Category: Philosophy
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Religion is failing us, Part Two
(Read Part One, if you haven’t.) For a couple of decades now, I’ve been interested in the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). I’m not obsessive about it, but my interest in it picks up from time to time. Yesterday, it was snagged again watching this video on YouTube: The speaker at this TED Talk, […]
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Greed is a terrible sickness
In the 1987 movie Wall Street, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas) informed us that greed is good. His character fit in well with the Reagan years, because this was essentially the mantra of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. If anything since then the Republican Party has become even more extreme […]
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Some questions for pro-lifers
I do have some friends that are pro-life. There’s nothing wrong with that and certainly in principle since the opposite of pro-life is pro-death, well who really wants to be that? Pro-life though generally has a more specific meaning, at least here in the United States. It means that you are against abortion, generally at […]
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The roots of terrorism
Ever get this strange feeling of déjà vu? Last Friday’s horrific terrorist events in Paris are being called France’s 9/11. Last I checked there were 129 mostly French citizens murdered in six separate but obviously well coordinated terrorist incidents in Paris, and more than three hundred wounded. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these incidents […]
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Free speech has limits
If freedom is not free then last week’s terrorist incidents in Paris by Islamic terrorists proves that free speech is not free either. In the unlikely event you were away from the news the last week, sixteen people including four French Jews and one Muslim policeman were murdered by Islamic terrorists in two incidents in […]
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The rationality of altruism
It’s Christmas time so this being America of course there are going to be people who will object to it. One such person is Peter Schwartz. On December 19 he wrote an op-ed published in The Washington Post. Schwartz was bemoaning the whole charity thing as something evil. If only we could celebrate rational self-interest instead, […]
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The path to genuine enlightenment
Religious violence is hardly news. Religious violence, such as what is currently going on between Shi’ites and Sunnis in Iraq, should drive millions of people to atheism. No God worth worshipping could possibly approve of any violence in its name, let alone require us humans to use force and murder as a means of spreading […]
Occam's Razor 