WIP

On the contrary, I could invite you learn the reasons why Christianity is so rife with doctrinal disputes, and why there are so many contradictions between the four gospels and other books of the New Testament, but I am not here to evangelize in hopes of scoring points with a higher power. But I was hoping that you would at least pause and consider that many freethinkers and unbelievers have reasons for not believing in an unseen world other than your simplistic claims that we just hate your god, or want to live in sin. But that seems to be too much to ask for! Your invitation to "learn about Christ," indicates that you haven't noticed that I have learned a lot about Christ! The kind of learning you are referring to is brainwashing, since you expect only one result -- conversion. Well, my learning leads me to side with the many Biblical scholars and historians who have come to the conclusion that the Church of Rome created the modern synthesis of doctrines that are now called Christianity, and used their wealth, hierarchal organization and political connections to stamp out Gnostics, Marcionites and Jewish-Christian sects so their version became the standard. More B.S.! Atheism represents non-belief, not a system of beliefs No, I don't. It's based on an unlikely assumption that most people would be happier if their religious worldview was removed. Some people are happier without religion, and some aren't. It's depends on personality and the degree of uncertainty a person is comfortable with. So the ads are needlessly inflammatory, since most people keep belief in God as a personal matter and for the most part, consider that other people may have valid reasons for believing in something different.

Well, now that that's over, we still have thousands of nuclear warheads that can destroy the world many times over. The assumption from the "don't worry, be happy" crowd is that mutually assured destruction will stop anyone from using them. But, what about Ahmadinejad? And there are likely others willing to see what happens, who are looking forward to the "war to end all wars." As long as nothing happens, complacency rules. But what happens if several missiles or suitcase nukes are set off in the U.S. or Russia -- would either leader be willing to let his country die and leave the rest of the world alone? Or will there be a response like the rumoured mythical "Samson Project" that claims the Israelis will incinerate as much of the MiddleEast as possible in the event of a nuclear attack on Isreal. Would a U.S. or Russian attack be different, or would they want to take their enemies down with them, regardless of who they felt made the direct attack? As long as there are thousands of nukes out there, we are still at risk of being wiped out at any given moment!

This could get really complicated really fast, because ground rules have to be established before we can discuss the same subject. This is why philosophers insist on clear definitions of terminology used in a discussion of philosophical principles like how to derive systems of ethics. When I first started delving into this subject a few years ago, I quickly discovered that people coming at this subject from a religious perspective had a different definition for objective than I did. In a nutshell, philosophers define SUBJECTIVE to refer to any category of experience that is personal, by nature, and may or may not exist outside of that person's own experience. On the other hand, OBJECTIVE refers to something that is agreed to exist independent of our own perceptions. And it could refer to reality, or the external world that two or more people share, or it could refer to principles such as truth and reliability. The monkey-wrench gets thrown into this discussion when Christians and others from a religious perspective, insist that objective principles come from outside of human experience (usually handed down by God), so that moral facts are already out there in the world even before any humans existed. Things are good or bad independent of us, and then we come along and discover morality. This would be more accurately described as transcendent principles, rather than objective, and a naturalist considers transcendent to be the same thing as nonexistent, or something created by someone's personal beliefs. The general humanist or naturalist perspective is that moral facts are not out there in the world until we put them there; that the facts about morality are determined by facts about us. So, morality is not something that we discover as much as something that we invent. And I think this explanation makes more sense when we take a look around the world, and through history, and find that there are some basic universal principles, like "don't kill members of your own tribe," whereas other principles governing issues like slavery and polygamy vary depending on local needs and desires. Now, the question is what principles guide a modern society facing technological changes and the realization that decisions locally regarding pollution, nuclear weapons etc., can affect the rest of the world. And that's why I insist that the consequences of laws and rules tell us most of what we need to know! In this specific example, the leader of the Catholic Church is bound to make rules that make the situation worse, because he has to follow a code that is independent and indifferent to human experience. This is also how they recently got stuck in the ludicrous situation of excommunicating a Brazilian woman for violating Church doctrine to save her daughter, and yet not excommunicating her daughter's rapist step-father because of a system that regards his crime as the lesser evil. I am not seeing evidence that they are helpful programs, and some psychologists are even starting to wonder if the fanaticism over abstinence is having a harmful effect on relationships of young evangelicals after they are married -- since divorce rates among younger Christian fundamentalists are increasing faster than any other demographic group. One researcher speculated that the high stress on abstinence is creating fanatical expectations about sex that can't be met after the couple is married and feel a let down. So be it! But who exactly is ranting here? I have given you the reasons why I object to the Pope and the unwarranted influence he has in the media and even in international policy-making. You keep accusing me of having some personal defect of my own, without backing it up with evidence, or providing anything to support your claim that the Pope is unfairly maligned. If anything, he gets the kid-glove treatment because of his power, and should be condemned every time he says something stupid that could have a detrimental effect on millions of people around the world!

