The Latest Pied Piper for Atheism

A recent conference for Atheist, Beyond Belief, featured several prominent atheist and Darwin’s current bulldogs. Sam Harris is America’s latest village atheist who believes that religious beliefs just aren’t challenged. I guess that he has never heard of Voltaire, Shaw , Twain, Dewey, Nietzsche or many others. Mr. Harris doesn’t have anything new to add to the debate. He is a lightweight compared to many other critics of Christianity. In addition to calling religious people lunatics, he also takes aim at the Eucharist. Like many critics of religion, he doesn’t really examine the religious principles, he just ridicules the belief.









In the clip he discusses reconciling science and religion. He admits that science can’t disprove religion but he doesn’t seem to understand why. Science and religion are different domains. Science can’t prove that we shouldn’t kill immigrants because this isn’t a scientific question. Harris suggest that questions outside of science are silly. He eventually meanders into the problem of evil with the same casual, superficial banality.

Vox Day reviews some of Harris’ work.

The Latest Pied Piper for Atheism

A recent conference for Atheist, Beyond Belief, featured several prominent atheist and Darwin’s current bulldogs. Sam Harris is America’s latest village atheist who believes that religious beliefs just aren’t challenged. I guess that he has never heard of Voltaire, Shaw , Twain, Dewey, Nietzsche or many others. Mr. Harris doesn’t have anything new to add to the debate. He is a lightweight compared to many other critics of Christianity. In addition to calling religious people lunatics, he also takes aim at the Eucharist. Like many critics of religion, he doesn’t really examine the religious principles, he just ridicules the belief.

In the clip he discusses reconciling science and religion. He admits that science can’t disprove religion but he doesn’t seem to understand why. Science and religion are different domains. Science can’t prove that we shouldn’t kill immigrants because this isn’t a scientific question. Harris suggest that questions outside of science are silly. He eventually meanders into the problem of evil with the same casual, superficial banality.

Vox Day reviews some of Harris’ work.

Turin Turambar or Oedipus

I recall this story from 60 Minutes, sperm donor and several half siblings who find each other (the siblings not the donor).

Elizabeth Marquardt at the excellent blog about the Brave New Family, Family Scholars Blog as usual makes an interesting observation:

Of course, the fact that all these half-siblings, and who knows how many more, were conceived in and mostly growing up in Colorado, and are now teenagers, and it’s completely up to their parents and the clinics whether to tell them the truth, and they will soon begin dating and might find that cute guy or girl who seems so *familiar* somehow really attractive… that fact alone — that we are intentionally setting up a generation of young people who could unknowingly sleep with a half-sibling — should be setting off alarm bells everywhere.

What about dad? That fun man who’s old enough to be your father may be your father.

Warning: Shopping MAy Be Hazardous To Your Health

Health warning: shopping is addictive
By Theron Bowers
Tuesday, 05 December 2006
Help is near for holiday shopaholics from American psychiatrists.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



November's Black Friday for American retailers will soon turn into January's Red Friday for many shoppers. After lashing out on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the first day of a national holiday spending spree, shopaholics will find lumps of coal in their mailboxes when the credit card statements arrive. But that's OK: they're not spendthrifts, they're sick.


Welcome to Compulsive Buying Syndrome.

But the worst consequence of turning spending into a psychiatric disorder is a shift from personal responsibility to finding a medical cure and posing as a victim. What will Compulsive Buying Disorder mean for retailers and credit card companies if it becomes an entry in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual? Once a personal problem becomes a public health problem, government intervention will surely be required. After all, children must be protected from themselves. Big Retail could become the next Big Tobacco. Commercials might come with health disclaimers. Perhaps we will see the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Target and Macy’s in front of a congressional panel. What will they say when asked, "Is shopping addictive?"


So is shopping an illness?

The Annuciation

From the folks at CWR

What Would say to Tony Soprano and Hugh Hefner

There’s a good review by Beckwith of a book by Larry Arnhart for the conservative case for Darwinism at Right Reason.

Beckwith Argues:
(1) It seems tome that Arnhart is correct that certain sentiments (e.g., love of
family, children) are consistent with a conservative understanding of community.
But these sentiments themselves seem inadequate to ground moral
action or to account for certain wrongs. For example, Tony Soprano’s love
of kin nurtures sentiments that lead to clear injustices, e.g., rubbing out
enemies…..

Arnhart responds:

My response to the Tony Soprano example should be obvious. Murder is condemned in every society throughout history because there is a natural human sentiment of indignation against unjust killing. No society could survive if the moral sentiment against murder were not strong.

GG: I think Arnhart misses the point. Yes, there is a moral sentiment against unjust killing. However, there is also a moral sentiment to protect and advance the family. There is a moral sentiment to seek status, power. Can nature discern which sentiment is correct? Can we trust our sentiments to determine the difference between just and unjust killing.

