“The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.”

-- attributed to Malcolm Muggeridge

Tomorrow:  Proving Natural Law

Could it be that for many people the debate about homosexuality has less to do with homosexual than heterosexual behavior?

Consider the popular line, “They can’t help how they feel.”  This proposition is the minor premise of an implied syllogism, the major premise of which may be put, “To act upon a desire which one cannot help feeling is always blameless.”

Is the major premise persuasive?  Hardly.  Many an adulterer might say in perfect sincerity that he can’t help wanting to sleep with his neighbor’s wife; many a thief, that he can’t help wanting his victim to be few dollars poorer.  It doesn’t follow that these persons are blameless for acting on their desires.

We accept such absurd postulates not because they persuade us, but because they provide excuses for our own bad behavior.  “I can’t help wanting to sleep with everyone who wears a skirt, therefore ….”

Tomorrow:  Maybe Not the ONLY One

What are we to think of seemingly irrational government regulations, such as the proposed rule which would treat a mud puddle on a farmer’s land the same as a navigable river?  I suppose there might somewhere exist a few addle-pated regulators who really believe that the future of the planet depends on such edicts, but there couldn’t be many of them.  I think there is more to it.

The regulator’s frame of mind is suspicious in principle of all private power.  To his busybody way of thinking, it is almost beside the point whether the mud puddle diktat is needed or would do any good.  He views the rule as good just because it is a rule, for the farmer must be broken to discipline, like any young horse with too much spirit.

Tomorrow:  The Other Thing the Sexuality Debate Is About

“Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense.  They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason.  They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal.  They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Tomorrow:  What Makes the Regulator Regulate?

To the argument that the universe was caused by God, the village atheist retort is “Oh yeah?  Then what caused God?”

But the argument isn’t that every being requires a cause.  The village atheist is quite correct that if B causes A, C causes B, D causes C, and so on without end, we have a problem.  Nothing has ultimately been explained.

Rather the argument is that every contingent being requires a cause – every being that doesn’t have to be.  In reality the impossibility of endless regress makes the case for God, not against Him, because the regress continues only until it reaches a necessary being.

Tomorrow:  The Wrong Way to Wake Up