Why should free exercise of religion be defended? Not because people can make wrongs right just by thinking that they are right, or because religious folk would like indulgence for private eccentricities, or because they would like exemptions from reasonable demands grounded in the common good.
Something you will never see at a Catholic church: A marquee urging passing motorists, “Come for the latte, stay for the worship.”
Something you will never see at a Protestant church: A website at which the list of pastoral staff gives not the name of the current pastor, not the name of his predecessor, but the name of the one before that.
“‘There's a young student at this university,’ says [British neurologist John] Lorber, ‘who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.’ The student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had a slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. ‘When we did a brain scan on him,’ Lorber recalls, ‘we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a
To continue yesterday’s discussion: Are there in fact implicit norms to which the codes of particular cultures are better or worse approximations? Judge Posner says “No.” Let's consider his first example, murder. Posner claims that the prohibition of murder is a mere tautology – that killing is wrong when killing is wrong – so that essentially it says nothing. But is this correct?
The arguments of Richard Swinburne seem to be well known (and well debated) among professional philosophers of religion, but little known outside their ranks.
Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony: “[T]hose who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe any others when they say they do -- again, in the absence of deceit or deception. If we could not in general trust what other people say about their experiences without checking them out in some way, our knowledge of history or geography or science would be almost non-existent.”
Harvard anthropologist David Pilbeam, reviewing a book about human origins: “My reservations concern not so much this book but the whole subject and methodology of paleoanthropology. But introductory books – or book reviews – are hardly the place to argue that perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark; that our data base is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories. Rather, the theories are more statements about us and ideology than about the past. Paleoanthropology reveals more about how humans vie
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.” -- Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition
So far I’ve agreed with Bishop McElroy that the distinction between principles and prudential judgments should be consistently applied to both social evils and intrinsically evil acts, but I’ve suggested that he is not consistently following his own advice.