New fount of knowledge

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Check out moralhealth.com. It's a blog by a professor hubby has worked with. He's a very interesting and intelligent man so put on your thinking cap and go visit his blog. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite.

Romantic Love vs Religious Convictions
I cannot think of anything more futile than trying to prove the existence of God. I also think it equally silly for people to think that they have an argument that conclusively shows that God does not exist. You know the kind: If God were omniscient and omnipotent, then he could create a rock that he couldn’t lift. But if he can’t left that rock, then he isn’t omnipotent. Clearly, the problem of evil is a very serious issue. But to treat it as a slam-dunk against the idea that God cannot at once be omni benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent strikes me as really foolish.

Truth as Meanness*
“Well, I am just telling the truth”. From this utterance it is supposed to follow that one is justified in saying what one says. Hence, one cannot be morally criticized for said it. In response, I say that this line of reasoning is surely delusional. The simple fact of the matter is that truth can be down right hurtful. A person who indiscriminately says what is true is not a moral exemplar. Quite the contrary, such a person is, instead, utterly vicious in her or his truth telling. Moral maturity and decency entails the wisdom to know when not to say something.

Evil is masterful at exploiting ambiguity. Honesty is no doubt a virtue. Indiscriminate truth telling, on the other hand, is a vice. Minimally, honesty is a matter of responding truthfully to a question asked of one. Indiscriminate truth telling is not at all about responding to a question raised. Rather, it is about seizing the opportunity to volunteer the truth in order to achieve no other goal than that of hurting someone. As an aside, I am struck by the fact that those who insist upon indiscriminately telling the truth about others are masterfully discriminate when it comes to telling the truth about themselves.

Causing gratuitous pain is meanness by any other name. And quite often truth can serve the aim of being mean better than sticks and stones.

A Society of Freedom without Responsibility?
Never in the history of humankind have people wanted so much freedom and so little responsibility. Thus, never in the history of humankind have people been so intent upon excusing what they insist they should be free to do. If we do too much of a thing—be it eating or watching television or surfing the net or gambling—we insist that it is an addiction. Or, if the idea of an addiction seems out of place, then we find some other excusing explanation, such as we are temporarily insane or momentarily depressed or what have you. But God forbid that these freedoms should be taken away from us on the grounds that we are not responsible enough.

To state the obvious: Freedom without responsibility frees us from blame. In that sense, then, we are becoming more animal-like in society; for it is a conceptual truth that animals cannot be held morally accountable for their actions.

Freedom without responsibility is a recipe for disaster. This is because we cannot continually take the adult members of society seriously if we see that they continually disavowal responsibility for their actions.

There's plenty more where that came from so check it out.

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