Ouch! The serious study of philosophy or neuroscience might make you less moral. That’s my take-away from a recent article: “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” by Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler. This particular article by Vohs and Schooler [...]
Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time. I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since. Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s [...]
Bhutto is dead.
One tries to be understanding, patient, tries to embrace the tolerance so thoroughly rejected by those who condemn out of hand, with no chance for counterargument, the possibility of dialogue. Comes a point where one has to simply acknowledge that some people, in some places, just don’t share anything in common with us.
We [...]
I’ve been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, “The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism.” (you’ll need to scroll down to the z’s). Zimbardo’s article appears as one of a series of articles responding [...]
I’m pondering an idea which is certainly not original, though it is an idea powerful enough to make a mockery of any moral system that looks to the consequences of actions to characterize the moral quality of those actions.
Here’s the thought: Every so often something really bad happens to me. I’m in an auto accident. [...]
While doing the research for my previous post, A Slaughterhouse of One’s Own: A community confronts Santeria, I came across several explanations of exactly how animal sacrifice works in this religion, physically and metaphorically speaking.
The animal is bound and its throat is cut. The carotid artery is sliced with a ceremonial knife and the blood [...]
I received the following from a friend of mine, who sent it to his local paper as well. I’ve asked his permission to post it here, in its entirety. It concerns an issue which, while we may hope represents an unfortunate part of our history long outgrown, still rears its viperous and virulent [...]
Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?
Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our [...]
Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace. When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often [...]
According to this post at Alternet, there are many forms of rampant self-indulgence. The GOP specializes in the most pernicious forms:
While the culture at large was adjusting to the idea that families don’t all look the same and that private sexual morality was not the business of the state, the decadent economic elite and right [...]
Senator Bernie Sanders writes that the American Middle Class is being decimated. He cites some interesting numbers. Here’s a couple shockers:
Robert Frank, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has detailed the lives of the rich and famous in the book Richistan. He writes that households with a net worth of between $100 million and $1 billion [...]
Cop-out: a feebly transparent excuse or explanation for refusing to face up to something.
We constantly hear that the Ten Commandments are the highest achievement of moral law. We even hear this claim from public officials who can’t even name the Commandments. They want to hang the Commandments everywhere, as though their display will cause bad people [...]
Stewart is a talented interviewer, but this one is especially good. It was satisfying, indeed, to see Stewart expose the amoral and clueless Matthews.
