Sammy Blaze: The Meaning of Life

Phatmass's Sammy Blaze is coming out with a new CD. Check out this song. LINK

The Dawkins Delusion

The Illusion

ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. (Link)

He then later says....

“the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul.”

So if the conclusion of neuroscience is that our own executive “I” is an “illusion” then why isn’t morality or science also an illusion? Is that what you call a "sounder basis"?

The Self-esteem (i.e. Self-Pride) Fallacy

Another study showing the pride does not pay. I recomend reading the rest of the article if you have children.

From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.” (link)

Reason and Materialism

An exchange between Mark Shea and an atheist...

(Atheist) Firstly, we have empirical evidence that reason and logic exist from both our own experiences and the recorded experiences of humans before us. Even nonhuman animals have limited powers of reasoning and learning, as can be demonstrated empirically.

(Mark) You do realize, of course, that you are saying "Reason proves that reason exists." I do believe reason exists. But I think you need to rework this argument.

(Atheist) Mark seems to have trouble with ideas grounded on abductive inferences validated by evidence and experience. Nonetheless, he has provided no evidence to refute their existence.

(Mark) Er, why? I have no need to show that reason, freedom or morality don't exist. I think they do exist. I simply don't think that a materialist philosophy can account for *why* they exist. In a materialist universe, reason, freedom and morality cannot be grounded in supernature, for supernature does not exist. So they must be grounded purely in Nature. The problem is, atheists don't talk that way. They talk as though Reason will liberate us from, among other artifacts of irrational Nature, religion. "Free your mind!" is the common slogan of atheism. But if materialism is true, then your mind *can't* be freed from the slavery nature imposes via the meme of religion because your mind is just another epiphenomenon of Nature. The best Reason can do is conduct you into another cell in the same prison. This is related to the problem of freedom, of course. Because if materialism is true then your "free" thought is just an illusion. It's all determined by the physical laws governing the motion of molecules in your brain. And morality, likewise, is simply that pattern of behavior which wind and weather have accidently conditioned you to prefer. If you happen to like killing and eating children, that's not "wrong" in a purely material universe. It's just a statistical aberration from the needs of the herd. No doubt you will be locked up or even killed as the herd asserts the dominant survival paradigm. But it's rubbish to say that your preference for juvenile cannibalism is "wrong". That drags in the word "ought" (As in, "You ought not to kill and eat children.") and you cannot derive "ought" from "is".

The trouble is, atheists generally moralize and drop "oughts" all over the place every day in ways that strongly suggest they believe their particular values are *really* right, and not at all in ways that suggest "I prefer chocolate, but others prefer butterscotch." This happens most especially, of course, when they are talking of religion itself. ("It is *criminal* to enslave young minds to this ignorant superstition!") Why, it's as though they think religion is really *evil* and not simply part of the marvelous diversity and colorful pageant of possible brain configurations, which are just as much a part of Nature's vast interlocking web of Inevitable Cause and Effect as the march of the clouds across the sky. Nope. Not a few atheists are pissed at religionists. And pissed, not as a man is pissed at his computer for breaking, but pissed as a man is pissed at another man for being really bad when he need not be.

Read the rest here LINK

The New Atheists

A quote from the WSJ...

For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins’s volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion.

The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza–let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith–the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history–is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness. Link

Occam’s Razor

I was reading a debate between Apolonio Latar and an atheist. They were discussing the question, “Is it Rational to Believe in God?” Apolonio does a fine job of making the case that it is rational to believe in God. The atheist made a comment that I would like to address. The atheist makes the following remark...

I think the answer is the failure to properly appreciate the necessity of Occam’s Razor. The mere fact that God is not necessary is, in and of itself, all the rational defeater one needs.

I will not be addressing the claim that it is a “fact” that God is not necessary. I want to focus instead on the idea that Occam’s Razor can be a decisive method in disproving God. To do this I will quote a online discussion on the topic outside the context of proving/disproving God.

