Bubba Watson's Hover (Winner of Master's 2012)

The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris

"Forcing women and girls to wear burqas may be wrong in Boston or Palo Alto, so the argument will run, but we cannot say that it is wrong for Muslims in Kabul…. Moral relativism, however, tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework – but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks. In practice, relativism almost always amounts to the claim that we should be tolerant of moral difference because no moral truth can supersede any other. And yet this commitment to tolerance is not put forward a simple one relative preference among others deemed equally valid. Rather, tolerance is held to be more in line with the (universal) truth about morality than intolerance is."

-Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

Such moral relativism was condemned by Sam Harris as he believed that moral absolutes do actually exist. The question is, how do moral absolutes in the first place? Robin Philips who reviewed the book here, says "Moral absolutes can and do exist, he asserts, but they are rooted in neither God nor biological evolution. Rather, [according to Sam Harris] they are grounded in neuroscience."

The underlying claim is that while science is the best authority on the workings of the physical universe, religion is the best authority on meaning, values, morality, and the good life. I hope to persuade you that this is not only untrue, it could not possibly be true. Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain.

 - From the opening chapter of The Moral Landscape

Richard Dawkins was also convinced, endorsing the book with the following quote "I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me.”

So are we like "a phenomenological glockenspiel played by an unseen hand"? 

"From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) that you are for the fact that you were born into this world."

- Sam Harris

A glockenspiel

A Materialist's Apology

 

 

From SMBC via Twentytwowords.com

Twitter vs Easter - The Spectator

"...And it’s Easter, not Christmas, that makes Christianity such a radical religion. In a world where we are invited to worship strength and power, the symbol of churchgoers is a man on a cross: defeated, despised and rejected. The story of the Passion and Resurrection is one of pain as well as joy, the worst suffering before the greatest jubilation. If you’re not a believer, there’s no story which has more to say about the hope and despair of being human. If you are, it’s the most important event in history..."

 - The Spectator

Darkness cannot drive out darkness - Martin Luther King Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

What to do if you pick your nose on tv?

Why Blasphemy Laws Are Wrong

"...this is because blasphemy laws and other uses of state power to enforce religious belief or worship are themselves a repudiation of the beliefs themselves. A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity. 

Christians should fight for the liberty of Muslims in America and around the world to be Muslims, to worship in mosques and to freely seek to persuade others that the Koran is a true revelation of God. This isn't because we believe in Islamic claims but precisely because we don't. If we really believe the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, we don't need bureaucrats to herd people into cowering before it. 

We don't just object to the Islamic persecution of Christians because we don't want to be persecuted ourselves. We ought to work with freedom-loving Muslims and with other people to see to it that no person is imprisoned or executed for religious belief or practice. That's not because we think all religions are relative or because we think religion doesn't really matter all that much. 

It's because we come before the state with the same kind of confidence Jesus did in the court of Pilate. Jesus knew where Pilate's authority was, and where it wasn't..."

- Russell Moore, the rest of the article here

Bring prespective through reading

The PSYining

Gangnam Style by Stanley Kubrick

Atheists vs Dawkins - From an Atheist

"...The more I listened to Dawkins and his colleagues, the more the nature of what has gone wrong with their argument seemed clear. Religion was portrayed as a force of unremitting awfulness, a poisoned root from which no good fruit could grow. It seems to me the work not of a thinker but of any balanced observer to notice that this is not the case. In their insistence to the contrary, a new — if mercifully non-violent — dogma has emerged. And the argument has stalled.

These new atheists remain incapable of getting beyond the question, ‘Is it true?’ They assume that by ‘true’ we agree them to mean ‘literally true’. They also assume that if the answer is ‘no’, then that closes everything. But it does not. Just because something is not literally true does not mean that there is no truth, or worth, in it..."

 Atheists vs Dawkins - Douglas Murray, The Spectator

Can we be truly free? - Philip Vander Est

We are accustomed, in ordinary conversation, to dismiss any argument if it can be shown to rely wholly on prejudice or some other irrational factor or premise. But if atheism is true, our minds are wholly dependent on our brains (because we have no souls) and our brains are only accidental by-products of the physical universe. This means that all our thoughts, beliefs and choices, are simply the inevitable result of a long chain of non-rational causes. How then can we have free will or attach any validity or importance to our reasoning processes? If we are bound to think or behave the way we do because of our internal biochemistry, how can we be free agents or know that we are in possession of objective truths about science, ethics, or politics?

If our perception and use of the rules of logic are merely the inevitable end product of a long chain of random and purposeless physical and chemical events, how can we know that our examination of facts and arguments yields real knowledge? Surely, if atheism is true, our thoughts and values have no more significance than the sound of waves on a seashore, as C.S. Lewis argued at length and so convincingly in his famous book, Miracles¹. Indeed, even some atheists have recognized the extent of the problem of knowledge for philosophical materialists. To quote one famous Marxist scientist of the 1940s, Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true...’ (Possible Worlds).

- Philip Vander Est

"I'm not sure man needs the help" - Hobbes (and Augustine)

"For it still seemed to me that it is not we ourselves who sin, but some other nature within us...I loved to exculpate myself and lay the blame on that something that was with me but not me. But it was all me. In my impiety I was divided against myself, and my sin was all the more incurable in that I did not consider myself a sinner."

- Saint Augustine, Confessions

Baby wakes up to to favorite song

Jesus during the Super Bowl

Definition of "Worldview"

"A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being"

- James W. Sire "The Universe Next Door"

What's your worldview?