The phrase "all men are created equal," isn't in the Bible; but it is in the Declaration of Independence. He certainly believed that Christian principles were the root cause of his opposition to slavery, but that's because of the capacity for religions to reinvent themselves when adherents want to change. The slavery supporters in the South had more Bible verses at their disposal to quote from than the abolitionists had! The Jacobins and other deists of the French Revolution were not what I would consider principles of the Age of Enlightenment. The intellectuals behind the American Revolution, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, were inspired by some of the French philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire; but they put more stock in John Locke's ideas of natural human rights, than the collective values of the French revolutionaries. The difference is whether the rules are being made by people who claim to have transcendent principles, that by their very nature cannot be altered, or whether they are using objective standards that can be examined and evaluated for their worth by everyone. If a Marxist says we must have a classless society at all costs, and everyone who resists collectivization must be shot -- it makes no difference what his metaphysical beliefs are. If the doctrine of class struggle was presented as an objective principle, it could be analyzed and deconstructed to determine its merit or lack of merit, and if it was determined to be weak, the majority of people could scrap it. But when the Marxist leader claims it is an absolute principle, he is not going to accept any argument against it, and if he has the power, he will kill anyone who stands in the way of reaching this lofty goal. No, I can't accept this in any form. The enlightenment principles that led to human rights, majority rule, protection of minorities, are all based on the assumption that most people are basically good, or do not need to be threatened or coerced to act in the best interests of others. The concept that we are all evil, depraved sinners just waiting to kill, rape, sodomize etc. if there are no ruthless earthly or divine overlords threatening us with retribution, is part of the old system of despotism and totalitarianism. Well, I see more religious people engaging in destructive behaviour than non-religious people these days. Well, they're materialists, but I don't think they follow the same definition of reason that philosophers have identified since the time of Plato and Aristotle: the search for objective truth. Otherwise, the Marxist and Objectivist systems would be able to adapt to new understandings instead of resisting and fracturing like religious cults over disputes of doctrine. In a bygone era, it used to be known as liberalism. But that was before most liberals adopted Depression Era social policies of FDR. The holdouts started calling themselves libertarians. If that's what he's saying now it sounds like he is trying to spin his way out of the ditch he created for himself a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, if it's true that he said that he did not want to admit to believing in evolution because of Richard Dawkins, that would mean that he is even less qualified to be science minister than if he was a creationist!

My point was that it was mischaracterized as "abortion on demand," when that was only true for abortions performed during the first trimester. No I did not! I have said repeatedly that a woman's decision to have an abortion should not be interfered with in the early stages when there are no grounds for treating an embryo or fetus as an independent human life worthy of protection until it has reached a stage where it has identifiable human qualities like the ability to survive on its own outside of the womb, a rudimentary ability to feel pain or discomfort, development of the cerebral cortex - the higher brain region where conscious thinking is performed...and there may be others, but whatever it is, none of these marks are reached before the 16th week of gestation, which is the normal cutoff for abortions performed in clinics. Now, who's the moral relativist? You mean you don't see a problem if allowing sex-selection abortion or future sex-selected genetic modification is used to skew the ratio of men and women one way or the other? I'm not shoving my personal beliefs on anyone. The basic principle should be that people are free to make their own personal choices as long as there is no significant negative effects on the rest of society. So any personal choice that could be a serious problem for society as a whole, should either be restricted or disallowed completely. But, a man can't hav an emotional attachment to a fetus! A woman can because it is a new life growing inside of her, but a man's attachment takes awhile to develop...and I got to say from my own experience that I could not really connect with our children the way my wife did when they were newborn infants, even though I did all the things that a modern dedicated husband is supposed to: prenatal classes, coaching her in the delivery room, changing diapers, doing occasional bottle feedings....still it wasn't until our babies were old enough to respond to faces and try to interact with me that I really started feeling an emotional connection to them. I know there are guys who try to push pregnant girlfriends into having abortions, and that should not be their decision to make, but if it's a guy who wants the baby, he should not have the right to force her to carry it and deliver the baby. If men had babies, you can bet that there would be no abortion debate, since we don't care for anything that restricts our personal freedoms. So I've heard! But not many atheists or agnostics are part of the pro life movement. Claiming that life (human personhood) begins at conception, does not find much favour with secular-thinking people, and the requirement that this doctrine goes so far as banning emergency contraception because it might kill a newly fertilized egg cell, requires putting restrictions on personal rights of women that very few humanists, if any, are going to be willing to agree to. So, draw the line at 21 weeks, or 16 weeks, whatever it is, it will be long past the point where most women seeking abortions have them done. But even after 23 weeks, exceptions have to be made for conditions where the mother's health is at risk if the pregnancy is continued or there are severe birth defects discovered that will degrade the quality of life the fetus will have if it is born. It's not the costs that bother me here, it's the fact that these dangerously premature 21 or 23 week old infants are almost guaranteed to have serious health defects as mentioned in the articles you cited for reference. A recent medical research study has determined that being even being born 2, 3 or 4 weeks premature can set you up for life-shortening problems like stroke and heart attacks later in life, even where there were no other identified risk factors. So children that are born this early are really facing long odds against having a long, healthy life.

