What do we do about the 12 million illegal immigrants already here? Apologizing for their poor welcome is a start.
Category: Uncategorized
Culture clash
Found at Aqoul.
Why do men have nipples?
Perhaps man was made in woman’s image?
Read all about this and other conundrums for creationists: top ten vestigial organs that somehow slipped past god’s master plan.
Hillary: Freedom is slavery
Hillary Clinton wants to replace our “ownership society” with a society of “shared prosperity.” Sharing normally refers to voluntarily sharing some of your property, but Hillary clearly has another definition in mind:
“I prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society,” she said. “I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none.”
In case she wasn’t clear, Hillary isn’t offering to “share” her millions with you – she wants government goons to “share” your income with her constituents.
Not content with obliterating one word, Hillary goes after another:
“There is no greater force for economic growth than free markets. But markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed,” she said. “Fairness doesn’t just happen. It requires the right government policies.”
Translation: Freedom is best – except when it isn’t. The right “policies” are necessary to replace free markets with a government-imposed state of “fairness.” “Freedom” normally means the absence of government coercion – Hillary defines it as the presence of force.
Socialists like Hillary have accepted the nominal failure of socialism – and decided to rebrand their ideology with a “market-flavored” version of the same. You won’t find any principled ideology here – except the promise that unless you’re “in it together” with Hillary, she’ll “share” some of your property using the “the right government policies” when she considers it “fair.”
Hillary isn’t promoting a “society of sharing” at all – she wants a society of looting.
More One Minute Cases
In case you missed them, I’ve been busy writing more one minute cases (with help from Galileo Blogs.) I’ve also started recording posts to make them available as a podcast – just add the url or do a search in iTunes.
What topics would you like to read/hear next?
Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?
I remember a student asking this question in my intro philosophy class back in school. It sounds like a silly question, but it has fueled vigorous theological argument. The question can be analyzed on several levels:
Superficially, the problem is that belly buttons are a scar remaining from the detachment of the umbilical cord, and since Adam and Even were fully-formed in their adult form, they would have no trace of such a scar. So the answer is no.
Not so fast. “God created man in His own image”, so if every man has a belly button, God must have one too! But belly-buttons are unnecessary to an immortal being, so if God took on the shape of a mortal being, he must have formed Himself in man’s image! (Perhaps men formed God in their image?)
Would God create a fictional ancestry for man, or provide demonstrative proof of his creation but also show than mortal men are not made in his image after all?
A related debate has been held in the field of astronomy.
The speed of light was first measured in the 17th century by observing that the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Io took slightly longer when earth moved away from Jupiter. The delay of 16 minutes and 40 seconds was caused by the longer time the light reflected from Io took to reach earth. Since that time, we have much more sophisticated methods for measuring the speed of light – such as a microwave lined with marshmallows.
In 1838, astronomers were able to use the motion of the earth to measure the distance to stars, and realized that some of them were very far away. This can be confirmed visually by observing that the position of stars within constellations do not change between summer and winter, despite the fact that earth moves to a different position within the solar system. In fact, the stars are so far away, that the starlight we see in the night sky might have started out thousands, millions, or even billions of years ago! If that’s true, then how can the earth’s age be the biblically-correct value?
A similar question has been posed by geologists, biologists, nuclear physicists, cosmologists, molecular biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and other assorted heathens and skeptics regarding the age of the earth. How can God-fearing folk reconcile so many observations with the Holy Word?
One response is to say that God created the universe in its current form to make it appear old. Why would He do this? Perhaps it’s a test of our faith. If we could see the evidence of the creation miracle firsthand, it wouldn’t be called “faith,” would it? The idea that God is fooling us may be hard to grasp, but so is the idea that Noah tended to a T-Rex on the Ark, men rode triceratops, and a flood carved the Great Canyon.
But if God is fooling us, is there any point to science at all? After all, the universe may have been created 5,000 years – or 5 minutes ago in its present form, with memories of things that never happened. On the plus side, there would be no point in trying to prove how old the universe is, since the evidence would be conveniently set up to mislead us. On the down side, it would be just as futile for creationists to prove how young the earth is, since they would be trying to find gaps in the illusion of an infallible being.
So did Adam have a belly button? If he did, then God is deceiving us about the origin of the universe, and any search for evidence of the divine is a futile challenge to His omnipotence. One would have to rest one’s beliefs entirely on faith and abandon reliance on reality. If he did not, then the evidence must be all around us – making faith entirely superfluous.
The One Minute Case Against Antitrust
The great successes in business were achieved by companies that began small, and became large through innovation and lower prices. Antitrust did not make those successes happen. On the contrary, antitrust is poised like a guillotine at the throats of every businessman who has the foresight, perseverance and pluck to become successful.
Introducing The One Minute Case
What is it?
The One Minute Case is a new collaborative blog which will present a brief argument about a controversial issue that can be read in under a minute. The goal is to publish one case per day. You can read the cases to learn something new about an issue or use them as a source for longer arguments of your own.
Why so short?
Some issues can be summarized in 60 seconds, while in other cases, we’ll try to make you aware of a new perspective. The goal is to encourage critical thinking and discussion rather than present an open and shut case. If you disagree, or think something is missing, comment away!
What do the cases look like?
Here’s the first one.
How to contribute
Just register and a submit a case (such as one of the proposed topics) as a comment or email. If we like your style, you’ll be given publishing privileges.
If you know anyone who might be interested in contributing, please let them know!
Free-range livestock on organic farm responsible for deadly spinach outbreak
Authorities for the first time said they had isolated the deadly E. coli strain on Paicines Ranch in San Benito County near a field the ranch leased to Mission Organics, a spinach grower.
They found E. coli “indistinguishable from the outbreak strain” in river water, cattle feces, and wild pig feces on the ranch within a mile a from the spinach fields…
Organic food is not necessarily more dangerous than plain food, but this is nevertheless a timely reminder of the productivity and safety benefits of technology.
How U.S. farm policy makes us fatter and sicker
“For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?”
A good article, except:
“The devil is in the details, no doubt. Simply eliminating support for farmers won’t solve these problems; overproduction has afflicted agriculture since long before modern subsidies.”
I wonder why we don’t have a plague of “overproduction” of iPods, staplers, or cars? Perhaps it’s because their prices are set by the market, not bureaucrats.