(Chad Orzel) Occam’s razor is not science. The scientific method does not consist of looking at the world, constructing multiple theories which might explain the observed facts, and then choosing the simplest.

Occam’s razor is meta-science at best, and not a decisive argument in any way. Sometimes, the more complicated theory is the right one.

(Tommaso Dorigo) Well, well, well, while I usually concur with Chad’s opinions, I am not sure I agree with him on this one. Occam’s razor does not consist in constructing multiple theories, but rather to advise succintness in construction of a scientific theory.

(Chad Orzel)I wouldn't say that Occam's razor is unscientific, but it is not by any stretch a decisive principle of science. It's like mathematical elegance-- a hint that you're on the right track, but not conclusive evidence of the rightness of the theory.

If the only tool you have to distinguish between two theories is that one is simpler than the other (or that one is more mathematically elegant than the other) then you need better experiments.

(There's an anecdote about some famous physicist-- for some reason, I think it was Bethe, but it might've been Feynman or Fermi or one of those people-- who was presented with a bunch of experiments that some people were claiming as evidence of a new particle discovery. Each time they showed him a bubble chamber picture that they said showed their new particle, he had an alternate explanation-- stray fields, particles not detected in the picture, all sorts of things.

(Finally, in frustration, they said "Look, we've shown you a dozen pictures, and you've given a dozen different explanations of the track. We have a single, simple theory that explains all of them."

("Yes," was the reply, "and the difference is that each of my dozen different explanations is right, and your single simple explanation is wrong." And he was right.)

(Tommaso Dorigo) I know Feynman's story Chad, but it proves my point - entia non sunt multiplicanda: it is the particle they were claiming which was what Occam's razor would have slashed, and it was precisely by applying Occam's principle that Feynman ended up being right: his explanation were more economical, since they relied on known effects.

(Chad Orzel)This is a nice illustration of the reasonwhy Occam's razor is not a decisive scientific principle, though: Prior to the experimental confirmation, you could perfectly well argue that either side had the more economical explanation. The people doing the experiment thought that a single particle was a simpler experiment, while Feynman (was it Feynman? I can't recall the source) thought that using known effects was simpler.

In hindsight, we can easily say that the correct explanation was also the simpler one, but that's because we know it was correct. Relative simplicity is very much in the eye of the beholder, though, and does not provide a useful basis for determining which theory is correct.

I don't object to Occam's razor as a sort of useful heuristic, but it's not decisive. You can say of two theories "Well, this one seems simpler, so I think it's on the right track," but that doesn't prove anything. It might be a good way to determine which of two expensive and complicated sets of experiments would be better to undertake (the simpler theory stands a better chance of being confirmed), but experiments are the only real way to distinguish between theories. (LINK)

The Path to Happiness

What is the scientific proof that a modest lifestyle is the path to happiness? Rayo said one example is Buddhist monks. They eat the same food and wear the same clothes every day. With years of meditation they lose interest in the "next new thing and the moving target," he said. "And their brain scans show that they are happier than most people in a scientifically measurable way." Link

Looks like psychology is finally catching up to Aristotle, “buddhist monks”, and Christian saints. I had a post way back that covered the 4 levels of happiness that basically says the same thing as this study. I would like to know how a brain scan can measure happiness though. If happiness consists in a group of neurons, then lets just throw out the hassles of everyday life and just hook some electrodes up to these neurons and be done with it.

The virtue of humility and the folly of pride

I teach confirmation, and one of the topics that it hard to get across is pride and humility. My students seem to see pride as the virtue and humility as self hate. I have tried to explained that humility is seeing onself as one really is. Humility is being honest and it provides the ability for growth. In regards to pride, I try to give them examples of people acting proud and it seems to work as far as showing them the concept. Anyway this study also shows the distinction between humility and pride from a secular source.

