Readers may or may not be familiar with Peter Singer, the Australian born philosopher (I use that term very loosely here) who teaches at Princeton, and who thinks that baby cows either do, could or should have more moral rights than baby humans.
I think he’s finally found the perfect avenue (not that it ended up being a very receptive audience). He recently appeared on the Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.
Here it is, the second installment of my two part series on the moral argument.
Oh, and before anyone gets offended and writes to me about the parody in the blog roundup – stop and ask yourself: Are you a Windows user by choice? If so, then which of us is really worse, hmm?
Thanks Dee Dee for bringing this story to my attention.
A former board member of the Lakewind Church in Tennessee has sued the church and its pastors, saying that he was injured when he fell after the spirit took him during a church service.
According to the complaint, Matthew Lincoln was participating in the evening service at the church when a visiting minister touched his forehead after Lincoln came to the altar. “Mr. Lincoln received the spirit and fell backwards striking the carpet-covered cement floor . . ., causing him to sustain severe and permanent injuries.” Lincoln alleges that the fall aggravated a pre-existing back injury, rendering him unable to work.
I find this to be (apart from hilarious) rather revealing. It wasn’t the pentecostal leaders who made him fell – right? It wasn’t peer pressure, his own silly expectations or the desire to look spiritual in front of his peers. Right? It was the Holy Spirit – Right Mr Lincoln?
So why is he suing the church? They didn’t make the Holy Spirit do this, did they? Why isn’t he suing God for the 2.5 million dollars he is seeking?
Here’s part 1 of a 2 part series on the moral argument for theism. The argument is largely about meta-ethics, so the bulk of this presentation is devoted to explaining the meta-ethical issues: What are moral facts at all? And could there be any such things in a purely naturalistic worldview?
This isn’t a real episode, just a message to other podcasters out there about how to promote this podcast. I’m more than happy to do the same for your podcast/site.
Here’s Episode 008, in which i discuss whether a truly secular version of liberalism can really embrace a proper liberal doctrine of equality. I argue that it cannot.
I’m also experimenting with lower quality mp3 files to save space, and it make it quicker to download. This one is only 64kbps.
William Lane Craig was recently in New Zealand for a conference on Molinism at the Victoria University in Wellington. While he was here he had a number of public speaking engagements, including this one, a debate with Bill Cook of the New Zealand Atheists, Rationalists and Humanists, at the University of Auckland. The topic of the debate was: “Is God a Delusion?”
Unfortunately I was not able to attend. From what I have heard, most of those in attendance, regardless of their view of the existence of God held a more or less shared view of who won the debate. But you can decide for yourself.
OK, my hosting provider has just emailed me to let me know that I just exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit. That means I’m had a lot of downloads from this site. This is good and bad. It’s good because it means that more people than I realised are listening to this podcast (listening to it at my site has the same effect on my bandwidth usage as downloading it). I will never discourage that, of course. In fact I’d like to see my listener base increase greatly.
On the downside, this means I’m going to have to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan. The benefits of hosting podcast files in space that you rent yourself are significant, so that’s what I did. But you know what I’m discovering? Hosting plans with decent storage and bandwidth limits aint dirt cheap.
Now (listening to my own show, I realise that I use that word a lot. I have cut out so many instances of it), I’m not even thinking about wimping out – not likely! I’ll just meet these costs as they arise. What I’ve decided to do, however, is to add a donate button to this blog. At the main blog site (www.beretta-online.com/wordpress) you’ll see some buttons on the right hand side. The one at the bottom is a PayPal donate button. If you have a paypal account (and you really should, it’s a fantastic way to make international payments online), you can click on that button, which will take you to the paypal site where you can make a $5 donation. Nothing is expected, everything is appreciated. If it were ever to generate a profit I would remove the button until hard times come again.
Think of it like the collection plate at a poor church you’re just visiting. No obligation whatsoever, but if you like what they’re doing, you might wanna help them out a little.
A few episodes ago in my podcast I made a reference to the fact that Helen Clarke’s Labour Government was seriously talking about the possibility of allowing accused people to be re-tried for the same offense. I used it as an example of how extremely totalitarian the views of our Prime Minister really are. I would never have thought – at the time – that such a sinister move would ever find wide support. I noted an extraordinary outlandish point of view, and moved on.
As Madeleine explains, given the normal practice of one accusation, one trial:
So we are left having to accept that once a court has heard a case, weighed the evidence and ruled, that’s that. Allowing the state to keep having a go because despite the court’s assessment, the state “know” this person is guilty (or worse because of trial by media, the public “know”) is to give the state far too much power and to give society far too much uncertainty in the justice system. Whilst it may succeed in increasing the chances of nailing the guilty it equally runs the risk of allowing the state to run trial after trial after trial with its vast resources against the innocent.
Labour undid hundreds of years of jurisprudence on human rights formulated by far greater legal and ethical minds than any of them possess in one sitting last night. Just remember that next time you decide that someone guilty got off after listening to the 8 second soundbite on the news or reading the 600 word article in the Herald; if a judge and 12 of your peers who heard all of the evidence, got to see the body-language and hear the tone of voice of the witnesses ruled the other way, maybe they were in a better position to assess the case. If the police failed to build their case then tough. If anything, knowing they can have a second crack will encourage them proceed with a lower standard of evidence.
Well said.
The Bill, which will become law soon, also allows a guilty verdict to be reached by only 11 of the 12-person jury.
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