Louis CK - If God Came Back...

After God created the heavens and the earth, he thought to himself:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Traditionally, this has been understood to mean that God created everything for the benefit of humans, and at the expense of everything and everyone else. Quite convenient for us, but what if what has been translated as "dominion" (in the sense of ownership) should really have been more accurately translated as "stewardship" (in the sense of "look after this for me till I come back, and don't fuck it up in the meantime!")?

Comedian Louis CK has a few thoughts on the subject...

I bet God is wondering how successfully He managed to make us in His image :p

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Malcolm Gradwell - Her Way

What do you do when your best friend decides to marry someone who crushes his spirit, who loves him only on condition that he not be himself, who takes his sine qua non away from him, who makes him feel ashamed of the very things for which most people love him?

Well, if you're Malcolm Gladwell, apparently what you do is write a little ditty about it and perform it with your friends at the wedding reception :)

Most awkward wedding ever :)

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Philosophers are no longer allowed at summer camp

When it comes to the question of the metaphysics of diachronic personal identity (the question of whether you are the same person at different times), philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, David Lewis and others, have come up with a plethora of absolutely fascinating and disturbing thought experiments. The idea is that these intuition pumps should help us get clearer on the concept and its logical implications so we can test the coherence of various views. What they haven't always considered is how non-philosophers might react to these stories :)

Unfortunately, summer camp is not the only place we're banned from :(

Via: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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Filibustering to Abort the Abortion Bill

When the Texas Senate wanted to pass a new abortion bill that would severely restrict abortion guidelines and ban abortions after 20 weeks, Senator Wendy Davis decided to literally stand up for women's right to make their own reproductive health choices by filibustering the bill for 13 hours in what has quickly become a national sensation that has galvanized liberal support from all corners of the nation.

Of course, conservatives are furious about her stance, and Governor Rick Perry (most likely afraid of losing his own office to her come next election), has decided to attack Davis on a personal level by going after her and her family. In addition, in one of his statements, Perry claimed that "in Texas, we value all life," apparently completely oblivious to the fact that on the very same day, his state had committed its 500th execution...

And just to give you a sense of the double-standards and dirty tricks some conservative opponents tend to use when approaching their core issues, here's what they tried to do with respect to the fact they saw that their bill wasn't going to pass:

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And although Davis ended up talking non-stop for about eleven hours, she can also be quite concise:

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Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblowers

Whistleblowing and information leaks have been spearheading news headlines recently. Among the highest profile cases in America we've had Bradley Manning and, most recently, Edward Snowden. Many have jumped on the character assassination wagon, calling them traitors, cowards, and a lot of other things, even calling for their heads!, all of which tends to distract from the more pressing issue: the information leaked, what it tells us about the sources that were trying to keep it secret, and the implications going forward.

Directly or indirectly, both men did work for the government, so a case could potentially be made that they betrayed our government. Though I disagree with that position, I'm willing to grant it for the sake of argument. What they did not betray, however, is their country. They saw that the government was violating human rights, the constitution and the principles upon we always claim our nation was founded, and they decided to stand up to power so that we could rescue our country back from the forces that want to corrupt it for their own purposes. These men are American and moral heroes. Few have the courage to stand up and risk so much when it would be so much easier to just stay silent and look the other way, and now, in their time of need, we ought to stand by them and support them.

Yes, the information they revealed is shocking and damaging to our reputation, no doubt, but our reputation ought to be based who we are, not on what we hide. And claims regarding national security, at least in these two cases, have been completely fabricated or at least blown way out of proportion. Unlike the previous administration, which actually outed individual secret agents and put their lives at real risk (all in the name of politics, I might add), Manning and Snowden have leaked information about highly questionable programs and practices that have been institutionalized without having gone through the proper checks and balances (you know, pesky little things like the Constitution and such)...

But of course, how you feel about and refer to these folks depends on where you're coming from, as the hilarious Samantha Bee beautifully and succinctly shows:

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And just to give you a taste of the backward twilight zone world we seem to be living in, here's an example of those in (financial) power trying to silence those who report on their corruption by trying to turn the law on them! (and apparently without noticing the irony and contradiction):

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Ok, this is going to sound horrible, so be warned, but was it deliberate that the public relations spokesperson sort of looks like a piggy, to make it look like they sympathize with the plight of animals, or was it just an unfortunate and ironic coincidence?

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Hunters Are Pussies

There, I said it. You have probably seen what hunters like to do, right? Once they've killed some "game," they like to take pictures of themselves next to the dead carcass before mounting it as a trophy on their walls for the world to see and admire. Future generations are going to think of us the way we think today about slave owners: as a bunch of ignorant assholes...