A recent NYTimes article highlights the work of Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his grad student Justin Kruger on the critical relationship between self-assessment and skill level. Not surprisingly, they've shown that people with poor skills are also quite bad at assessing their own abilities. They tend to be grossly overconfident, demonstrating a notable deficiency in "self-monitoring skills." The opposite is also true: better performers have far more humble predictions, and subsequently more accurate assessments, of their performances. (Link)

Catholic Cartoon Blog

This is from a must see blog....Catholic Cartoon Blog


Hat tip to the Curt Jester

Adding complexity to the seven deadly sins

This is creative and kind of fun.



Link

G.K. Chesterton’s on Saint Francis of Assisi

I found this quote/post intersting:

To write history and hate Rome, both pagan and papal, [referring to H.G. Wells’ Outline of History] is practically to hate nearly everything that has happened. It comes very near to hating humanity on purely humanitarian grounds. To dislike both the priest and the soldier, both the laurels of the warrior and the lilies of the saint, is to suffer a division from the mass of mankind for which not all the dexterities of the finest and most flexible of modern intelligences can compensate. A much wider sympathy is needed for the historical setting of St. Francis, himself both a soldier and a saint.

If religion doesn’t work so well for you and the concept of spirituality is totally baffling, that’s fine. But becoming hateful or crusading about it seems as ridiculous to me as it would be for Asperger-types to rail against the need for empathy and social skills. You’re obviously just missing some hard-wiring, so leave it alone (Link).

"Accountabalism" and the sex abuse scandal

As an amature computer chair apologist it is hard to deal with the sex abuse scandal. How do you defend the indefensible? You don’t. I have heard it said that the corruption of the best is the worst and this is true with the Priests who abused. This is really the only response that I know when the subject is brought up. And I have spent many sleepless nights thinking about the issue.

I guess it’s the 5th "anniversary" of the breaking of the sex abuse scandal. (Let the confetti be thrown and blow the party horns) I have seen/heard these "anniversary" type specials on both PBS and NPR. They seem to push the idea that the scandal stems from some systemic problem of the Catholic Church. There is a problem with this view, a view that has been coined as "Accountabalism".

Accountabalism assumes perfection—if anything goes wrong, it’s a sign that the system is broken. That’s not true even of mechanical systems: Entropy, friction, and manufacturing tolerances ensure that no machine works perfectly. Social systems are incapable of anything close to perfection, so if something goes wrong in one, that need not mean the system is broken. If an employee cheats on expenses by filling in taxi receipts for himself, the organization doesn’t have to “fix” the expense-reporting system by requiring that everyone travel with a notary public. (Breakthrough Ideas for 2007)

There are some basic, common sense things that were implemented like reporting to police when there is an allegation of sex abuse. I think this is great and what any decent Bishop would have done anyway. But for NPR and PBS this is not enough. Women need to become priest. Priest need to be married. The Church needs to turn into a democracy so that public opinion can tell the holy Spirit that abortion is a right. Religion should be compartmentalised as much as possible. Basically they have the agenda to twist the Church into their own image and it has nothing really to do with sex abuse but more to do with their own agenda.

Patriarchs don’t die...we multiply

But patriarchy always makes a comeback, because its adherents put more genes and ideas into the future than do their secular counterparts. This process is already well under way in the United States. For example, among American women just now passing beyond reproductive age, nearly 20% are childless and almost as many have only one child. Consequently, a relatively large share of the next generation is descended from a comparatively narrow and socially conservative segment of society that places a high value on reproduction. Today we see a culture in which social conservatives and the religious-minded play a far greater role than they did forty years ago. (Breakthrough Ideas for 2007)

It’s ironic that liberalism is in decline by it’s own venerated evolutionary mechanics.

Nutrition and Tradition

I find this article on nutrition very interesting. I thing it diagnoses not just the problem with our current culture of food but also the current culture of how we understand ourselves. The article argues that the scientific tool of reductionism “takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle.” This has lead to processed foods that have the known nutrients but are still unhealthy because we lack the full picture of what is going on.

It’s also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot? (Unhappy Meals)

So what is one of the cures for “nutritionism”that is laid out in the article? To go back. Not to what our mothers see as food, but what our mother’s, mother would consider food. To go back to the wisdom that is found in how our ancestors lived and ate. So to use my own word, we should go back to tradition. And extending the argument, I would say that materialism has the same fundamental disfunction and the same fundamental cure.

