Our revulsion at the cruelty of the Supreme Leaders henchmen is a powerful refutation of the postmodernist credo that anything goes. After the enlightenment discredited the authority of tradition and religion, the notion that reason or civilization could provide an ersatz God has also collapsed. The efforts of analytical philosophy…
Category: Ethics
Wait a minute; those aren’t my morals!
The other day, I wrote on my blog about how I continue to find that even as intellectually and ideologically, I’m moving farther (bad typo; I wish I could move my father past the church) past the church, I realize from a practical standpoint, I’ve still got a lot of…
Sunday in Outer Blogness: Parade of Patriotism Edition!
Now, let’s just dispense with the esoteric discussions on the true dirty definition of “tea-bagging” since the tea-baggers are just patriotic Americans who don’t like taxation without representation, and if your favorite candidate fails to get elected one time, then the patriotic thing to do is, well, secede from the…
Spain Investigates Jay Bybee for Torture
According to Harper’s, Spanish authorities are investigating Bush administration officials for torture. That includes the former BYU law professor Jay Bybee who signed off on John Yoo’s infamous torture memos. The premier Spanish newspaper El PaÃs reports that judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation. Garzon is famous for…
The Nature of Sexuality
Todd just found a youtube video of the documentary Legacies about the treatment of Mormon gays by their church: Spencer Kimball’s attitudes about sexuality, unfortunately, can only be characterized as superstition. In the Mormon case, superstition is intertwined with claims to personal revelation. The latter is defined such that the…
Narratives and the Golden Rule
I was doubtful as to whether to complete this, since I guess things have kinda blown over in recent times, and perhaps we may not even need this message. But something I read recently made me want to write about it all over again… You may have seen our great…
Moral Foundations: Why we may not see eye to eye with the faithful
During my most recent tour around the interwebs, I found an interesting idea that Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been working on. The idea is a new way of looking at the foundations of morality than the old economic idea of humans being rationally…
A Convert’s Conscience
Although he appears to be a star professor at BYU, I have only become aware of Robert Millet’s efforts during the last two years. As a convert, I have to admit that his approach to investigators distresses me somewhat. I know that Millet means well when he suggests to side…
Taking the Long Term View on Marriage Equality
Intellectually, one can only sustain the orthodox position against marriage equality if one assumes that gays are not fully human or somehow defective. Unfortunately, biology contradicts that notion. The Church is correct in asserting the freedom for the organization and its members. However, our liberty ends where it begins to…
We Were Asking for It
If you sew the wind, you shall reap the storm. If you live by the sword, you shall die by the sword. It’s just sad.