Okay! I stand corrected. I haven't read this history since my days in high school, and I was led to believe that the Conservatives sought out disaffected farmers to build their party so it would be capable of winning elections again. I thought there were more than a handful of former Progressives who followed Bracken, but other articles indicate that most of them went back to the Liberals or joined the CCF when the party disbanded. Yeah, but those NDP guys have a whole different meaning to the term "social gospel," than the people on the Right do. On personal issues, even the guys like Tommy Douglas and Stanley Knowles were liberals. The supreme being who is capable of proving his or her existence. No, and here's why: in our everyday existence, we don't see evidence for supernatural phenomena, whether it's gods, spirits, ghosts etc.. A person may be free to believe them, but they should be satisfied to keep it as a personal subjective belief having no bearing on the outside world, unless they happen to have objective proof to back up their spiritual claims that can be verified by others. Otherwise, we should be operating under the assumption of methodological naturalism. That doesn't mean that claiming there is no supernatural, but for our dealings with each other, we should stick to the things that can actually be proven to exist...so gods and spirits should be left in church and not brought into parliamentary debate. So, there was nothing wrong with William Wilberforce being a Christian, but if he were alive today, I would challenge him to cite the Biblical evidence to back his arguments that slavery was immoral....just like all of the Southern Baptist and Methodist ministers did during the slavery debates! The fact is Wilberforce's objections to slavery did not come from his Bible, they came from the Enlightenment principles that every person should have the same basic rights and freedoms, and no man should be property of another man -- this was not a principle of Biblical times, even New Testament times! On the other hand, Stalin may have been an atheist, but so was Ayn Rand, and Bertrand Russell and Albert Schweitzer etc.. There are no unified principles of atheism, just lack of belief in gods and the supernatural. But since Stalin was a Marxist, he was part of a philosophical tradition created by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, which claimed to have discovered transcendent principles for governing society and understanding history and class struggle ....yadayadayada....so atheist or not, that puts Stalin in the same category of many religious zealots who claim to have a system based on higher principles that are perfect and unchanging. So what happens when these higher principles are being resisted or not followed scrupulously by the population? Well, the principles can't change, so the people have to, and Stalin decided that all of those millions of peasant farmers who refused to give up their farms and move to collectives should be exiled into Siberia, where they could starve to death. Along similar lines, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia decided in advance of their invasion that city dwellers would not be of the right mind to become a proper proletariat -- so they decided to kill them all off as soon as they started entering the cities, and once again accomplishing the higher purpose of creating the perfect revolutionary state required killing off scores of people who would stand in the way of this higher goal. The Marxists and those equally dangerous Ayn Rand followers on the far right, may be atheists, but they are certainly not humanists, or they would have been forced to adapt their policies to the desires and goals of people living in the real world. Well, if you mean these guys who think the Earth was created 6000 years ago, one of them is the new science minister, and won't answer a simple question on a scientific issue: do you accept the theory of evolution? If his religion means that he has to be a creationist and deny evolution, he shouldn't be part of policy decisions on scientific issues -- and the other one who is so out front about his ignorance shouldn't have position of responsibility either.

No, read the history! The name was the result of a merger between the Conservative Party and the populist Western farmers party called the Progressives, which won more than 60 seats in Parliament during one election back in the 30's. The emphasis on religion and social issues is very new to Canadian politics, at least on the federal level. There have always been SoCreds and others out west who put social issues on the front burner, but there is no history for social conservatism in most of Canada, and that's why I suspect that Harper will try to keep this group energized for grassroots campaigning, but will not want them pushing issues that will scare away the rest of the voters. Until we get to the third trimester, or whatever stage fetal human rights are considered worthy, it should not be any outsiders' decision to make. I remember the name! Why just one example? If they don't -- they should! It's not my fight anymore since I feel I have moved to far to feel much in common with any version of conservatism anymore.

You haven't been paying attention to my objections to the Pope apparently. If the pope had a valid point, his advice would lead to a reduction in AIDS-related deaths, and what burns me most is that he is openly interfering with other efforts to reduce the spread of HIV and cut the number of deaths. Coren is a hack and claiming persecution is just a cheap attempt to change the subject. I don't read his columns otherwise, but I imagine he had the same excuse when the Pope was welcoming fascist priests back into the fold, or excommunicating the Brazilian woman who took her pregnant 9 year old daughter to a hospital to have an abortion performed. Any criticism of the Pope or the latest Catholic Church scandal is an opportunity for Coren to claim that his church is being persecuted. Maybe some people fall for this diversion, but I don't! Topics change, but the principles used to determine ethical rules should be consistent whether the subject is abortion, gun control, illegal drugs, gay marriage, polygamy, the death penalty etc.