Why So Many Jewish Comedians?

I think this gives some great insight into humor which can be very helpful in apologetics. Hat tip to Mark Shea.

"Why So Many Famous Comedians Grew Up In Religious Jewish Homes"

by Rabbi Daniel Lapin

The Jewish High Holy Days begin this Friday evening with two days of Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year and end 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches that what God thinks of us is far more important than what we think of God. Thus it follows that Rosh HaShana, literally the head of the year, is the time when God judges all humans. Rosh HaShana's solemn role of affirming that God indeed does judge us, makes one of its central themes, laughter, difficult to understand.

Is laughter indeed the motif of this most solemn day? Traditionally, we Jews search for the meaning of the day within the Torah portion designated for public reading on that day. On Rosh HaShana, Chapters 21 and 22 of Genesis are read; they chronicle the birth and early life of Abraham and Sarah's son, Isaac, history's first born Jew. Even from conception, laughter surrounds his life. In fact, out of the 13 Scriptural references to "laughter," nine occur in the context of Isaac's life. His name means "he shall laugh" and it is the name that God instructed Abraham and Sarah to give him after they had laughed about his birth. It must have seemed a comic thought to a 90-year-old woman that she and her 100-year-old husband would become first-time parents.

Ancient Jewish wisdom requires us to blow the shofar (ram's horn) 100 times on Rosh HaShana in a complex sequence of notes composed to sound just the way crying or laughing sounds. (From another room, deprived of visual clues, even mothers often fail to distinguish whether a child is crying or laughing.) With the laughter meaning of Isaac's name as well as the laughing sounds of the shofar all integrated by the day's reading of the Torah portion, Rosh HaShana is not only the day of judgment, it is clearly also the day of laughter. There must be some way of integrating our understanding of both the joy of laughter and the solemnity of judgment.

Laughter is one of the distinctions that humans enjoy over animals. What makes us laugh? People laugh at things that violate a sense of how things ought to be. A pompous mayor who slips on a banana peel is funny. A vagrant who falters and sprawls on the sidewalk just seems sad.

Likewise, a sexual innuendo that provokes howls of laughter among school boys and titters among stockbrokers, elicits yawns of indifference from hardened prison inmates. The dirty joke assaults notions of human refinement, thereby causing laughter. To the depraved, however, it is not a dirty joke, it is reality.

The only reason that we laugh at cartoons of talking animals is because of our underlying conviction that only humans were given the gift of speech. A joke can only be funny in the context of a fixed framework which it contradicts.

The paramount project of secular liberalism is to utterly obliterate most rules and fixed frameworks. In the absence of any system of inviolable, religiously based absolutes, there are no unthinkable acts to perform; there are few rules to violate. In a world in which everything floats, humor has nothing solid to thrust against.

To the dismay of secular parents raising Godless children, their offspring will probably find humor one day only in the absurdity of their parents' Godless lives.

The laughter and joyfulness that permeate the family life of religious Americans springs from the presence of Biblically inspired discipline and structure. Conversely, the grim seriousness with which the secular liberal seems to go about the business of life springs from the absence of absolute values. (One cannot help but recall the famous joke that reflected feminism's humorlessness: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Answer: That's not funny).

Since jokes are only funny if they contradict a preconception, and all preconceptions are becoming banned, many genres of jokes are vanishing from our national repertoire. The political correctness doctrine banishes humor and laughter entirely because humor presupposes an existing standard. If nothing is absolutely good and nothing is unthinkably bad, nothing can be funny. Clearly one of the goals of secular liberalism is to eliminate most existing standards. The unintended consequence will be the dreary and somber atmosphere that was characteristic of life behind the old Iron Curtain. Secularism, and its sequel, socialism, work together to banish laughter from the world.

