Search results

This argument doesn't even make any sense in light of the statement to which it is ostensibly a reply: Secular worldviews have no ontological basis for morality that stands outside of themselves, and Christians do. It's not an evidence-based argument, and you miss its point by trying to treat it...

Read more carefully. This is not at all what I was saying in the sentence you quoted. What I was saying is that identification of stuctural/functional milestones as the dividing line for the status of "humanness" must presuppose some kind of objective moral authority. A purely secular judgment...

No, I read the posts that came before yours; you’ll see that I posted on this thread just three or four pages ago. What have I taken out of context? You indirectly stated that a defining criterion of humanity is consciousness and pain perception. Not once in that post or in any other post you...

Okay. Now I feel better about the Jew I anaesthetized, then disemboweled, then dismembered, then urinated on. After all, he never felt a thing, was never conscious. That way, when some self-righteous bigot from the Religious Right pickets in front of where I've put said Jew's head on stake in my...

The Roman Church asserted that it was over the law back in the Middle Ages. In 1302, for instance, Pope Boniface VII issued the bull Unam Sanctum, a document which reasoned that since "there is no power except from God and the things that are, are ordained of God" (Rom 13:1-2), and since the...

Yeah, I'm talking about the 9 months before Sept. 11. Bush spent 80+ days of his first 9 months on vacation, and the media was all over it. In fact, it was one of Michael Moore's main talking points in Fahrenheit 9/11. And all the liberal pundits were jeering back in January of this year that...

"...for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Riiight. So Dubya does jack for 9 months, and he gets demonized for playing golf on the job. Obama does jack for 9 months, and the world hands him a Peace Prize. Did I miss something? Where...

Favorite genre is alternate history. Favorite author is Harry Turtledove. The first book by him that I ever read was Worldwar: In the Balance, the first of an 8-part series that describes an alternative timeline where reptilian aliens invaded earth in 1942. The aliens, who call themselves "the...

"There would be no eulogies for Bob, no photographs of his body would be sold in sundries stores, no people would crowd the streets in the rain to see his funeral cortege, no biographies would be written about him, no children named after him, no one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in...

So is that the right and only way to look at it?

Here's a little story for you: Once upon time, American Christians actually gave a hoot about theology. Then some blockheads in all the mainline seminaries started importing German liberal theology and paraded themselves before God (who they said was dead) and everybody as though they were...

My wife recently became obsessed with the books, then co-opted me into buying the movie for her. While it was interesting enough to keep me watching it for two hours, thereafter I immediately ordered a copy of the Rifftrax commentary so I could vent my frustration over Bella's geeky high school...

It is interesting that those who shout Child abuse! loudest are the very same persons who have no objective justification for their moral stance on the matter. If all we amount to is matter in motion, then there is no transcendent moral authority standing watch over our actions. There is only...

No where is God said to have loved Esau, but you do raise an important point in the discussion: there a sense in which God hates the wicked, and there is a sense in which He loves them. He hates them in that they stand defiant against His law by neither loving Him nor their neighbors, and in the...

No? Not when you see all that wreckage after you come out of the Reactor 1 attack? That was on the upper plate; how many people do you think died down in the slums, where most of the debris probably landed? Barret himself admits in the conversation on Disc 2 that, "Lookin' back on it now, I can...

Obviously, the motivation that Barret communicates strongest at the game's beginning is his sentiment that Shinra Corp. is sucking the life out of the Planet. However, we of course find out later in the game that Shinra was responsible for the deaths of his wife and his best friend, and thus one...

This is as silly as saying that I can neither exist nor operate in my office on the grounds that I am not limited to my office. Aristotle had the same objection for why his Unmoved Mover could not be immanent, but Aristotle failed to take into account that the Unmoved Mover moves everything else...

A good Western is always character driven, willing to spend entire hours giving you exposition on two or more persons who will inevitably clash at the end of the movie. Sometimes the clash is between two friends, as in The Shootist. Other times it's between two men who are just mean on...

How Few Remain: A Novel of the Second War Between the States by Harry Turtledove, which I am reading for a second time five years after the first time I read it. It is the first book in an 11-part series that describes the alternate course that North American history might have taken had the...

I like that. It's more profound than most. Sorry I butted in -- it's just that I think that utilitarian/consequentialist arguments weaken the pro-life position.