Mondays are my student query days.

Question:

I’ve been arguing with some of my friends about marriage and family.  When I bring up a certain scholar’s findings, they say “His data and inferences are worthless because he’s cooperated in a project of the Vatican.”  I don’t know how to answer that.  Has he really done work with the Vatican?

It would be much easier to agree upon the answers if only people would take the questions seriously.

You saying playing fair is a natural law.  But some people don't play fair.

I haven't argued that people always obey these precepts.  I've only argued that they know them.

If they don't always obey them, then how do you know that they know them?

Why do you call anything the natural purpose of anything?

Why do we call steering the purpose of your car's steering wheel?  Because in the first place it does steer the car, and in the second place that fact is necessary to the explanation of why the car has one.

At a conference several weeks ago, a federal judge told me that some of the defendants in his court weep -- not when they hear their sentence, which would not be surprising, but when they hear the pre-sentence report.

You natural law thinkers seem to be confused about whether natural law comes from God, from nature, from conscience, or from reason.

Mondays are reserved for the perplexities of students.

Question:

If the most general principles of the natural law are at some level known to everyone, why is it so incredibly easy to disobey them?

Reply:

I commented yesterday that widespread cultural adjustment to nihilism has happened before, for Buddhism is the nihilism of the East.

Western nihilism is different.  We don’t follow the Noble Eightfold Path, because we no longer admire anything noble.  Despite a few superman pretensions, ours is a nihilism for the vulgar.

Nihilism is the belief that everything is meaningless.  Usually this belief is coupled with the view that nothing we perceive is even real – that the world is a mocking veil of illusion.