But here's the thing: this wasn't a fair fight. In fact, it wasn't a fight at all. The poor animal got ambushed and killed before it could have any time to protect itself, and the wimpy but boastful "predator" was hundreds of yards away, taking comfortable advantage of a weapon that makes him feel like a "man" while simultaneously negating that manhood by placing him completely outside of any real danger and discomfort.

And as Stephen Colbert reports, to add insult to injury, they're also getting lazier...

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If you want to hunt and be a real man, leave your rifle behind, grab a couple of knives and go fight the beast head-on. Let the best fighter win...

But let's keep it real, here's what's probably going to happen:

Q.E.D.

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Jon Stewart Pwns Bill O'Reilly on Profiling... and Math

We all know that Bill O'Reilly is a petulant, loud-mouth who bullies and yells at people he disagrees with (even when they are invited guests in his show), and it's kind of hilarious to watch him and Rush Limbaugh go at it every now and then, but I'm starting to wonder whether the Jon Stewart vs Bill O'Reilly little debates and repartees are fair... I mean, Papa Bear is like five feet taller, a lot louder, always willing to make up straw man arguments, and overshout everyone... and Jon Stewart, well, he takes the abuse graciously, but also drops an atomic bombshell every now and calls him out on the inconsistency of his bullshit...

Here's just one more example of that ass-kicking:

So, is O'Reilly a masochist or just clueless?

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Richard Feynman on the Scientific Method

When it comes to backward, mystical, conspiratorial, pseudoscientific thinking, I'm actually pretty forgiving of people in the past: apart from  a small intellectual elite, most people didn't always have the technological and conceptual tools necessary to separate reasonable ideas from the bat-shit crazy. Today, however, when we have such easy access to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom humanity has accrued over the past few thousand years, all of which can be easily accessed through our phones, there is no longer an excuse for science illiteracy. Today, if we are ignorant, much of that is by choice.

By science literacy I'm not talking about keeping up with the details of all the latest studies and experiments published in the latest and most prestigious science journals. I'm talking about a basic understanding of the thinking and methods involved in adjudicating competing claims, whatever their source and whatever their nature. And who better to give you an idea of this kind of thinking, if you're not already familiar with it, than the inimitable and hilarious Richard Feynman? :)

Share with your friends. This is a gospel worth spreading :)

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Stephen Colbert - The Word: Medical Leave

As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in the past (as in this video and in this article from The Atlantic), when we turn from a market economy to a market society, we have taken a decidedly wrong turn... Instead of valuing people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect and consideration, with goals and projects that may have meaningful, intrinsic, emotional or educational value, we start to see everything (and everyone) around us through money-colored filters, and valuing them only in terms of their economic value: how much money they can contribute to our own financial goals or how much money they're going to cost us; and in the process we rob them of their personhood and humanity.

Stephen Colbert reports on some instances of this downward trend as it applies to hospitals and health-care providers...

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And what does it say about the insane cost of our healthcare system that deporting people overseas on a private plane is cheaper than just taking care of their injuries???

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Monty Python - The Argument Clinic

If you've ever met or seen philosophers in action, you've probably noticed a couple of things: they're wicked smart, they're incredibly nit-picky about defining their terms (and getting others to do the same), and they love to argue.

I can see why many people would find these traits off-putting—in fact, that's kind of why the Athenians sentenced Socrates to death!— but I also hope you can see why they're important, so I thought I'd share a couple of examples.

In the first clip, we have the famous Argument Clinic skit from Monty Python, in which a fundamental disagreement about just what exactly an argument is (in the technical sense: a collection of statements connected to establish a definite proposition) leads to another sense of an argument (the one understood more colloquially: a quarrel, or mere contradiction between disagreeing parties).

And, thanks to former President George W. Bush, here is a great and hilarious example of what can happen when you don't define your terms clearly:

Looks like the choice is yours: would you rather be thought nit-picky or an absolute idiot? ;)

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Pat Robertson - Want Miracles? Be Simple-Minded, Credulous and Uneducated

In a strange case similar to that of Benjamin Button, it seems as though Pat Robertson's senility is firmly advancing in the direction of reason, to the point that I've been wondering lately whether he's becoming one of the most interesting exponents of religious nonsense and an unexpected advocate for secularism. Well, either that or he's so far gone the deep end that he's not even trying to be ironic... Here's a case in point:

Ah, those simple, primitive people... they'll believe any nonsense you tell them :)

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The Real Victims of Gun Control?

The number of gun-related deaths in America, at least compared to civilized countries, is out of control (as you can tell from the poster to the right), but when it comes to reasonable debate, somehow we just lose it.

