Balancing Moral Dilemmas on Top of Our Everyday STUFF

Interesting missive, that moral rules, dirty secret, thing.  Got me thinking.  I am one of those people with too much stuff.  I’m also one of those people who would just as soon give money or time to kids on the other side of the world as pay my own bills, but that’s a different problem altogether.  Let’s call it a problem with authority, and we’ll just visit that one some other time.

I’m on mission right now to rid my life of stuff.  If you entered my house at this point, you’d laugh at how, thus far, I haven’t fared particularly well in this area.  Stuff has sort of taken over.  None of it is particularly expensive or luxurious stuff, just stuff.  I have kids.  They like stuff.  ‘Nuff said.

In figuring out how to rid our lives of the extraneous junk and the stress it inevitably causes – particularly when it trips me up in the middle of the night causing swear words to wake my children – I’m faced with a choice.  Sell it, trash it or donate it. 

Trashing some of it is a favor to all involved – junk is a kind word to describe much of the effluvia of childhood.  Small plastic things, 40 drawings of essentially the very same flower, more small plastic things, pieces of other things we’re sure we’ll find the rest of eventually, single socks (even a shoe or two) in a house full of bi-peds but surely-the-mates-are-here-somewhere-and-if-I-toss-this-one-I’ll-immediately-find-the-other; hey look, more …

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Framing the abortion debate (part 1): What is the missing premise?

A logical argument, known as a syllogism, looks like this:      PREMISE 1:  All dogs have wet noses.      PREMISE 2:  Max is a dog.      CONCLUSION:  Max has a wet nose. Easy, right?  Now, let's see what happens when we remove one of the premises:      PREMISE 1:  All…

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No Faith? But that’s no good, either . . .

I love that there are people like Erich Vieth in the world, people who take the time to refute dangerous “fact” spouters like the Creationists who got themselves powered up to the top of the Google listings for vestigial organs.  I love that he researches so thoroughly and carefully points out the enormous flaws in what passes for logic in the world of the fanatical faithful.  They need to be pointed out, those flaws.  Because in recent years, their voices have become very, very loud.  And often, unfortunately, loud wins.  Especially when loud is accompanied by legislation, or worse, explosives.

Seems fanatics, whether they be Christian, Muslim or otherwise, are dead-set on yelling the loudest and therefore claiming victory.  It pains me.  It obviously pains lots of people; even most flocks of the faithful can see that anything carried too far becomes dangerous.  People like Erich, or Al Franken, say, do good work.  I applaud them.

I, on the other hand, might be more likely to just cover my ears and say “la-la-la-la-LA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU!”

Yeah, yeah, I know, not particularly effective in the battle against ignorance.  It’s just that I get soooo tired of it.  Of the fighting, of the rhetoric, of the nonsense that parades as so much religion and the often arrogant verbosity working to knock down the many points of faith, one at a time, but not being heard because, after all, if you believe, you don’t need proof.  Or un-proof, as it were.

I happen …

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Would a deadline for troop withdrawal create fewer American dead?

One of the Sunday morning pundits today (4/16/06) made an excellent point.  He observed that President Bush has refused to give a firm date for withdrawing US troops from Iraq, because, Bush says, such an action would embolden the terrorists to just wait us out.  However, Bush then ignored this principle…

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Why does “irreducible complexity” sometimes demand a creator and sometimes not?

So here's my question:  creationists (a subset of Fundamentalist Christians) claim that life on earth is too "irreducibly complex" to have arisen spontaneously, without an "intelligent designer," so how do they explain the existence of God, who is, presumably, infinitely more "complex" than any life on earth?  Was God designed by…

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