Speaking of bastardizing Progressive Conservatism, I don't recall self-described Red Tories like Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark or Flora McDonald having a whole hell of a lot to say about the Monarchy! They may be supporters, but so were most of the Liberals, and it hasn't been a frontburner issue for either party since the days of Diefenbaker fighting against the Maple Leaf Flag. On the other hand, they were all pro choice on abortion, and I believe others close to Red like Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell, and Sinclair Stevens were as well. The only P.C.'s who were prominent social conservatives were the flakes out West in Alberta and B.C. The main difference between Red Tories and those further on the Right, was that the Reds supported progressive taxation and social programs for the poor and unemployed. I think the point is that social conservatives want government social programs gutted and whatever aid is available is back to being the province of the churches, likely by means of tax credits and direct subsidies like the Bush Administration cooked up south of the border. Great if there are Christian fundamentalists volunteering at the food bank (hopefully for other reasons than just proselytizing), but people living on the margins should not have to depend on the charity of churchgoers for survival. Where this relates to the abortion issue is that the most absolute (no exceptions) pro life groups have little or anything to say about providing for the fetuses after they are born. They are generally only concerned about the sanctity of life until it is out of the womb, then it can die on welfare! One of the few unifying principles of the old Progressive Conservative Party was the opposition to the Liberals drive to increase federal powers at the expense of the provinces, especially under Trudeau. But social issues were never a primary focus before, and no previous Conservative leader would have given important jobs to creationists who believe the world was created 6000 years ago.

Well, thanks for getting back to me so fast! I thought this was a dead topic.The obvious difference in that example should be that the baby outside the womb can be cared for by others, and this could also be true for the fetus that has past the 23 week of gestation. That was the reason why the Roe vs. Wade decision determined that restrictions should be applied to abortion after this stage......but that wasn't good enough for prolifers who have propagandized the decision as "abortion on demand." Is this why you waited a month to answer back on this topic? I addressed the issue of sex-selection and I already told you that there are reasons to disallow this frivolous use of new technology because it can skew the population ratio of males to females that is normally roughly equal. I showed you examples where sex-selection has been used to abort female fetuses, but for some reason you ignored that and made this claim in post#431: Now, your CBC link to a statement from an organization of obstetricians and gynecologists, does not even identify which sex is being aborted, so it doesn't bolster the claim you made earlier that male fetuses are being aborted by some feminist conspiracy to create a no-male world. The sad truth is that the opposite is the reality, and pregnant women are indoctrinated to hope for a son (especially as first offspring), and the Nobody elected Hitchens pope, and I don't even know who Nat Hentoff is, and I could care less since arguments from authority don't carry weight among atheists! The only thing I know I have in common with them is what we don't believe...and one issue where Hitchens was totally wrong on was his support for the Iraq Invasion and occupation, so why should I check first with what Hitchens has to say before forming my own opinions. That has always been a defining distinction for a lot of people. Any attempt to enforce an abortion ban earlier cannot be done without being in direct conflict with the personal rights and freedoms of a pregnant woman. And deciding when personhood should be granted and override the interests of a pregnant woman, should be set a stage when a good argument can be made for personal rights of a fetus....not the lame, half-baked arguments of future potentials that keep getting trotted out in endless variations. Here we go again! It's the female fetuses that get aborted, not male fetuses! From what I read previously about the sex-selection issue, sex cannot be accurately determined before the third trimester, so we are already into the zone where fetal rights are considered worthy of consideration. The point is not whether sex selection desires are frivolous, but what effect allowing it will have on society, and allowing people to dramatically skew male/female ratios is not in any society's best interests. And I think the same reasoning applies in the "designer baby" issues of whether new bioengineering technologies should be allowed so people can actually choose the sex of their child. I woulldn't object to choosing physical features, but I don't think this choice should be allowed when it becomes available for the same reasons that sex-selected abortions shouldn't be allowed. It's not a matter of what I want or don't want! I'm in favour of leaving the decision to the woman's personal choice until there is a point where the fetus should be considered to have its own personal rights. Molly is right that this is an issue where men are wading into an area where we don't have any skin in the game. We don't get pregnant, have to worry about getting pregnant etc., and the fact that so many pro life men are so oblivious to this simple fact indicates to me that they don't give a shit about what women want or don't want in a general sense. Certainly all women aren't pro choice, but I couldn't help noticing that women tend to be more pro choice than men of similar backgrounds; so even women who are thoroughly indoctrinated by pro life religious propaganda from childhood, are more pro choice than their male compatriots.

As mentioned above, there are reasons based on past behaviour and present problems dealing with polygamous compounds like Warren Jeff's to show that they have a negative effect on the outside world as well as creating misery in their own isolated communities.