We are a freedom-loving people, or so we tell ourselves, and we get paranoid about losing the liberties that we care about, but we are also perfectly comfortable imposing our values and intruding in other people's lives when it comes to other things we care about. In this respect, only libertarians tend to be consistent in asking for almost complete government non-intervention in the choices that adults get to make. Conservatives and liberals, though, affirm one sort of freedom, but are happy to take away another. Just look at how they treat the first and second Amendments to the Bill of Rights to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

But the main problem, especially on the right of the political spectrum, has to do with the absolutely insane extremism associated with the fear of and opposition to gun control, to the point that, as the following clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart indicate, they are completely oblivious to the real victims of guns.

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But let's not protect people from guns... let's protect guns from people:

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And of course, while people are getting killed all over the place, this is the kind of thing that Fox News is upset, actually outraged, about:

If we're not afraid of fully automated machine guns, why are we so afraid of a discussion?

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Physicists Confirm They Found and Killed the 'God Particle'

Virtually since the inception of its moniker, many atheists have hated the fact that the Higgs Boson, a theoretical subatomic particle thought to be responsible for attributing mass to matter, has been referred to as the "God Particle."

But as The Onion reports, they may finally have reason to celebrate, as news have been revealed that physicists have finally found, and then killed, that goddamn particle...

But if you actually want to get an idea of what the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field are, you can check out the LHC tag, or just watch this short clip with the awesome Sean Carroll:

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If Richard Dawkins Died and Met His Maker...

Religious apologists have a long history of using the idea of death-bed conversions by skeptics as proof that God is real. Apparently, if you're afraid of one thing, that proves the existence of some other thing. One of the most often cited such conversions was Darwin's. That such conversion never actually took place matters little to charlatans who will lie and deceive in honor of their god, not realizing what an insult that is to the very god they worship... but that's how it goes, I guess.

When it comes to philosophers, it was David Hume's intellectual integrity and courage that shocked the world, and especially the renowned biographer James Boswell, who could not understand for the life of him why his literary mentor didn't think it was at all rational or prudential to bet on Pascal's wager as he was nearing death...

When Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it one step further, pre-emptively arguing (starting at 7:52 in the video below) that any such possible conversion on his part, were it to happen, would most likely be an indication of his illness, medicine administered by doctors, or some sort of dementia.

Finally, and although he has not kicked the bucket yet, it seems that if Richard Dawkins were to die and find out he was wrong after all, and that there is a god, god who would be the one to end up getting bitch-slapped :)

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What Do You Get When You Mix Russian Drivers and Dashboard Cameras?

A few days ago news spread all over the world about a 15-meter (roughly 49 feet), 10,000-ton meteor that hurled towards Earth over central Russia and exploded in mid-air, sending sonic shockwaves that damaged hundreds of buildings. Although over a thousand people were injured, apparently there were no casualties.

The interesting thing about this news, though, is that the footage of this amazing celestial event was captured by dashboard cameras installed in many vehicles. Apparently, this is sort of a necessary fad there because a lot of Russians simply cannot be trusted to be peaceful, honest, law-abiding citizens. So what do you get when you mix Russian drivers and dashboard cameras? Apparently, Benny Hill-styled footage. Jon Stewart reports.

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Fear and Trembling - The Story of Abraham and Isaac

I'm currently re-reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, one of my favorite books of all time: a gripping philosophical and theological analysis of one of the most macabre stories in the Bible: Abraham's unquestioning willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the son that had been promised him by God, and who was destined to start the nation that was to trace its lineage back to Abraham.

As I also re-read the biblical story, I noticed that while it tells us what Abraham did, it doesn't say a word about what went through his mind when he first heard the injunction, nor what he thought/felt when he drew the knife that was to kill his son. This silence allows Kierkegaard to explore the paradox that Abraham, as the knight and father of faith, represents.

And through a lyrical exposition (for this is not the kind of thing that can be argued for), Kiergegaard shows that Abraham's silence also implies that we can't use the universal categories of language and the ethical to understand him, since his move transcends the universal, the intelligible, the communicable. This is why Kierkegaard explores the question of whether there can be a teleological suspension of the ethical, and why, while he simultaneously admires, praises and shudders at Abraham and his conviction, he cannot understand him.

And this inability to understand, this absolute necessity for silence and absence of language, communication and rational intelligibility, is further reinforced by the fact that Kierkegaard wrote this philosophical work under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio: even if Abraham did what was most appropriate in the particular situation he found himself in, there is nothing we can extrapolate from his choice; he cannot be understood, and his greatness, if it isn't just madness, cannot be communicated.

For Kierkegaard, faith isn't the lazy cop-out answer that's given by most believers nowadays when they simply fail to explain something they don't understand: it is something that has to be experienced permanently, in fear and trembling, because it represents a conviction that stands at the edge of the most dangerous abyss, and that is affirmed existentially in virtue of its absurdity.