Jewish tradition has it that Abraham, through his renowned kindness, attracted thousands of devotees to Judaism. Yet, a full three generations later, by which time the world's Jewish population ought to have reached large numbers, the Bible (Genesis 46) indicates a total Jewish population of merely 70 souls.

The great transmitters of the Oral Torah explain that Abraham had focused on the Almighty's capacity for unrestrained love and compassion. Isaac, the icon of Rosh HaShana, introduced an awareness of God's firm hand into Jewish culture. Many of the disciples drawn by Abraham's gentle nature were later repelled by Isaac's unpopular emphasis on law, leaving a core following of only 70.

Yet it is precisely the structure of law that defines boundaries and allows humans to live among one another. Ancient Jewish wisdom in chapter three of Ethics of the Fathers, exhorts "Pray for the welfare of legal authority--without it, men would destroy each other." The origin of legal authority and its best validation is the model of Divine authority. For this reason, civil authorities like kings would often head the Church too. They were aware that their acceptance of God's authority made it more logical for citizens to accept their's.

In other words, my children are more likely to obey my rules and later, society's too, if they grow up watching me accept God's rules. Children of parents whose vehicles sport bumper stickers that read "Question Authority" will grow up doing just that. They will also become rather hard to live with.

We humans are by nature reluctant to submit ourselves to a higher authority. Showing how treasured human moments like laughter depend on that submission, helps persuade us that civilization depends upon allowing God to judge us. That is the paramount message of the High Holy Days and accounts for its laughter motif.

Being Catholic: From the Heart

Being Catholic: From the Heart, by Bishop Gordon Bennett

When I was Teaching high school English, I used to assign my students a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne to read and discuss which was titled “Ethan Brand”. The story is about a young man, the title character, who deliberately embarks upon a search for what he called the “Unpardonable Sin”. His journey involves, not a descent into unbridled pleasure or overt selfishness, but rather in desiring to know everything there is to know. Hawthorne skillfully describes how this young man gradually evolves from a sensitive and caring person into what Hawthorne describes as a fiend. He writes that Ethan Brand became a fiend “the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.” His education, because it neglected his spiritual nature, had as its greatest fruit - the Unpardonable Sin.

Let me quote from the story: “so much for the intellect! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother, he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment and, at length, converting men and women to his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.”

I used to teach this story as a kind of warning to my students of how important it was for the head and the heart to grow together, and this was a warning that students who were as privilege and gifted as my students were needed to hear. I was trying to help at the expense of disowning their own hearts. It was a way of asking them the question Jesus posed to the rich young man in the gospel: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” I loved giving that lecture and facilitating that discussion! It was a last chance to harangue my students about the importance of claiming their hearts, of paying attention to their inner longing, which are the prelude to discovering the presence of God. It was really trying to tell them that, in life, the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.

I had, of course, hoped that Ethan Brand would never have been on the list of those persons my students would choose to emulate.

But then, a few years later, when I was principal, I actually met Ethan Brand.

His real name (not really!) Was Kevin, 16 years old, bright, talented, handsome, athletic, a student body officer - and, apparently, a drug dealer. This last activity came to my attention through parents in his neighborhood who told me that, although Kevin never sold drugs at school (which would have been cause for expulsion), he was selling them to the kids in his neighborhood. The parents said they hd talked to Kevin’s parents but had been unsuccessful in convincing them that their son was really doing this.

I called Kevin into my office, partly because I thought he should know what was being said about him, and partly because I wanted to put him on notice that, if anything like that happened at school, he would be dismissed. To my surprise, he admitted that he was, in fact, selling drugs to his peers, that he was keenly aware of the repercussions which would attach if he was to do so at school, and that he had not qualms whatsoever about continuing. When I expressed some curiosity about why he would do this since he was obviously wealthy and did not use drugs himself, he gave and answer, which reminded me of Ethan Brand. Kevin told me he sold drugs because he was fascinated by the effects they had on other people and that he enjoyed the power he had gained over them.