The courts need to deal with the issue of whether plural marriage has a history of benefiting a modern democratic society or whether it presents a destabilizing threat to others, because a court decision to allow plural marriage would not only open the door for offbeat threeway couples, who will not likely be able to establish lasting plural relationships -- the communes that tried this during the 70's all failed because they did not have an authoritative structure underlying them to demand compliance from the member. But the religious fascists do! They have a group of followers that have been brainwashed since childhood to follow orders, and a court decision to allow plural marriage would be an open door to those religious fascists. They believe ONLY MEN have this right, not women, and only the male leaders have authority to decide who everyone marries. It would be the resumption of a theocratic fascist society as the modern Mormon church has only disavowed polygamy for political reasons. If they are free again to resume this practice, it would be as it was in the days when Brigham Young was not only the Governor of Utah, but also the head of the Mormon church: Modern Mormonism's success is certified by the emergence of Mitt Romney, a Mormon governor from Massachusetts--heartland of nineteenth-century antipolygamy sentiment--as a presidential contender. A glance at Mormonism's largely forgotten history reveals the magnitude of the transformation. The Reynolds Court was not speaking theoretically when it declared that polygamy could "fetter a people in stationary despotism." Prior to statehood, Utah was a de facto theocracy. For all their differences, Brigham Young and Chief Justice Waite would have agreed that monogamy and polygamy give rise to divergent governing principles. Brigham Young was simultaneously head of the church, governor of the Utah Territory, and a member of the boards of major businesses. Young decided where his followers lived, the crops they grew, where they shopped, the professions they chose--and who they married. There was little government beyond the church's structure. Religious leaders schooled their families privately, while most of the territory's children remained illiterate. Elections were understood not as forums for debate and decision, but as occasions for popular acclamation of God's choice. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...6jhfgd.asp?pg=2 And unlike the debate over gay marriage, there are clear reasons why allowing polygamy to flourish would affect the non-polygamous majority: Those who don’t marry, Rauch suggested, would suffer most from widespread polygamy. Monogamy gives everyone an equal opportunity to marry, he argued, but plural marriage skews the market. He observed that “the real-world practice of polygamy seems to flow from men’s desire to marry all the women they can have children with.” If polygamy were legalized, polygynous marriages (one man, many wives) would undoubtedly outnumber polyandrous ones—and when one man married four women, three other men would be left spouseless. This inequality would create a subclass of poor, unskilled, and uneducated men: In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy’s inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200611u/polygamy And there are real world results of that inequality in both the large Saudi population of young men who have been sent off to wage jihad to get them "out of the house" so to speak, and the insidious practice that fundamentalist Mormons have practiced by creating a sub-group of "lost boys" by excommunicating them and banishing them from the community for minor infractions just to remove them to keep the desired male to female ratio of the community leaders.

No, once again it was just the usual pope blather....don't have sex....yeah that's advice people will listen to! And the editorial by Michael Coren makes me wonder if he actually uses the brain inside his bald head when he writes his formulaic screeds claiming his church and pope are being persecuted by us godless heathens! Coren's argument doesn't address the complete failure of abstinence programs (George Bush's for example), and his charge that condom use in Africa is ineffective, is similarly false and deliberately deceptive, since he fails to mention that the Pope's underlings in Africa, such as the Archbishop of Mozambique have directly told their Catholic followers not to use condoms. Other churches and Muslim leaders have pretty much obliterated the efforts by family planning groups sponsored by the U.N. and other relief agencies to help women gain access to birth control and safe sex information. Neither baldy or the guy in the funny hat, have addressed the issue of spermicidal foams, which could also reduce the risk of AIDS and other STD's if available in Africa. Then the icing on cake is Coren's usual tactic of blame-shifting -- claiming that the groups working for condom availability and other methods to reduce STD risks are patronizing black people in Africa. This is the ultimate insult coming from people who are so indifferent to real suffering that they want nothing other than lectures on abstinence to the people of Africa -- that is a real example of treating people like children.....unwanted children in this example! Penicillin and the birth control pill made promiscuity an option for many young women starting in the 1960's. Don't listen to the crap that it was the Beatles that turned kids into pot smoking hedonists. The time had come for change that new technology and social conditions made possible, so the Beatles and other celebrities were poster boys for the trend, not the creators of it. I'm not trying to talk about the merits or problems with gun control; I followed up your example because I've been trying to get through the point that the latest bad advice from the Pope is not about this particular issue of condom use, but should also focus on the basic principles of applying ethical rules. Should rules be based on a predetermined, unulterable code that claims to be perfect....and rigidly applied even if the end results are worse? Or should rules be cross-referenced with results, so bad results means somethings wrong with the set of rules, and they need to be altered or replaced with a different strategy? I'm for the modern teleological approach of using effective rules and scrapping ones that make problems worse (prohibition laws for example)

