People are attracted to some awfully bad rules of life. Maybe you’ve noticed.
Since we are a rational species, and most people aren’t idiots, how do bad rules of life become so popular?
Case in point: The phenomenally successful Nike advertising slogan, "Just do it."
Most young Christians are unfamiliar with their own intellectual traditions. They are disconcerted when persons of an unserious disposition taunt them with questions like “If God exists, then why is there evil in the world?” or “If God made everything, then who made God?”
How much do we read? I suppose the answer depend on what one means by reading. Much of what we call by that name is barely the same activity. We say we have no time for real reading. But we seem to have plenty of time for snack prose.
On a cold summer day in the morning
Edward’s teacher gave Ed a grave warning.
“Read humbly, my boy,
“Learning’s not just a toy,
“For you can’t learn from what you are scorning.”
From time to time someone argues that abortion couldn’t be against the natural law, because sometimes during the course of gestation spontaneous abortions occur.
Here is the difference. In one case, the unborn child dies because something goes dreadfully wrong during the natural process of development. In the other, he dies because someone kills him.
“This I regard as history’s highest function,” says the Roman historian Tacitus, “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”
For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits. -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
How is morality like and unlike mathematics?
Alike: In both math and morality, there are right and wrong answers.
I keep your How to Be Full and Exact post open on my smartphone. Now that I've settled into my first academic job, I should really work on practicing more of your suggestions!
Reliably supporting a cause is not the same thing as being consistent. Case in point: Old reliable Richard Dawkins, who has been writing for years about how meaningless everything is, but who can’t keep his own claims straight.
I am not one of those (actually there are very few) who believe that natural selection does not explain anything. Yet this godlike properties attributed to this mechanism are more than a little bit difficult to credit.