Disgust as a basis for morality

It is striking that so many conservatives spend so much energy condemning gays. They don't just criticize gays; they condemn gays with intense passion. Nor does this process of moral judgment usually involve any sort of delicate weighing process. Too often it is a visceral and unrelenting moral harpooning delivered by the likes of Ted Haggard—or, at least, the sort of judgment previously delivered by the then-closeted version of Ted Haggard, whose name is now synonymous with “reaction formation.” Many of the people who condemn gays on street corners and pulpits remind me of steam boilers on the verge of blowing up. Anti-gay bigots are rarely if ever attempting to work through the details of any of the three main historical philosophical approaches to morality (consequentialism, deontology or virtue) when they condemn gays. No, there is nothing much philosophical about the way most people rail against the gays. They are not driven by any sort of philosophy. In my experience, they are primarily driven by disgust. What especially disturbs conservative Christians are images of men kissing men and men having sex with other men. Such images are so incredibly disgusting to those who hate gays that it has become a favorite insult on the streets and in the military to shout "You're GAY!" And when this insult is hurled in the process of casting moral judgment, it is done by people whose faces are contorted with utter disgust. Because such condemnations of gays are so visceral, this raises the issue of whether disgust is a valid basis for morality . . .

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Stop using the American flag to fan the flames of virulent nationalism

Howard Zinn, writing at Alternet:  On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag,…

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Humble scientists with a sense of wonder

I am tired of reading creationist accusations that scientists are robotic, dogmatic and unfeeling know-it-alls, unredeemable determinists incapable of having any sense of wonder regarding the world. This general accusation that scientists lack any sense of wonder is untrue based upon my own acquaintance with scientists who I know personally as well as those who I know through published writings and videos.

It is certainly true that some particular scientists express themselves with the precision that is devoid of emotion. It is true that some scientists are dogmatic and reductionistic. The same can be said for professionals in any field. The same can be said for most creationists, whose writings display in obedience to perceived authority and a refusal to open their minds to new evidence.

I am creating this page for the sole purpose of collecting writings of scientists who have expressed themselves on scientific topics with humility and wonder. I will jumpstart this page with several quotes, and I invite others to contribute additional quotations in order to create a page to which we can point whenever we hear unfair accusations directed at scientists.

Douglas Futuyma, from Evolutionary Biology, Third Edition, page xviii (1998)

Do not expect to find many pat, dogmatic answers or simple declarations of fact in this book. Very often, the exposition of a topic builds slowly and carefully toward a conclusion, and sometimes the conclusion is that we do not know which of several hypotheses best accounts for our observations. In evolutionary biology, as

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Ancestors along the highway

[This idea was born as a comment here, but I decided to create a separate post out of it]. What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother's mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years. The woman at the end of that 300 foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You'd still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. Isn't it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I'm assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago? Now think even further back. In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That's about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute. It wouldn’t take long to reach the last of your relatives who looks like you. In fact, your trip would have barely begun. Biologically modern humans (those whose bodies are the functional equivalent of our own bodies) came onto the scene between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Driving at highway speed parallel to that line of your own relatives, you'd run out of your biologically modern human relatives less than one-minute after beginning your trip. That's only 4,000 generations. [More . . . ]

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The Manichean worldview of George W. Bush

Why has the Administration of George W. Bush made so many enemies?  It comes from an early intellectual decision to view the world in terms of Good versus Evil.  This article in by Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely.  Efforts to impose limits on waging war against Evil will themselves be seen as…

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