Jean Paul Sartre claimed that even a prisoner locked in solitary confinement has free will because he still has control over his own mind and thoughts etc. But, here in the real world, there are encumbrances on how much freedom we have to change our standard of living. The basic theme of the conservative and libertarian right is that everyone has the same opportunities to succeed and fail, and their outcomes are the result of their own personal failure or success. This way of thinking makes it easy for the Rush Limbaugh's of the world to feel nothing more than indifference or outright contempt for those who are mired in grinding poverty. But do people born into impoverished neighbourhoods with high crime, substandard schools, little or no access to health care (in the U.S.), high unemployment, really have equal access to success as someone born into relative wealth? I doubt it! As for the rags to riches stories, the consolidation of wealth has led to a virtual oligarchy, with corporations that are "too big to fail," and this puts limits on those rags to riches stories. As it stands now, there are very few cases like Sam Walton, who pushes in and takes over the already crowded retail market by using more efficient inventory and market data collection methods than his competitors; most rags to riches stories only happen when someone invents a new technology, and recognizes its potential, that has been overlooked by the majors. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have commented that they would not have had the chance to join the billionaires club if it wasn't for the fact that IBM and Xerox did not recognize the potential of computer operating system software, or personal computers. The rags to riches stories are like lottery winners; they are exceptions to the rule. For the majority of people in the middle class, up until the latest stock market bubble burst, we had been watching several years of economic growth, rising real estate prices, growth in stocks and bonds, told that commodity prices were declining and our wealth was increasing -- and yet, feeling like it was getting harder and harder to make ends meet, having to work more overtime just to stay where we are. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.htmlFrom McClatchy Newspapers Oct. 21, 2006 http://www.newsobserver.com/news/growth/ce...ory/501203.htmlNow that the bubble has burst and the dust is settling, the reality is setting in that the boom of the last 20 years has only benefited those in the top one to three percent. The already rich, have been getting richer, but everybody else has been stuck in place! If there is one good thing about the coming Depression (I don't believe this latest market runup will last, Obama and the rest of the G-20 are just trying to reinflate the market), we may see a leveling of the playing field. This occurred during the Great Depression of the 30's, when after the same growing gap in income, the wage gap actually declined when high stakes gamblers, like the present hedge fund managers, took a bath and lost fortunes, and the government had to allow people to organize unions and take other steps to prevent civil unrest. So, maybe a depression or a severe recession has a silver lining, and this bubble should be allowed to burst, so that the game-players who make fortunes pushing paper, have to give way to people who add real value to the economy.

I heard part of an interview where he makes this announcement. Just the fact that he is getting media attention again means that the Republicans are so short on leadership candidates, that they'll even consider retreading Newt. Seriously, after he was forced to resign as House Leader, he couldn't get any Republicans to listen to him. I remember him calling up Rush Limbaugh's show early on in Bush's first term, and Limbaugh cut him off and dumped him after two minutes. I wouldn't take his call for a third party seriously! He is just trying to ingratiate himself with the religious right -- a group he lost when it was found out that he was having an affair on his 2nd wife during the time he was prosecuting Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, he's blaming big business Republicans for losing sight of conservative values and allowing government spending to explode during the Bush Administration. A couple of years ago, when he put his toe in the water to test his chances as a presidential candidate, he refused to blame Bush or the Republican congressional leaders for the deficit spending. Now, it's too little, too late!

But, to me, the primary objection to legalizing polygamy still boils down to the fact that our society will look like Saudi Arabia or some Mormon compound if it was legal and became a widespread practice. This isn't about business contracts -- the simple fact is that during normal times, the ratio of men to women is equal, so if polygamy is allowed, the richest, most powerful men get more women, and many lower class men end up batchelors for life. That's why the Saudis send their surplus young men off to fight jihad, and the FLDS Mormons excommunicate many teenage boys to artificially maintain the disproportionate odds within the community.

Another one! I've read that Stephen Harper started forging close ties with U.S. Republican strategists, and so far, he seems to be following the Reagan/Bush strategy of building a base of support among the religious right. So, how many more Conservative MP's are going to pop up that believe in a 6,000 year old world? Not surprising that this one has no more respect for the scientific process than Goodyear does -- science is no different than religion in their eyes, so Lunney declares that he should be able to promote creationism if that's his belief.....maybe in church, but neither of these jokers should have anything to say about science policy issues. Can you imagine if Goodyear decides that he is not going to allow funding for biomedical research using applied evolution to find new cures for disease.