Try to keep myself from doing something irrational, I began informing him, with as much genuine passion as I could muster, how his insensitivity to others had already ruined lives and could possibly even cause death. I tried to explain to him how what he was doing was beyond the pale of acceptable behavior toward friends or even enemies.

As I was talking, I saw something happening to him. He eyes locked into mine. His face reddened, his jaws shut tight, his eyes filled with tears. But I made the mistake of reading remorse when what he spat out at me was pure rage. He said: “I’m sorry I ever came to this damned school.” Being totally confused, I asked him to repeat what he had said, and he did, with even more energy than before: “I’m sorry I even came to this damned school.” When I asked why, he stunned me with his answer: “Because,” he said, “if I had gone to a public school, like I wanted to, I wouldn’t have had to worry about saving my soul.”

If I had gone to just a public school, I wouldn’t have to worry about saving my soul. ~Bishop Gordon Bennett, "Being Catholic: From the Heart"

“Ethan Brand” by Nathaniel Hawthorne


I got this from William Trentman from Utah's 44th Annual Pastoral Congress

Are all Values Subjective?

I got this response in the comments section of a blog that I commented on;

“But values are in the subjective realm. Any specific human brain is in only one person, therefore values are in only one person. Many are the philosophers and religious devotees who would have their own values mandated as objective. Personally, I think the attempt to do so is immoral.”

Am I being objectively immoral or only immoral in the sense of your own subjective value standards? If subjective, I hope you are not trying to "mandate" your subjective values onto me.

I agree that values have a subjective element but some values are also based in natural law which is written into us as humans. Your argument has as it’s premise that humans are so different that there is no commonality to base any objective value standards. If you are right then on what basis can you tell anyone that they are wrong? On what grounds would you tell the early American slave owners that they were wrong for not valuing African American’s as equals. Most you could really say was that subjectively you value Africans American’s as equal but the slave owners would not be objectively wrong for valuing them less. They would be right based on their own subjective values.

You also have the problem that in a society that only has subjective values to base standards on, the only thing that makes something socially right or wrong is power. Might makes right which is scary.

Address at the University of Regensburg

I made a response to the following quote:

“Value judgements are hard to argue with--is green a better colour than blue? Should we have justice or peace? Thus, we all seek to make our value preferences into facts, rather than opinions.” Link

What your are doing here is exactly was Pope Benedict was addressing in his controversial Address at the University of Regensburg. He said,

The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Not all values are subjective preferences. Some values are universally held and to deny them is to deny the best of what it is to be human. Take the value of courage, can you imagine a society were cowardice was held with more value than courage? The answer is not to try less, but like pope Benedict explained we need to broaden the use of reason to bring the important questions that religion and ethics ask out of the subjective realm.

Innocence Vs. Insight

Here is an interesting article on innocence versus insight.

Innocence seems to be a potentially attractive kind of ignorance. Apparently, in many social contexts ignorance can be a good thing, in part because helps to preserve idealism. Idealism is a simplified view of the world that supports optimism about the abilities or motives of oneself, one's associates, one's groups, and of related social processes.

It is interesting because it gives respect to innocence. Something teenagers and Hollywood usually don’t do. I don’t really like the examples used because they seem to be controversial and not altogether convincing. I think I could give better examples. For example, hearing gossip about someone you like. “So and so cheated with so and so” is not something that I really want to know when one of both or the so and so’s is someone I love.

Here’s another example, How The Lord Of The Rings should have ended:




Warning if you are a lord of the rings fan you probably want to pass on this one. I know I wish I never saw it.

My final example would be drugs. Having the insight of how meth feels could be a curse.

I have a feeling that innocence versus insight can be a false dichotomy. I think there is a third higher position where you can keep ones innocence and at the same time have insight when the insight conforms to God’s will. I can view the Church as the holy Kingdom of God but also understand that it has members that do evil things. People can have shortcoming but I can also see them with tremendous grace. I guess its seeing with the eyes of faith. Things that are complex and dispiriting become clear and consoling when viewed with the grace of God. This innocence is an essential Christian trait.

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3)