HT the Dish from Matt Walsh Blog
Look, I wouldn’t presume to give marital “advice.” In my life I’ve met a few people really qualified for that job, and I’m not one of them. But I come across this “divorce is high because people aren’t ready for marriage” shtick quite a bit. Predictably, it’s mostly unmarried folks who say these things. And it only results in more and more people my age hesitating to break out of the cocoon of adolescence and get going with their lives. Continue reading
HT to Jim De Borst for this piece
STS starts from the proposition that scientific knowledge is one of the basic means with which modern societies make sense of who they are, how they relate to the world around them, and what they can or should do in order to improve their conditions. It follows that societies also need to study the processes through which science and technology are made – in order to understand how knowledge advances, what makes innovation happen, and why things do not always progress as hoped or planned.
A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.
Once again, no harm, nobody else knows, and, like the dog-eating family, it involves a kind of recycling that is— as some of my research subjects pointed out— an efficient use of natural resources. But now the disgust is so much stronger, and the action just seems so … degrading. Does that make it wrong? If you’re an educated and politically liberal Westerner, you’ll probably give another nuanced answer, one that acknowledges the man’s right to do what he wants, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone. But if you are not a liberal or libertarian Westerner , you probably think it’s wrong— morally wrong —for someone to have sex with a chicken carcass and then eat it. For you, as for most people on the planet, morality is broad. Some actions are wrong even though they don’t hurt anyone.
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind. The next step is to understand where these many moralities came from in the first place.
Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother, are traveling together in France. They are both on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. So what do you think about this? Was it wrong for them to have sex?
Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 45). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Paramus residents are the most vocal in support of the laws, saying they need one day a week when they can get out of their driveways, and travel through town without fighting off mall traffic. But retired state legislator Paul Contillo, who is credited for legislative amendments that made it harder to defeat the laws in past referendums, said there are a lot of retail workers in Bergen County who don’t live in Paramus, but who like having Sundays off.
Editing out a Biblical Reference
Last night a friend who is a world renown expert in water resource management told me he was asked to write a piece about the current California drought. He told me the he ended the piece with a comment about Elijah’s drought found in the book of Kings in the Bible. He also noted that the editors took the comment out of the piece.
My friend wasn’t trying to make a larger point that this drought is God’s judgment on California or anything. He’s a very measured man that usually pours water in the alarmism the media likes to sell papers with. He just noted that this drought wasn’t anything like he imagines that drought would have been.
Why did the editor remove the story? I don’t really know of course, but neither he nor I was surprised it was removed. The media market expects and enforces a degree of secularity.
The Secular Filter Continue reading