Beckwith’s second objection:

(2) As I have already noted, Arnhart’s account of morality is, at best,
descriptive, for it does not provide the reason why I ought to follow it.
Granted, it may very well provide us with an accurate description of what
behaviors in general were instrumental in helping the human species survive.

GG: Does evolutionary psychology explain what behaviors helped us survive? Certainly, evolutionary psychology can’t claim that monogamy was any more beneficial to human survival than polygamy. Both still exist today. Are both necessary for survival?

Anyway, here is the heart of the argument, the is/ought dilemma.

But it cannot say why citizen X ought to perform (or not perform) act Y in circumstance Z. For example, it may be that the traditional family, as Arnhart argues, best protects and preserves
the human species if it is widely practiced. But what do we say to the eighty-year-old Hugh Hefner, who would rather shack up with five twentysomething buxom blondes with which he engages in carnal delights with the assistance of state-of-the-art pharmaceuticals?..... Because we have always had in our population Hugh Hefners of one sort or another, it is not clear to me how Arnhart can distinguish between good and bad practices if both sorts may have played a
part in the survival of the human race, unless there is a morality by which we assess the morality of evolution. But this would seem to lead us back to the old natural law, the one that has its source in Mind and that is not subject to the unstable flux of Darwinian evolution.

Arnhart’s response:

My response to the Hugh Hefner example should also be obvious. Although there is a natural desire for sexual mating, there are also natural desires for conjugal love, parental care, familial bonding, and enduring friendship. Mr. Hefner might satisfy his desire for promiscuous mating, but his pleasure will be shallow and momentary. Marriage and family life promote our fullest happiness over a whole life. And that's why the image of an 80-year-old Hefner surrounded by his bunnies evokes both disgust and pity among mature people. We know that such a life is deeply unsatisfying in its shallowness and thus bad because it's undesirable for any sensible human being.

GG: Arnhart proves Beckwith’s point. He must go beyond the evolutionary data and argue for transcendent values against shallowness and momentary delights.


Arnhart:
What would Beckwith say to Hefner? Mr. Hefner, don't you realize that your life of sexual promiscuity violates the commands of Mind? To which Hefner might respond: Mind? Are you suggesting some kind of Cosmic Mind? Would you please explain what that could possibly mean? And why should I obey the commands of such a Cosmic Mind? How would I know that the commands of this Cosmic Mind are good? Wouldn't I need to have some standard of goodness to judge this? But if I already have a standard of goodness independent of the commands, why do I need these commands of the Cosmic Mind? Is something good because the Cosmic Mind commands it? Or does the Cosmic Mind command it because it is good?

GG: Arnhart misunderstands natural law and suggest that it is mere volunteerism. In natural law, good is good not only because God says so, but also because it is good and can be found good through reason.

What Were You Thinking

Newsweek had a brief article on teenage thinking. If you ever wondered why young people can be such jackasses, here a little (very little) insight:

Surprisingly, behavioral scientists have actually done these interviews with hundreds of American adolescents. In order to explore really stupid behavior, they have asked what seem to be really stupid questions: Is it a good thing to set your hair on fire? Drink Drano? Go swimming where sharks swim?
The results are fascinating, and unsettling. While teenagers are just as likely as adults to get the answer right (the correct answer is “No”), teens actually have to mull the question over momentarily before they answer. As summarized by psychologists Valerie Reyna of Cornell and Frank Farley of Temple in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, teenagers take a split second longer than adults to reject such patently inane behaviors. And more of the teenage brain lights up, suggesting that they are actually going through some kind of deliberative calculation before concluding what the rest of us assume is obvious.

This last recommendation stands in direct contradiction to recent educational trends, particularly the values clarification approach.

Ultimately, psychologists would like to teach adolescents to think categorically—to make sweeping, automatic gist-based decisions about life: “unprotected sex bad,” “illegal drugs bad.”

Modern Eugenics

There is a discussion at Catholic Answers about comments that Richard Dawkins has made about eugenics. Dawkins has a point. We have a eugenic culture which only differs from Nazi Germany by degree and subtlety. Remember, for the Nazis, eugenics was seen as a medical program. Not all aspects of their eugenic doctrine were racial, especially in regards to children. These days, the proposed solution for many genetic illness has been eugenic abortions. I appreciate opponents like Dawkins and Singer because they don’t hide the implications of modern secular philosophies. The following is from an article earlier this year in American Spectator about our quiet eugenics.

The New Eugenics
Medical researchers estimate that 80 percent or more of babies now prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (They estimate that since 1989 70 percent of Down-syndrome fetuses have been aborted.) A high percentage of fetuses with cystic fibrosis are aborted, as evident in Kaiser Permanente's admission to the New York Times that 95 percent of its patients in Northern California choose abortion after they find out through prenatal screening that their fetus will have the disease.

