Kyle, from the video blog Serptopia writes the following to me in reply to my posts from the summer, “On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being and Goodness”: Oh my, you seem quite the Aristotelean. From a certain angle, yes, I am very Aristotelean. But in the broader picture, I see myself as situating all of [...]
A moral and legal dilemma: When a B.C. couple discovered that the fetus their surrogate mother was carrying was likely to be born with Down syndrome, they wanted an abortion. The surrogate, however, was determined to take the pregnancy to term, sparking a disagreement that has raised thorny questions about the increasingly common arrangements. Get [...]
Via Dan Savage, A Christian decodes for his brethren: When you tell a gay person to “resist” being gay, what you are really telling them—what you really mean—is for them to be celibate. What you are truly and actually saying is that you want them to condemn themselves to a life devoid of love. Be [...]
Now, according to the natural order instituted by divine providence, material goods are provided for the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore the division and appropriation of property, which proceeds from human law, must not hinder the satisfaction of man’s necessity from such goods. Equally, whatever a man has in superabundance is owed, of natural right, [...]
Peter Wilby approves of the “giving pledge” through which 40 billionaires have each promised to give half their fortune to charity but thinks much more systemic change in the ways the wealthy treat existing obligations of citizenship and corporate stewardship is more fundamentally necessary: I repeat: we should welcome the Gates-Buffett initiative and applaud those [...]
ProfMTH explores legal definitions that define sex acquired through fraud as rape: I have argued before, formally speaking, deception is a kind of force. Laws which treat procurement of sex through fraud as a form of rape seem to stem from similar considerations of the relationship between at least certain forms of deliberate deceit and [...]
Recently a University of Illinois adjunct professor in a course on Catholicism got into unfairly lost his job over expressing his philosophical opposition to homosexuality in an e-mail to his student in what seems to me like a pretty clear violation of academic freedom. As to the substance of his arguments though, PZ Myers does [...]
I speak only for myself and not for all of those committed to both loving the Mets and hating the Yankees, when I say, George Steinbrenner was the best enemy any baseball fan could have. His contributions to the sport were monumental and for the best. He raised the standards of economic and athletic competition [...]
In a rare occurrence, I am being taken to task for giving religion too much credit and atheists too little! Here are the offending paragraphs I wrote on Friday: I would say that various practices called religious, if stripped of all their dogmatism, traditionalism, literalism, and authoritarianism, can and do certainly coexist with and complement science [...]
Cultural variation is amazing: Your Thoughts?
A somewhat unpleasantly hostile atheist is outraged that a nephew, with whom this atheist is admittedly not very close, announced on Facebook plans to study theology (in addition to political science). Here is what the atheist wants to say to the nephew “in a nutshell”: “In a nutshell, I think religion is: pernicious fraud and one [...]
Tushnet’s moral choice for herself and for other gays is celibacy or gender reassignment. Of course for some people, specifically some of the transgendered, a sex change is entirely appropriate and preferable to gay sex because from a gender(rather than a sex) perspective, those who are pre-op transgendered and are attracted to members of their [...]
I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters. The controversy centers not [...]
This ripped my guts out to watch. Thanks to the “Let’s Lodge A Complaint Against God” Facebook page for the video. But the takeaway from this video should not be just another reiteration of the problem of evil, it should be refreshed urgency in our thinking about proactively remedying the problem through humane human efforts. [...]
A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand. Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]
It was a unanimous 79-0 vote: Women seeking abortions in Louisiana will be required to get an ultrasound first, even if they are a victim of rape or incest, under a bill that received final legislative passage Wednesday. The bill by Democratic state Sen. Sharon Broome of Baton Rouge was sent to the governor’s desk [...]
Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency. Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s [...]
This is mostly previously reported information, but it does include an appearance by Canon lawyer Kevin O’Rourke, a priest who both sides with Sister McBride and admits that the Church’s policy of automatically excommunicating anyone who permits an abortion but not automatically excommunicating pedophile priests “doesn’t look good”: My views on the ethical issues raised [...]
Courtney at Feministing is quite skeptical of marriage but characterizes Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) as making a relatively compelling case for “the radical potential to be found in the privacy of the family unit” in her new memoir, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage: [Gilbert] writes, “It is not we as individuals, [...]
Not that moral correctness requires popular approval, but moral admirableness of the populace does require morally correct opinions, and so this is a heartening development which sees America finally starting to get it right, with its first ever clear majority (52%) judging gay relationships “morally acceptable”: Andrew Sullivan analyzes the data: A large part of [...]
ProfMTH explores the issue with a wealth of information, siding against such exemptions: The second video is chock full of legal information. The most interesting bit in here is where he discusses Antonin Scalia’s strong case against religious exemptions and Sonia Sotomayor’s general support for them. 1. Regarding Christian Legal Society v. Martinez– –the decision [...]
In reply to my post on the story of Sister Margaret McBride whom the Catholic Church “automatically excommunicated” for helping to give the go-ahead to an abortion claimed necessary for saving the life of an 11 week pregnant mother, I have already received two interesting replies. The first challenged the medical argument for the necessity of [...]
Feministing: Sister Margaret McBride has been demoted from her position at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, AZ after participating in the approval of an abortion for a critically ill patient in 2009. McBride was part of the hospital ethics committee that approved an abortion for a patient with pulmonary hypertension, which can be [...]
Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations. I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional [...]