Posts

[From CNN] It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed, and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint. -Penn Jillette ...

I came across a Facebook friend’s post which declared “Right-wing commentator: Poor people voting is ‘un-American’” Since the liberals who were commenting on the story appeared to completely miss the point that the commentator was getting at, I decided to help them out: Oppression should be opposed regardless of who the oppressors are or who they happen to want to oppress. This goes for rich oppressing the poor through the purchasing of government favors with their dollars just as much as it does the poor oppressing the rich through the purchasing of government favors with their votes. ...

Can any sort of morality be sustained in the absence of a divine moral lawgiver from which an objective moral standard can be derived and to whom we are all accountable? Atheist philosopher Joel Marks argues in his piece that it cannot ( part 2), that the best atheists are left with is the subjective dislike of certain attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors. Here’s the conclusion for those of you who are pressed for time: ...

A bible-study companion of mine recently sent me Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism”. Here’s my response: Thanks for sending that over! I must admit I haven’t read much of Sartre, so the lecture you sent helped remedy that. I have a hard time differentiating existentialism from hedonism, something Sartre seems to acknowledge at least by accident when he talks about how existentialism got an early reputation for exalting man’s baser actions. ...

Many people today consider government regulation to be a necessary evil. Without government overseeing greedy corporations, the thinking goes, attention to quality, and especially safety, will degrade. It is assumed that government is the only entity with the ability and motivation to look out for the interests of everyone. To help illustrate how faulty the notion of government regulation being our saving grace is, let’s take a look at how the Soviet Union regulated the production of its most effective propaganda outlet, the common TV set. Keep in mind that the USSR had an interest in producing quality TVs in order to govern more effectively. ...

Here is an excellent example of the McGurk effect: My interpretation of this effect is based on the physics of both sound and light waves. Based on Shannon’s theorum, light carries more information than sound so it makes sense that our minds would, when presented with conflicting information. So it is understandable why many people operate on the principle of “seeing is believing”. However the McGurk effect should serve as a warning to us that when faced with problems of interpreting information, what we are seeing may be masking the truth of what we are perceiving. ...

In the movie, Next, Nicholas Cage plays a man who has the ability to perceive future events. Here is a section of the movie where Cage’s character is attempting to thwart a future event (don’t worry, this isn’t a plot spoiler, the movie is still worth watching) by examining all the possible outcomes of his actions in space and time. This provides a pretty good approximation to the philosophical concept of counterfactuals which are used in the theological concept of Molinism/middle knowledge. ...

In this talk I attempt to explain the distinctive features of human civilization. Animals have forms of social organization and communication but they do not have money, property, government, and marriage. Why not? Human institutional facts are created and maintained by a specific type of linguistic representation that I call a “status function declaration.” This operation can be performed over and over again on a wide range of subjects. It creates and maintains systems of deontic power: rights, duties, obligations and empowerments of various kinds. These provide the glue that hold human society together. They do that by providing humans with desire independent reasons for action, that is, reasons for doing things that are independent of their immediate inclinations. ...

Sam Harris, in his book “The Moral Landscape”, defines good as that which moves away from “the worst possible misery”. Once we conceive of “the worst possible misery for everyone” then we can talk about taking incremental steps towards this abyss. -Sam Harris, Moral Landscape, pg 39 While listening to Sam’s opening speech in his recent debate with William Lane Craig ( audio, video), it occurred to me that by “misery”, Sam means, “physical misery”. That made me wonder, what about nonphysical misery? It seems that Sam’s dedication to physical materialism could prove to be a great hinderance here. ...

A friend of mine recently pointed me to this page where in the author crafts an argument against the definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. His argument is based largely on biological anomalies which give rise to odd situations where if we consider the person to be male or female depending on what aspects of the male or female biological makeup we choose to measure by (ie. testosterone, estrogen, physical features) we might end up “mandating and legally sanctifying exactly the sort of same-sex marriages they’re intending to ban”. ...