What Can We Learn From the Future?
Christians in the past have believed and practiced things that embarrass us today. Keith has brought that up repeatedly in the thread on a “Gay Rights” assault on freedom of conscience. In context it seemed he wanted us to back off on our beliefs regarding gay “marriage.” He didn’t say that ought right, though, I asked him to follow his premise to a conclusion: given that Christians can make mistakes like that, and in view of …
David DeGrazia, professor at George Washington University, has written a peer-reviewed paper for the Journal of Medical Ethics on “Moral Bioenhancement” (MB). The suggestion is to “encourage or require” advanced technologies, including genetic and embryonic “selection” to enhance the moral status of the human race. I learned about this through William Briggs’s excellent blog.
I am struck by DeGrazia’s frequent use of “we,” as in,
The specific questions …
David DeGrazia is a professor of philosophy at George Washington University. He has just published a fairly complex research paper into the ethics of “medical bioenhancement,” meaning the use of high technology, including selective abortion, to improve the ethics of the human race.
He relies on academic literature with which I am not much familiar–though I have read enough on human freedom to know that his brief discussion on it there was wholly inadequate to its purpose.
Now, I want …
Unbelievers love to bring forth unreasonable commands from the Bible to prove it’s wrong. Leviticus 19:19 is one of their favorites:
“You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.
Now, that certainly seems odd, doesn’t it? But Jonathan Morrow explains it all clearly enough in Think Christianly. On page 166 …
Book Review
Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture by Jonathan Morrow
I have an all-too-large “guilt shelf,” which is what I call the list of books I know I should be reading. They’re books that I want to read—that’s why I have them—but I can’t seem to get to all of them as quickly as I would like. Think Christianly has been on that list for several months. The timing …
Christianity is first of all about the good God, our Creator and King; and about Christ's work reconciling us, whom he had created in his image but who rejected him, back to a full and right relationship with him and with all of his works. Everything else flows out of that, including the explanation for who does good and why.
Everyone exercises compassion. Why? What motivates interpersonal compassion? What is its purpose? Where does altruism fit in to the human picture? Why are some more …
A few days Mike Adams posted an article at Townhall.com titled Diversity and Catatonic Schizophrenia. It begins,
Dianne Harrison is the new president of California State University, Northridge (CSUN). It’s a small college in the Golden State but it sure is loaded with diversity. How do I know? Because Dianne has written a letter to the entire university, telling everyone how diverse they are and, more importantly, what a great person she is because she loves diversity. In her short email of around 800 …
Someone on Facebook (“Zach”) was touting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, and the Foundation Beyond Belief yesterday, saying they were “doing good without gods.” Zach’s point was that atheists can be just as compassionate as Christians, or even more so. I have to say I am impressed with the Gates’ generosity and the great work DWB does. I’m not familiar enough with FBB to comment on that group.
What He Meant to Say Was… But there’s confusion in this phrase, “doing …
Sam Harris thinks we’ll see how rational it is to be compassionate toward evildoers if we recognize that no one has free will. If criminals are not really to blame for their wrong, it makes no sense to hate them for it. But as I wrote in Part 1, this “compassion” comes at the price of denying all humanness; and with that eliminated, just what is it we’re being compassionate toward?
Harris’s no-free-will dystopia is disturbing in other ways besides. C.S. Lewis anticipated this …
"The New Atheists claim to be the party of reason.... The problem is, they're not very good at it." — Discover the provocative ebook True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.