I went to see it with my son, who already read the graphic novel, whereas I hadn't, but am somewhat familiar with the superhero genre. I liked the movie, even if I had a hard time following the unfolding of events as they moved back and forth through history. The big blue guy - Dr. Manhattan, was a good object lesson for what would happen if someone actually developed godlike powers. In WWII, many issues of Superman had him fighting against Hitler, but they didn't deal with the implications that the course of history would change if one nation had a superman on its side. Superman was always winning battles against the Nazis, but never wins the war outright so everyone can just go home. In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan does what 50,000 U.S. soldiers could not -- he wins the Vietnam War for America, with the unintended consequence that Richard Nixon becomes the greatest benefactor and is still president in 1985, after winning four or five consecutive terms. The physics of how a superman would relate to the world was another interesting angle -- Dr. Manhattan can directly experience all phenomena, right down to the movements of subatomic particles, which makes it increasingly difficult for him to relate to humans and their emotions, and life in the world of middle dimensions that we live in....he becomes so absent-minded about human needs that when he takes Silk Spectre to his new home on Mars, he almost kills her by forgetting that he needs to provide an atmosphere for her. On Mars, when informed about the problems on Earth and the danger of all out nuclear war, he responds that life is over-rated and is more interested in the elaborate crystal clockwork machines he has created out of the Martian desert. It makes me wonder, would such a god-like creature open to all physical experience really consider the little human dramas to be the most important thing to him, like Superman does in the old DC comics? Would a real superman consider worship and adulation from crowds of humans to be the most important thing in his life?

No! That's the whole point to teaching people how to reduce the odds that they will contract an STD through sex. What lamebrain doesn't know that you can't get a sexually transmitted disease if you don't have sex? For the obvious reason that this man wields an inordinate amount of power and influence, so his bad advice does more harm than bad advice from the average televangelist. What other religion has its own national headquarters and has a leader treated as a head of state? Most people practice monogamy -- serial monogamy; so there is always the chance of chance of catching an STD and passing it on unless you're among the tiny minority of extremists who are completely abstinent until marriage -- have sex exclusively with their partners afterward, until the day they die, or just get too old to do it anymore..... most normal people are going to have at least some prior sexual experiences before getting married. If they stay married, odds are at least 50% I hear, that there will be at least some infidelity. The question I have is why are their people, like the pope, who are trying interfere with efforts to minimize this risk? Once again we are back to the question of whether ethics should be based on rules or actions which lead to the best results, vs. the old religious ethics based on arbitrary rules that don't change even when they increase suffering and misery. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter which solution is chosen, as long as it is the one that leads to the best overall results. Right, no guns, no gunfights! But, would that make a ban on handguns or some other gun control legislation the proper solution to gun crimes? Maybe, if it actually led to a reduction in violent crime. But the simple fact that criminals are not going to register or voluntarily turn in their handguns, would have to be considered before declaring that banning handguns is the best solution. And if the pope started a Church campaign to ban handguns and push restrictive gun control laws, that would be the end of his support in the U.S. conservative movement.....and I suspect, he's smart enough to know that and will not lead that campaign for gun control.

How does that equal being more accepting and welcoming? If they accept your sermon, of course you're going to accept them, but what if they don't, then what? I remember those days with the J.W.'s, going door to door, spreading the good news; and as I recall, I didn't meet a whole lot of unbelievers, just believers in different religions. The ones you had to worry most about getting a garden hose turned on you, or being threatened were the Catholics with all of the statues of the virgin mary in the front yard. BTW despite the fact that Evangelicals claim that evangelism is obligatory for all Christians, I have only once had someone who wasn't a Mormon or a J.W. knock on my door; and that was more than ten years ago when a new independent Baptist church had started and was trying to grow their membership....what about all of the other Evangelicals! All I ever see them do is leave those annoying little tracts threatening hellfire, in hospital waiting rooms, buses, lunch-counters etc.. It's pretty weak to call it evangelism, and amounts to little more than littering! I guess most fundamentalist Christians express their anger quietly as opposed to some Muslim-majority countries where they periodically go on the rampage to kill infidels and apostates! But I worry a little about some who express their anger quietly, because it feeds a persecution complex, the one Glenn Beck is trying to channel over at Foxnews. Just because people hold to the teachings they grew up with and don't want to change, does not mean that they trying to deceive others -- they just have their own ideas about spiritual or metaphysical truth. No! Just religion that goes beyond the personal, and has the arrogance to assume everyone must change whatever they believe in, and fall in line. Because of the bluster and belligerence of Islam and Christianity, there is a mistaken assumption that every religion claims to have the exclusive revealed truth about the Divine....but they don't! In fact, they are unique in insisting that the locals have to drop their own animist religions that were part of their customs and tradition, and replace them lock, stock and barrel with the foreign God of the colonists or missionaries etc. I'm surprised so many Christians can't grasp the arrogance of cultural superiority that was part of the package of wiping out indigenous cultures around the World, and replacing them with Western European culture. And I believe that the multitude of different religions and conceptions of God or Gods, adds weight to the argument that religion is a natural phenomena, not an actual revelation from above.

