Expanded from a reply to a post in jaylake's journal ("Where should the rules come from?")

The problem is that the examples offered of attempted atheist reorganizations of society, in particular totalitarian Communism but also (for some values of "atheism") various kinds of Fascism, are frightening. Not so much because a society with atheist roots has to ( Read more... )

When one apologizes, one is implicitly or explictly stating three things.  The first is that the act for which one apologizes is morally wrong.  The second is that one could have prevented this act.  The third is that one will try to prevent recurrences of this act in the future.

Not one of these conditions applies to The Innocence of Muslims.  It ( Read more... )

Ten years ago today, it was the morning after an all-nighter. I was taking out the garbage outside my apartment in Little Egg Harbor, NJ. The skies were clear. Thunder rolled out of a cloudless sky. I looked around, but could see neither a stormcloud nor a supersonic airplane. And the sound was strangely protracted. I shrugged, went back ( Read more... )

The Palestinian Arabs started the fight with the Jews; they feel "wronged" because they failed to win. Now, the Palestinian Arabs are in the moral position of a bully who, having failed to beat up his victim and, having been tied up by this victim to avoid future attacks from the bully, persists in continuing the fight by bashing his head ( Read more... )

IntroductionSince the dawn of science fiction, we have speculated about the possibility of nonhuman sapient life on other planets. This is not hyperbole: some of the earliest guesses that other worlds might exist like the Earth also postulated that other races of "men" might exist on these other worlds. The supposition makes sense: why could ( Read more... )