something you said...

So last time we spoke you said something to the effect of prefering a judcial system where a person, for whom it could be proven that the likelihood of offending again was exceedingly small, received no retributive punishment.  I think I'm stating that correctly.  I wonder then where you stand on the converse;  supposing that the liklihood of repeat offence could be proven to be very large, and the offence had large societal impact.  Would you prefer punishing them for the rest of their natural life, ending their life quickly, no retributive punishment, changing their brain to make them no longer a danger to society, or something else?  Furthermore, how would you rate these possibilities and your own(if you chose) on a moral scale? (as in, list most moral to least moral)

Read this..

http://www.doxaweb.com/assets/doxa.pdf

Your facebook status about which we argued, to me indicates that you have a appreciation for beauty and whimsy and funny coincidence and that you see our planet as the most 'heavenly' place one could be.  At least for a white middle class American grad student.  The link is very short and worth discussion.

Intelligent Design Sort

See it here.

The probability of the original input list being in the exact order it's in is 1/(n!). There is such a small likelihood of this that it's clearly absurd to say that this happened by chance, so it must have been consciously put in that order by an intelligent Sorter. Therefore it's safe to assume that it's already optimally Sorted in some way that transcends our naïve mortal understanding of "ascending order". Any attempt to change that order to conform to our own preconceptions would actually make it less sorted.

Meditation on a Monotonous Lark

The lark sings out after the rain adjourns,
perch'd earth against an ever tumbling sky.
The sound and sight excite my mind in turns,
a devil in the maelstrom of my mind.
"Is this illusion and would it rescind
the stirring effervescence of my heart,
and end the arched spires of kith and kind?"
The trifle question dies before it starts.
More weightless than illusion against art,
my mind moves on to dwell on other things,
the realization that stirs me with a start
of silver flecks of sunlight on its wings.
  Illusion it may be, and life may be absurd,
  but enough for me, is perch-ed with that bird.

Absence of Evidence

This is relevant to our discussion:
A Silence That Screams.

Note that no mere historical analysis is sufficient in my mind to discount the mystical claims of a group of people alone, although I do, obviously, believe the evidence in favor of a Divine or even diabolical or otherwise magical Jesus is insufficient to support belief (whatever that means).

No, the other scissor in this logical implement is the bizarre conclusion we must come to that a God would incarnate out of love, suffer horribly (we are told), die, and come back to life and leave no physical evidence or any contemporary accounts by disinterested observers so that the end of all of this sacrifice and miracle, which requires that we Know Jesus, could be achieved. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Jesus never once tells an apostle or disciple to write anything down, to make notes, to find independent observers to corroborate the miraculous events happening. He never suggests means by which to organize The Church, the steward of the Good News, for the thousands of years that he will be missing from the material world. He never conjures from nothing elaborate technology to record his incarnation, sample his DNA, or provide, by some science unknown to us but certainly in the purview of a Divine Being, some confirmation of his nature.

The paucity of the material evidence is met by an equivalent paucity of the philosophical. Jesus never addresses ontology, science, philosophy. He never tells us how we can "know" anything at all. Never addresses the obvious rejoinder that a Buddhist would make to his claims, in the presence of miracles or otherwise, that one way or another Jesus, Yahweh, Sin, Suffering, are all illusions - a claim which, is more unshakable than any faith. The Gospels, if we are to believe them, are universally concerned with folk ontologies and folk psychologies local to the region of Jesus' life. There is nothing to indicate a larger view. The one ontological question posed in the Gospel "What is Truth?" (John 18:38) is posed and left shockingly, and honestly to me, quite sorrowfully, unanswered. These are stunning and irresolvable omissions on the part of a Divine Being who is on the road to profound torment to save us all out of love. How can he save us if he cannot even tell us how to know if the Universe is illusion or not? How can I begin to worry about his claims if I cannot even know Truth?

Crucial to this argument is the fact that all of the above is within the ability of the Divine Being. Could we make sense of it in any meaningful way, other than asserting that we simply do not understand God's Plan, but it must be Good and Just and Loving (even to the point of saying that we only have incomplete knowledge of the meaning of these words?). I don't think so, but I would hope that God's Plan would be better than to require us too. He knows how stupid and insane and ignorant and sad we are.

Science!

Livescience posted this article. It might be worthy of discussion. I found it interesting the things they say are 'fact' about Jesus life.

The following "facts" about Jesus would be affirmed by most history scholars, Borg said:

• Jesus was born sometime just before 4 B.C. He grew up in Nazareth, a small village in Galilee, as part of the peasant class. Jesus' father was a carpenter and he became one, too, meaning that they had likely lost their agricultural land at some point.
• Jesus was raised Jewish and he remained deeply Jewish all of his life. His intention was not to create a new religion. Rather, he saw himself as doing something within Judaism.
• He left Nazareth as an adult, met the prophet John and was baptized by John. During his baptism, Jesus likely experienced some sort of divine vision.
• Shortly afterwards, Jesus began his public preaching with the message that the world could be transformed into a "Kingdom of God."
• He became a noted healer, teacher and prophet. More healing stories are told about Jesus than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition.
• He was executed by Roman imperial authority.
• His followers experienced him after his death. It is clear that they had visions of Jesus as they had known him during his historical life. Only after his death did they declare Jesus to be "Lord" or "the Son of God."

Thats all. Of course, I take issue with the last fact.

Tracks

This article on Talk Origins is about purported evidence of dinosaur/human footprints. The evidence that any of the tracks are human is the sort of thing only a mother could love.

Religion thrives on interpreting ambiguous evidence favorably, unfortunately - a habit so ingrained that we hardly notice it. The January 15th accident in New York this year, where 150 people miraculously survived an emergency landing in the Hudson River was viewed as a miracle by some (downplaying unjustly, I would argue, the competency of the pilot) while a similar accident a month later, resulting in the death of 49 people on board and one extremely unlucky person on the ground, is left, like most "random events", outside the purview of God, at least in common rhetoric.

This occurs at all levels - Jesus walks around Palestine, purportedly performing miracles and preaching moral lessons and people take this and reports of his resurrection from the dead as evidence of his Divinity (not that it constitutes evidence of that in any way). Yet the bizarre reality that a God synonymous with Love and Justice would leave the requisite concepts of salvation (faith in Jesus Christ) materially unknown to whole swaths of humans living on other continents and philosophically unknown to those adhering to philosophies which assert that the whole universe, Jesus and Yahweh included, are a flickering illusion is, basically, ignored. At least God's motives for using this particular conveyance, word of mouth, for the substance of what must be the most important thing He has ever done with respect to Humanity, is left as a Mystery - as are so many of the essential elements of Christianity.

That these things might all be True alone is not the point. You never know anything for sure in this universe, as far as I can tell. But the profound ambiguity of Christianity is itself evidence against it. it is utterly bizarre that the universe is such that a reasonable person might as easily disbelieve as believe in God's most important work. Or maybe that, too, is a mystery.