I hear this often, and it still leaves me scratching my head....it's like religion is castor oil or something, it's so bad it must be good for you! I would say that most children end up unconsciously following the patterns established by their mothers and fathers. Part of this is undoubtably genetic, but when it comes to beliefs and customs, using the parenting style that you experienced as a child, seems to be the default position. This is fine, if you are from a stable, happy home and have good lessons to teach the next generation; but what about all of the children from dysfunctional families! Unfortunately, most of them also follow the bad things they learned: abused children grow up to be abusers, children of alcoholics grow up to be drunks, boys who raged about being abandoned by their philandering fathers, grow up to follow the same pattern -- unfortunately I have seen this happen with a nephew from my wife's side of the family, whom we had custody of during his teen years -- he often told me how much he hated his father, and refused to speak to him, and as much as I warned him that it would be hard to break the mold, he has started his adult life abandoning one pregnant girlfriend already. Final word is it's hard to break the mold, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid repeating mistakes of past generations; but the first step is recognizing that your mom or dad were not right about everything, but rather than just feeling animosity towards them, you have to work really hard to chart a different course.

Gibberish and nonsense! The scientific method of starting from scratch and using experiments, empirical evidence to advance knowledge and understanding about the world, is only a couple of centuries old, at most, and it is counter-intuitive according to the way people understand the world. The reason why it is so powerful, is because it has been so successful in advancing the growth of knowledge and understanding about the world; filling in gaps with plausible scientific theories.The natural way of understanding the world around us is based on filling in the gaps of understanding with mythical stories that can provide plausible answers -- at least for the time being. Religion has been around for thousands of years, and gets its strength from our reluctance to leave mysteries unsolved. Because religion takes a top-down approach to knowledge (making claims to possessing all relevant knowledge by revelation), there is no way to avoid a collision with the modern scientific approach to information-gathering -- working from the bottom up to try to develop plausible working theories to explain experimental data or natural phenomena. And for 150 years, evolution has been right on the battleline. Some religions have given ground by re-interpreting their revealed truth to harmonize with new scientific understanding, but some religions see giving ground as a continued retreat, until they lose all credibility (and they may be right). Where this relates to Stephen Harper's new creationist science minister, is that he has refused to answer a straightforward question on science: do you or do you not accept the theory of evolution by natural selection? By claiming religious priviledge to dodge the question, and avoid the embarassment suffered by Stockwell Day some years back, when he did respond that evolution conflicted with his biblically-based understanding of the natural world, Goodyear has signaled to all that he values religious belief more highly than scientific evidence, and that's why there is a call for his removal! No one who is opposed to the basic scientific theories that are universally accepted in fields like biology, should have any governing authority over scientific funding and policy.

If you're arguing that the Muslim World isn't held to the same standard that is expected of Western nations, it's a no-brainer! If one of the members of the G-20 was a mass murderer, indicted for genocide, mass rape and ethnic cleansing( Radovan Karadzic, for example), there would be an uproar of Biblical proportions if he showed up at the summit, and was photographed shaking hands with other leaders showing their solidarity with him. The default response from Muslim and/or Arab leaders, as long as I've been around, has been that the ends-justify-the-means -- so suicide bombing, genocide, public stonings, can always be excused as unfortunate circumstances on the road to meeting a higher purpose......but that doesn't mean we should give aid and comfort to those in the West, who have the same mindset -- like Dick Cheney. Bullshit! If you are honest about the coverage of the Sudan genocide, you would have to admit that it would not have become a front-burner issue if it wasn't for the work of left wing groups like Amnesty International, Opendemocracy, and Unitedhumanrights etc.. The only beef I have with their approach, is that they will not deal with the religious aspects of these kinds of issues (just like public stoning and female circumcision). On the other hand, when the Darfur genocide first started getting noticed, the only rightwing voice I heard covering the story was Pat Robertson's CBN network....but I noticed that in most of the 700 Club stories on Darfur, they failed to mention that, unlike their friends in Southern Sudan, Darfur is also a Muslim territory.

Of course he is critical of neuroscience, and likely very critical of philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, who are trying to incorporate the latest findings on brain research into developing theory of mind. Certainly he would be critical of evolutionary psychologists like Stephen Pinker for looking at other animal behaviour for clues on the development of human social ethics. But, that is likely because he sees the neuroscientist in much the same way as the astrologer saw the astronomer, and the alchemist saw the chemist -- people who may find evidence to settle debates about issues like free will, dreaming, consciousness, mental disorders, the learning process and memory. These are subjects that Freudians and others have felt free to let their imaginations run wild, making up answers to tell their patients and colleagues; so I doubt that Zizek is the only psychoanalyst who feels hostile towards those who approach the subject of mind from studying the brain.

I'm not even charitable enough to credit him with having a valid point, since as already mentioned elsewhere, he is offering nothing to people who either don't believe in, or don't follow his restrictive sexual policies (remember, he is still teaching that sex should only be for purposes of reproduction, not recreation and enjoyment in its own right.) I could make a suggestion to people, entire nations of people, that if they are nice to each other and follow the principle of the Golden Rule, there would be no need for guns or bombs or armies! Now, if I said: "everybody! Get rid of your guns!" would that be a practical solution to the problems of crime, violence, war and civil strife?