You don’t know the word "palter"? I didn’t either, until I read a recent paper by Frederick Schauer and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard. The paper’s abstract defines this incredibly useful term, palter: Abstract: A lie involves three elements: deceptive intent, an inaccurate message, and a harmful effect. When only…
February's Big Read in Missouri has selected a surprising novel--Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I should not assume everyone today has read it, so briefly it is a novel about a future in which it is illegal to read books. The fire department, because all houses are built of fireproof…
Beliefnet is currently hosting an on-going discussion involving atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan. The topics of the discussion are God, faith, and fundamentalism. These are two excellent writers who are doing a terrific job of testing each others’ positions. Well worth a visit.
Here’s a sampling of Harris:
…Please consider how differently we treat scientific texts and discoveries, no matter how profound: Isaac Newton spent the period between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667 working in isolation . . .When he emerged from his solitude, he had invented the differential and integral calculus, established the field of optics, and discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Many scientists consider this to be the most awe-inspiring display of human intelligence in the history of human intelligence. Over three hundred years have passed, and one still has to be exceptionally well-educated to fully appreciate the depth and beauty of Newton’s achievement. But no one doubts that Newton’s work was the product of merely human effort, conceived and accomplished by a mortal—and a very unpleasant mortal at that. And yet, literally billions of our neighbors deem the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an to be so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. Given the breadth and depth of human achievement, this seems an almost miraculous misappropriation of awe. It took two centuries of continuous ingenuity to substantially improve upon Newton’s work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? It
I’ve written before about how banking laws are for sale (some would say I’ve ranted before). In that post I discussed payday lending. I often hear that payday lending is not predatory and that such lenders must be offering a service, else why would people borrow money at 300%, 400%, 500% or even more?
I also hear people blame the victims of payday lending. Others say the borrowers are at fault for borrowing money at horrible interest rates. Even borrowers hold themselves at fault. When (if) they get out of the trap (and make no mistake, it is a trap with a cycle of borrowing the same money repeatedly, because the costs are so high people have great difficulty paying the debt without borrowing to do so) they still blame themselves for getting into it.
Many borrowers blame themselves for being stupid or taking the ‘easy way’ out. One person I know, when faced with the choice of becoming homeless or getting some money, said she thought the loan was an answer to prayer. “As I prayed for help,” she said, “an ad for payday loans came on tv. I thought God was answering my prayer.” Hundreds and hundreds of dollars later in interest, she thinks it was the devil.
This is how the Lorraine Hotel looked last night (January 13, 2007) at 9 pm. I had never been to Memphis until this weekend, so I had never before visited the Lorraine (it is now a preserved historical site). It was eerily quiet last night, not at all the way…