How it evolved?
Note that just because something is natural doesn’t make it moral.
Category Archives: Philosophy
No Free Marketeer
That’s what John McCain is. One of the reasons it’s hard to get enthused about him. I suspect that Palin might be a little better.
[Update a while later]
Both presidential candidates are completely economically incoherent.
No surprise, since they’re both economic ignorami. Though in Obama’s case it’s worse, because he thinks that he understands economics, and much of what he knows for damned sure is wrong.
A Libertarian Governor
Well, it’s what one might expect from an Alaskan. It also explains why the press and the left are so completely wrecking themselves in attempting to derail her. They don’t understand libertarians, only able to think in simple minded terms of “liberal” and “conservative.” And I have to say that if this is what John McCain means by “maverick” I’m all for it.
Remembering The Gulag
Lileks reminisces:
I got all three volumes from the drugstore – which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore – and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.
Indeed.
Science As A Religion
And a fundamentalist one, at that:
When Salon interviewed me about my new book, “Saving Darwin,” I suggested that science doesn’t know everything, that there might be a reality beyond science, and that religion might be about God and not merely about the human quest for a nonexistent God. These remarks got me condemned to whatever hell Myers believes in.
Myers accused me of having “fantastic personal delusions” that could actually lead people astray. “I will have no truck with the perpetuation of fallacious illusions, whether honeyed or bitter,” Myers wrote, “and consider the Gibersons of this world to be corruptors of a better truth. That’s harsh, I know … but he is undermining the core of rationalism we ought to be building, and I find his beliefs pernicious.”
Myers’ confident condemnations put me in mind of that great American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who waxed eloquent in his famous 1741 speech, “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” about the miserable delusions that lead humans to reject the truth and spend eternity in hell. We still have preachers like Edwards today, of course; they can be found on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But now we also have a new type of preacher, the Rev. PZ Myers.
And they don’t even recognize it in themselves. Dawkins and Myers and Hitchens are doing more harm than good for science in their evangelizing, I think.
An Effective Alzheimers Treatment?
Let’s hope so. Alzheimers is, to me, one of the worst diseases, because it steals not just your body, but your mind, to the point that you’re essentially dead while the empty husk metabolizes on. If it’s actually possible to reverse the progress of the disease, that’s huge news. But I wonder if in doing so, you’ve still lost some irretrievable memories? And if so, who are you?
Why Am I Not Surprised?
Al Gore thinks (or at least thought at one time, and there’s no reason to think that he’s changed his opinion) that Rousseau is worth quoting.
You know, if I were going back in history and assassinating someone to prevent great harm to the world, my first choice would not be Hitler. It would be Jean Jacques Rousseau, the father of totalitarianism in all its forms. Though probably someone else would have come up with his vile notions independently.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Somehow, this seems related. An excellent essay on Obama’s charisma, and messianic campaign.
The danger of Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure–the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty–but also a change in human nature. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.
The Founders were Lockean. Obama seems more an heir of Rousseau, though perhaps an unwitting one.
Don’t Shout
David Brin has a warning for irresponsible astronomers.
When in danger, most people in a group recognize the responsibility to be quiet, and not give themselves away to an enemy by making noise, sometimes to the point that a crying baby will be stifled, and even suffocated. I think that this is a similar case where people should be enjoined, by force if necessary, because we cannot know the consequences. I see very little potential benefit to this, and a great deal of risk. The apparent insularity of the SETI folks cannot continue–we are all on this planet, not just them.
Obama’s “Freedom From Faith”
Jim Geraghty has some observations.
But I found this interesting (not that I hadn’t seen it before):
…many religious believers probably couldn’t imagine anything worse than not having their relationship with God. They don’t see their relationship with their Creator, by whatever name they call the divine, as something they could be “free” from, and in fact a fairly common definition of Hell is in fact “complete separation from God.”
This is one of those intellectual gulfs that separates me from believers. I not only can imagine not having a relationship with God, but I live the dream. Yeah, if I really believed in the fire and brimstone thing, and the imps <VOICE=”Professor Frink”>and the poking and the burning and the eternal tooooorment…glavin…</VOICE>, then I might decide that sinning wasn’t worth it. But if hell be “complete separation from God,” something that I’ve had all of my life, bring it on. All it gets from me is a shrug.
A Tri-Cameral Legislature?
Has the Supreme Court abandoned its role as a third branch of government?
It often seems that way.