I didn't know much about Dan Burton until I read today's story with this headline: "House Bans Lobbyist Gifts, Business-Sponsored Travel." Now I know that he's morally obtuse. Here's the gist of the article: The U.S. House of Representatives, after installing its new Democratic leadership, voted to ban lawmakers from flying…
About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory. It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.
One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material. He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.
That phrase stuck with me ever since. It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks. It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy. That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines. There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.
That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school. If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful. An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore. In law school, …
In this recent interview, published by Salon.com, Ronald Numbers (a former Seventh-day Adventist and author of the definitive history of creationism) discusses "his break with the church, whether creationists are less intelligent and why Galileo wasn't really a martyr." Here's a sampling. Aren't anti-evolutionists anti-scientific? It's not that easy, according…
I'm honored to learn that I can be trusted with millions in suspicious dollars. This, according to this email I just received: From: "capt brian" Subject: Hello SINCIRE Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 22:30:45 +0000 Dear Friend, I am Captain Brian James .of the US Marine Force on Monitoring and…
Back in the late 1970s, I found a copy of a book called The Faith of a Heretic, by Walter Kaufmann. The book is currently out of print, though I have retained my copy. Walter Kaufmann is well-known as a translator of virtually all of Nietzsche’s works. Back in the 1970’s, I found the Faith of a Heretic to be well-written and, at many points, inspirational. After re-reading portions of this work recently, I was again impressed.
What is a “heretic”? According to Kaufmann:
Heresy is a set of opinions at variance with established or generally received principles. In this sense, heresy is the price of all originality and innovation.
When Kaufman speaks of “faith,” he is not referring to close-minded beliefs that contravene evidence. Instead, he is using “faith” to describe the attitude of a person who cares intensely yet has “sufficient interest to concern himself with issues, facts and arguments that have a vital bearing on what he believes.” Kauffman argues that there are at least two types of faith: the faith of the true believer and the faith of a heretic.
Kaufman argued that although morality
cannot be based on religion, religion can be used to help prop it up. It may supply additional motives for being moral and for not being immoral. But to determine in the first place what is moral and immoral, we cannot settle the matter by relying on a deeply felt religious faith.
Here are some excerpts from Kaufmann’s writings regarding …