All this nonsense about Obama’s citizenship set me thinking other things about US citizenship, the different ways in which people come to be citizens of this great country, and other facts about our country’s handling of issues regarding citizenship and naturalization, and the extent to which racial and ethnic discrimination has affected the process. .
Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust and to hunting down the perpetrators still at large. “When history looks back,” Wiesenthal explained, “I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.” His work stands as a reminder and a warning for future generations.
But my philosophy correspondent, Pablo, was not impressed. “That immoral!” he declared.
But more frequently than not, deep pockets are the main factor that enables a person or an athletic team to claim victory. This applies as much in sport competition as it does in politics and love. Any competitor for the big prize in politics better have a good fund raising team, as well as a good political program (or at least one that appeals to the voters). Our romantic myths may say that love conquers all, but any man seeking a desirable partner in life better show at least a potential for a decent income if he is to succeed. A destitute lover usually remains destitute longer than he remains a lover.
Shermer is surely correct and Harris incorrect on the question of free will. Shermer makes reference to some interesting neurological evidence for the inhibition-of-impulses process in our brains, something that I had not heard before. But this conforms to what a number of philosophers and psychologists have long argued: namely, that we’re able to make significant choices between contrary alternatives despite that fact that whatever we choose to do can be neurologically explained in terms of a number of brain processes, which we don’t control and of which we’re not even aware.
There is a great variety of belief in G-d. There isn’t any general consensus on the claim that G-d is real. In short, this is not an obvious, objective fact. There is a great variety of non-belief in G-d. There isn’t any general consensus on the claim that G-d is fiction or non-existent. In short, these are facts that do not require supporting argument.
Generally, statement of belief makes reference to the object of belief, which is not a mere psychological state. Although belief often involves some state of mind, the object of most of our beliefs is something other than our psychological state of mind.
Human beings, like all entities existing in a natural and social environment, have a variety of causal conditions that limit what they can and cannot do. Much of what we are and do is causally conditioned. But this fact does not imply that we have no control over what we can do. We most often do control a good part of what we do, within the context of many conditions that we don’t control. It was only a remnant of the old doctrine of a soul not affected by material causation that led some people to the false conclusion that lack of control results from being subjected to a variety of causal conditions.
Historically, much misery and suffering could have been avoided if people had recognized that the nobler forms of religion deal with values and spirituality, not with doctrines or dogma about objective reality, and not with a supernatural being who includes certain groups and excludes, even condemns, other groups
In the former U.S.S.R. the story of Soviet genetics from 1937 to 1964 was one of the most tragic examples, with disastrous results, of a pseudo-scientific belief rising to absolute dogma. During this time a plant physiologist and charlatan named Trofim D. Lysenko rose to power, eventually achieving absolute control over all genetic and agricultural research. Lysenko not only destroyed the lives of thousands of scientists and stifled the development of biology in the U.S.S.R. for decades; he also had a devastatingly destructive influence on Russia’s entire economy.
Some people defend theism by arguing that theism represents a reasonable philosophy because it is consistent with the prevailing scientific picture of reality. Such defenders of theism claim that the sciences (i.e., the relevant sciences) have not proven beyond all doubt that a belief in God is false. Sometimes they add that despite all our accrued scientific knowledge of the physical and biological world, God, as conceived by Western theology and areas of Western theistic philosophy, could exist somehow and somewhere behind the scenes, beyond the scope of the sciences and critical, rational inquiry. In short, according to the defenders, belief in God has not been refuted by any of the sciences.