Mr. Moderate

I am all for being against terrorism. Particularly religiously-inspired terrorism. But it sure seems to me that our government has seen fit to selectively ignore some terrorists for present or future political gain. For instance, the date picked for triggering the Oklahoma City bombing was the second anniversary of the violent end to the Waco siege. It is clear that the two events were linked. And another disturbing link was the inspiration drawn from The Turner Diaries, a fictional novel that described a similar bombing. There is little doubt in my mind that the Oklahoma City bombing was inspired by anti-Semitic hate groups with a strong religious motivation. Nonetheless, the US government has refused to adequately investigate any links from the immediate perpetrators to the religious hate groups which obviously supported them, and which gave them their inspiration. Why?

And of course, there is the ever-baffling mystery of why President Bush only sent about 15,000 soldiers after Osama bin Laden, the chief perpetrator of the September 11th attacks, while committing ten times that number to sit on the border of Iraq, waiting for orders to invade. The net result is that there were too few US troops to successfully capture Osama bin Laden, and bin Laden remains at large today (April 30, 2007).
Continue reading ‘Bush’s Bogeyman - Osama bin Laden’ »

Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.
Continue reading ‘The “Big Bang” Is Not A Beginning’ »

It is a fact that the Earth is undergoing a period where our climate is getting warmer and warmer. It is also a fact that this is not a new thing, but that the climate on Earth has gotten warmer and colder at various times in the past. No sane person should dispute either of those two statements.

What is disputed by scientists is to what degree human activity contributes to global warming. This scientific dispute makes it impossible to produce a valid cost-benefit analysis of what changes in human activity need to take place, at what cost, and for what benefit.
Continue reading ‘What To Do About Global Warming’ »

It has become quite popular for atheists to bash the very idea of religion. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have produced a trifecta of recent best-selling books asserting that religion is bad for humanity. Well, doing away with religion altogether would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water. If there is some bad (bathwater) about religion, then by all means, please do throw it out. But the baby represents our future survival as the only known intelligent species, and religion has been demonstrated to be vital to the continued survival of the human species.

It is no coincidence that every known civilization that left monuments or writings for us to analyze clearly had a dominant religion. In his landmark book, The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler asserted that culture is born out of a strong religious feeling which becomes held in common by all of the people who will eventually comprise the civilization that the culture produces. It is the purpose of religion to bind a people together for common purpose by continually reminding them that they have duties to entities larger and/or older than themselves. Any good psychologist can produce multiple theories about why religion has good effects upon groups of people. For instance, it creates a common bond of trust and security among fellow believers. It acts like an insurance contract in that your fellow-believers will rush to your aid if you are victimized in some way, by another human or by nature itself. All of these attributes are pro-survival, and as I’ve shown in yesterday’s blog essay, survival is the foundation of morality.
Continue reading ‘We Need Religion’ »

Fundamentalist Christians constantly tout their interpretation of their Bible as the only conceivable foundation for moral values. They quote Dostoevsky’s words from the The Brothers Karamazov: “without God, everything is permitted.” And they plead the argument from design: a moral law implies a moral law-giver.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have postmodernists who claim that no absolutes exist at all, and thus all morality is relative. Under some circumstances or another, any act we might view as immoral would not only be permitted, but required.

Both of these views are clearly wrong. Only a fraction of God’s laws from the Christian Bible are worthy of adherence in modern times, and most of those are moral laws that have equals (or at least, echoes) in most other cultures. The so-called Golden Rule is virtually a universal moral law as some version or another of it appears in virtually every known higher civilization. And the postmodernist assertion that no absolutes exist is also clearly wrong, as I will demonstrate, below.
Continue reading ‘Survival Is Moral Bedrock’ »

By now most intelligent people understand that our genes uniquely describe at some level (high or otherwise) how to make one particular human being, namely ourselves. We may have an argument over how much of some particular feature of some particular person is caused by genes (nature) or environment (nurture), but the default answer needs to be “it is probably some of both.”

We don’t pass our genes from one person to another except when we manage to have children or participate in a transplant (where different genes between the donor and recipient can cause rejection syndromes of various types). But we are constantly passing memes between ourselves as this is part of the essence of human interaction.
Continue reading ‘Transmitting the DNA of Memes’ »

When he derived his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein unwittingly gave birth to postmodernism. Einstein asserted that, in physics, there was no privileged observation point. Every observer observed facts according to their point of observation, and differences in observation were explainable by the differences in the points from which the observers observed things.

The above idea means a lot in the context of physics. But postmodernism takes that idea and extends it in unjustifiable ways to assert that every idea is unprivileged, and that nobody has a better view of the facts of any given matter than does anybody else. At the end, postmodernism denies that objective facts even exist at all. To a dedicated postmodernist, every idea is the opinion of one person, and no person is privileged by having the “correct” idea. This leads to utter rubbish in everything written by any postmodernist.
Continue reading ‘Postmodern Religion’ »

Anybody who pays much attention to science knows that the universe is big. But I’ve found that very few people, even very few scientists, have any idea of just how big the universe is. So, I’m going to attempt to explain what the inflationary theory of cosmology says about the size of our universe.
Continue reading ‘Just How Big Is The Universe?’ »

The title of this blog post is taken from a piece written by David S. Broder for the Washington Post, which published it on December 1, 2005. That was before the voting public kicked the Republicans out of power in Congress and replaced them with a very thin Democrat majority. Broder ends his piece with one unanswered question:

When both parties have lost public confidence, where do voters turn?

The duopoly that controls American politics leaves voters no choice at all for many of the most important issues which confront us. Both parties depend on huge contributions from the people who run corporate America, so neither party is willing to take seriously the demand by voters to secure the southern border of the United States against an onrushing torrent of illegal immigration, certainly including numerous members of various terrorist cells.
Continue reading ‘A Pox on Both Parties’ »

Epistemology is “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.” (Websters Dictionary) That is a fancy way of saying that it is the study of how we know things are true or false, and what degree of certainty we can assign to any particular tidbit of alleged knowledge.
Continue reading ‘What Is Epistemology?’ »