Anyway, while Kierkegaards's philosophical investigation is as serious as it gets, since it deals with the nature of human existence and choice, the story of Abraham reminded me of this hilarious clip I saw a few years ago:

For those of you who are not religious, I still highly recommend this book because beneath the religious surface, Kierkegaard explores the paradoxical nature of profound existential topics that we can't help but confront, despite our secular inclinations. Agree or disagree with him, he will stimulate your mind, and you'll get to read a master of writing. Here's just a small sample:

No! No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all. Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone was great wholly in proportion to the magnitude of that with which he struggled. For he who struggled with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but he who struggled with God became the greatest of all. Thus did they struggle in the world, man against man, one against thousands, but he who struggled with God was the greatest of all. Thus did they struggle on earth: there was one who conquered everything by his power, and there was one who conquered God by his powerlessness. There was one who relied upon himself and gained everything; there was one who in the security of his own strength sacrificed everything; but the one who believed God was the greatest of all. There was one who was great by virtue of his power, and one who was great by virtue of his hope, and one who was great by virtue of his love, but Abraham was the greatest of all, great by that power whose strength is powerlessness, great by that wisdom which is foolishness, great by that hope whose form is madness, great by the love that is hatred to oneself.

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Stephen Colbert - America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't

Sorry for the sparse presence recently folks, but I've been buried under a mountain of work with the end of the semester. Last night, for instance, I got a chance to have some breakfast only after midnight, and as I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I started watching a recent interview with Stephen Colbert at Google that just had to be posted here.

Why? Because in trying to explain the title of his latest book, Stephen Colbert starts the whole interview by explaining how St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of god works, and he actually does a phenomenal job for someone explaining it off the cuff.

Later on there's talk about the unexamined life, so you automatically start thinking of Socrates, and even though the whole thing is humorous, there are bits and pieces of philosophy, and ideas worth thinking about, all over the place, so enjoy:

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Bill O'Reilly - Christianity Is a Philosophy, Not a Religion

Unfortunately, the word philosophy is used, misused and abused by all kinds of people. For some, like the local drunk at your nearest bar, for instance, it means the semi-coherent and misogynistic ramblings about the "deep truths" he has "discovered" through dozens of failed relationships, and that he can't help but share with you. For others, it means some sort of "deep" motto, like "believe in yourself." A slightly more respectable version still is that of a worldview: a set of ideas by which you lead your life, and which, with any luck, are not incompatible with each other.

But for philosophers, philosophy is not a thing... it's an activity: it is the pursuit of wisdom (the good and the true) by means of rational conceptual analysis, by rigorous and systematic observation, by synthesizing the very best knowledge that we acquire from the sciences, by subjecting claims to rational scrutiny, by questioning what others take for granted, and by developing the existential courage to confront the harshness of reality head-on without having to delude ourselves with comforting beliefs and illusions. Philosophy is something we do, not something we "have."

Whatever its merits, however, religion is not that. In philosophy, we investigate to find answers, and we go where the evidence takes us. In religion, you start with your preconceived belief first, and then look for ways to back it up later. Philosophy is inquiry; religion is rationalization.

So, when I heard that Bill O'Reilly recently claimed that Christianity is a philosophy, and NOT a religion, my first reaction was, predictably, WTF? Ah, but when Papa Bear wants to play logic and semantic games, you know that Jon Stewart is ready to call him on his bullshit :)

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And hey, have you noticed that there are a lot of similarities between the Jesus and Socrates stories? Well, this is no mere coincidence. As Nietzsche once put it, Christianity is Platonism for the herd. It's the same basic story, without the actual philosophy part...

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Sometimes I wonder if Jon Stewart is proof of God's existence...

The problem, though, is that Mr. Deity is now upset:

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Megyn Kelly Makes Karl Rove Her Bitch

I have an ongoing debate with a friend. We're both liberals, and I think one can theoretically separate a person's political ideology from their physical attractiveness, and not like the former while very much liking the latter, or vice versa. My friend thinks I'm full of crap: once you know what's inside a person's heart and soul, especially when they're conservative ideologues, the outside is just as hideous as the inside.

And the object of contention between us has been Megyn Kelly. I think she's totally hot, even though I disagree with most of the things she says. My friend says she makes him want to barf. Here's the awesome part: on election night she did something that should completely vindicate me in my friend's eyes: she made Karl Rove her bitch :)

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I'm not big on schadenfreude, but that was awesome!

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Take the Money, Donald Trump! Do It for the Children!

Apparently Donald Trump wants to help charities, but he won't donate the money without extorting President Obama to release documents that, let's face it, will not satisfy the birthers and their conspiracy theories.

Fortunately, Stephen Colbert has an offer of his own for Donald Trump :)

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And of course, once it's all over, those will be the smartest things ever to come out of Trump's mouth...

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