"I THINK OF IT AS COMMERCIAL EUGENICS," says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the International Center for Technology Assessment. "Whenever anybody thinks of eugenics, they think of Adolf Hitler. This is a commercial eugenics. But the result is the same, an intolerance for those who don't fit the norm. It is less open and more subtle. Try to get any numbers on reproductive issues. Try to get actual numbers on sex-selection abortions. They are always difficult to get. If you are involved in that commerce, do you really want people to go: So you aborted how many disabled children? That's the last piece of information people want out there."

The self destructing mind

Orthodoxy
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of thenext generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea,so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinkingby teaching the next generation that there is no validity in anyhuman thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative ofreason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It isan act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation toreality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooneror later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right;even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be asmisleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of abewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to thinkfor myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says,"I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

Gay Fatherhood or Donorhood?

An interesting story in the NYT Magazine on gay men having children with lesbian couples.
Gay Donor or Gay Dad?

In an effort to become a parent of a sort, R., who is gay, agreed, 11 years ago, to donate sperm to a lesbian couple aspiring to pregnancy. A few years before, R. became friendly with a woman — white and upper class like himself — through the gay activist world. They weren’t good friends, he said, “just friendly.” The woman had a partner, a middle-class black woman, whom R. knew less well but who seemed solid.

As usual on the subject of marriage and parenting, the folks at Family Scholars Blog have a few interesting comments.

I have a couple of thoughts but I’m too tired, good night:)

Re: Singer

More on that interview with Singer:

In his book Writings on an Ethical Life, he says: “The more intellectually sophisticated non-human animals have a mental and emotional life that in every significant respect equals or surpasses that of some of the most profoundly intellectually disabled human beings. This is not my subjective value judgement. It is a statement of fact that can be tested and verified over and over again. Only human arrogance can prevent us from seeing it.”

I disagree. Singer never defines intellectually sophisticated. Mere alertness is not intellect. No one has yet demonstrated any animal other than human beings capable of abstract thinking and reasoning.



Often the families say, ‘we don’t want them kept alive,’ so what you could say is we agree they shouldn’t be kept alive indefinitely but since you’ve made the decision that it’s better that they have fluids and food withdrawn so they die, maybe we could keep them alive for another month or two to do some research that could save millions of lives potentially, and then allow them to die.”

Singer doesn’t back away from the implications of his ideas.

Singer asserts. “If we close off compassion for any sentient beings, we’re not necessarily going to feel it for all humans; we’ll regard some categories of humans as beyond the pale as well.”

Yet, he doesn’t see the contradiction. Singer is open to compassion for all but still ends up regarding some categories of human beings (the pre-born, infants and those with brain damage) beyond the pale.

Gotta get somethin out of dem brain damaged folks

My favorite supportive of infanticide continues to amaze. In the never ending quest for equality, Singer is in the van guard in his fight against speciism. In this interview, he recommends using brain damaged people for HIV research rather than chimpanzees.

And dig the title of this interview, “An Ethical Man”

Thanks to Wesley Smith at Secondhand Smoke (a must read for bioethics) for the tip.

Another Success for Adult Stem Cells

From Time Magazine:
Stem cell injections worked remarkably well at easing symptoms of muscular dystrophy in a group of golden retrievers, a result that experts call a significant step toward treating people.
"It's a great breakthrough for all of us working on stem cells for muscular dystrophy," said researcher Johnny Huard of the University of Pittsburgh, who wasn't involved in the work. Sharon Hesterlee, vice president of translational research at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, called the result one of the most exciting she's seen in her eight years with the organization. Her organization helped pay for the work. She stressed that it's not yet clear whether such a treatment would work in people, but said she had "cautious optimism" about it.

Two dogs that were severely disabled by the disease were able to walk faster and even jump after the treatments. The study was published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. It used stem cells taken from the affected dogs or other dogs, rather than from embryos. For human use, the idea of using such "adult" stem cells from humans would avoid the controversial method of destroying human embryos to obtain stem cells.

An honest perspective but why the scare quotes around adult?

I can't take it! Another blog!!

Well this is my first blog. Hopefully you may find some interesting stuff. The blog is about the Mind, Brain and Culture. Yes. I don't believe that the Mind is another word for Brain.

The title and my name are borrowed from my favorite writer, GK Chesterton.

We live in a modern, intellectual world that has a problem with thoughts (abstraction, conceptualization and reasoning) . Consequently, thinking has become ignored in much of psychology and philosophy in favor emotions or instinct.

So, I will have much to say about neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy. Of course, culture can't and won't be ignored but I will try to avoid politics.