Robert Novak and Edward Kennedy: RIP

"Bob Novak was a no-good, Jew-hating, Israel-hating Paleocon piece of shit."

Maybe that's so. But your reflect badly on yourself when you find a need to spit on another man's coffin.

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

Meditation 17
Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, Morieris.
(Now this bell tolling softly for another,says to me, Thou must die.)

Some one else:

I agree with you on this point 100%,...it's sad that this troll of yours only lasted one week, I would have liked to see you say the same things to posters of the right who weigh in on Kennedy's passing.

Well, since you were only a 1 week troll, I will now steal your work.

Thanks

Me again:

Yes, I've noted that as well. I think it is possibly to honestly evaluate someone's life without having to reduce a person's existence to politics either of the right or the left. I think both Novak and Kennedy would be the first to admit that they were flawed individuals. So what, aren't we all? Welcome to the human race. They both deserve a measure of dignity and respect in death by the mere fact that we share what they once were-- their humanity-- and we will be what they are.

Death Panel Ethics

A "death panel" is a fictional hospital committee that makes triaging decisions on patients-- who lives and who dies.

Two questions.

1. Would you like to serve on such a committee? Why or why not?
2. What ethical or religious principles, values, or parameters would you invoke in determining resource allocation-- doctor time and money for terminal patients?

For example, how would you priortize a two year old who has one year to live and a eighty year old who has one year to live?

My initial response is to say to prioritize the two year old over the eighty year old b/c the eighty year old has lived a full (long) life and that extra time wouldn't represent as large of a portion of his life and thus wouldn't be as meaningful. But I'd have to know more about the situation including the patients' relatives and the patients' potential for getting better to make this kind of decision.

Would the patient's position (say, a senator), role (say, a mother), background (say, a criminal) , or wealth (say, a philanthrophist) honestly play into your decision making?

How do you balance a patient's choice-- say to self-termination-- against the wishes of the family-- against self-termination, without respect to financial outgo.

I think a terminally ill patient should be allowed to die. It's my personal take on the issue based on the fact that I don't have any beliefs that make such a thing immoral, and that such a person shouldn't be obligated to live a life of suffering if they don't feel that it's worth it. I respect that some family members might not appreciate this, but I don't think it's a terminally ill patients' responsibility to stay alive just to make other people happy.

Most large hospitals have a triage procedure. Many more institutions have a triage procedure at least in the planning stage for a pandemic. Medical people know how to do this sort of thing. They have, in many cases, thought long and hard about priorities.

Many medical personnel are unwilling to even "snow" a terminally ill patient. It doesn't seem possible that many would be willing to participate in any sort of action based on other than raw medical necessity.

A reader answers both questions:

1. Yes! I'm the man for the job.

2. Oh. Nevermind.

An Answer to the $64,000 Question

The following Repubican whine dripped into my email today:

Subject: Finally The $64,000 Question Was Asked

More and more are asking this same question. I think it should not let up. The congress has had too many perks too long, and they have spent tax money with abandon.

This is what I've been saying to everyone, if it's good enough for the average person, it should be good enough for our (so called) leaders!!!!!!


FINALLY...THE $64,000 QUESTION WAS ASKED...

YESTERDAY ON "ABC-TV" (BETTER KNOWN AS THE ALL BARRACK CHANNEL)

DURING THE "NETWORK SPECIAL ON HEALTH CARE".... OBAMA WAS ASKED:

"MR. PRESIDENT WILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY GIVE UP YOUR CURRENT HEALTH CARE PROGRAM AND JOIN THE NEW 'UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PROGRAM' THAT THE REST OF US WILL BE ON ????"..... (BET YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER)....

THERE WAS A STONEY SILENCE AS OBAMA IGNORED THE QUESTION AND CHOSE NOT TO ANSWER IT !!!...

IN ADDITION, A NUMBER OF SENATORS WERE ASKED T HE SAME QUESTION AND THERE RESPONSE WAS..."WE WILL THINK ABOUT IT."

AND THEY DID. IT WAS ANNOUNCED TODAY ON THE NEWS THAT THE "KENNEDY HEALTH CARE BILL" WAS WRITTEN INTO THE NEW HEALTH CARE REFORM INITIATIVE ENSURING THAT THAT CONGRESS WILL BE 100% EXEMPT !

SO, THIS GREAT NEW HEALTH CARE PLAN THAT IS GOOD FOR YOU AND I... IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR OBAMA, HIS FAMILY OR CONGRESS....??

WE (THE AMERICAN PUBLIC) NEED TO STOP THIS PROPOSED DEBACLE ASAP !!!!... THIS IS TOTALLY WRONG !!!!!

PERSONALLY, I CAN ONLY ACCEPT A UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL THAT EXTENDS TO EVERYONE... NOT JUST US LOWLY CITIZENS... WHILE THE WASHINGTON "ELITE" KEEP RIGHT ON WITH THEIR GOLD-PLATED HEALTH CARE COVERAGES.

IF YOU AGREE PLEASE PASS THIS O N ....IF NOT PLAN TO SUFFER WITH THE OBAMA HEALTH CARE PLAN ....FOR FREE..... WHILE OUR SELF-SERVING POLITICIANS MAKE SURE THAT THEY TAKE CARE OF THEIR BUTTS AT OUR EXPENSE.

Here is my response:

I was standing in line at the post office on Saturday waiting for my turn as postal people wth cob webs on their arms slowly went about their business slowly. Someone said, this is the way it will be under ObamaCare, and he chortled at his own little joke.

What is the fallacy with my friend's joke at the post office and this interchange below?

It is the same fallacy to liberterianism generally. That is, government help is not necessary if you are rich and healthy.

You need to experience the sting of poverty first hand as I did in my early 20s to recognize that charities, churches, and families are not enough.

Health care is today rationed by cost, and there are folks that cannot afford to pay for a $5,000 injection of inteferon. So, as regards to the post office line analogy, there are millions of people who are not standing in line at all today. As regards to the idea of equity of health care between government officials and the public, I think the questioner is missing the obvious point: it is not to reduce existing benefits to those who have such benefits in either the private or public sector. It is to provide health benefits to those who automatically don't have such benefits, such as me. (As a consultant, our insurance is not provided.)

A secondary point is that politicans have the right to decide for themselves what public services are appropriate for their families. For example, Carter made a point of sending his daughter Amy to a public school in Washington, DC, while Clinton and Obama did what you or I would have done-- send our children to the best school available without respect to whether it is public and private, while still continuing to fight for increased funding to public schoosl.

I have some concerns about the health plan idea, such as privacy issues and the overall cost. I'm also concerned about death panels :)

I enjoy reading these kind of e-mails, as it gives the boys a chance to play my ongoing game-- spot the fallacy.