Humanities & Culture
Spirituality and FaithBy Aaron
3 weeks ago
Greetings.
Jewish date: 9 ’Adhar 5770 (Parashath Teṣawweh).
Today’s holiday: Feast of Polycarp (Roman Catholicism).
Worthy cause of the day: “Demerit Walmart”.
Topic 1: Caprica, in its latest episode, “Gravedancing”, continues throwing us scraps of theology, and the scraps are not all that appealing. Once again we encounter the cliché of “polytheism good, monotheism bad”, specifically in the form of statements made by a comedian/talk show host who claims that God is a “moral dictator” and a “big destructo-god in the sky”. These are cliché insults. The former is a complaint about the notion of a deity holding us to a moral standard. The alternative would be what? That we can do whatever we want? That we should be allowed to do whatever we want? The comedian is clearly not a moral nihilist; he opposes the “anything goes” attitude of the virtual world |
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Humanities & CultureSpirituality and FaithBy Aaron
3 weeks ago
Greetings.
Jewish date: 7 ’Adhar 5770 (Parashath Teṣawweh).
Today’s holidays: Anniversary of the death of Mosheh Rabbenu (Judaism), First Sunday of Lent (Roman Catholicism).
Worthy cause of the day:
Topic 1: “The chilling effect of 'lawfare' litigation” by Alan Dershowitz and Elizabeth Samson. This article deals with abuse of the law by Muslims to silence critics of Islam (“lawfare”). The idea is not to win cases per se; rather, the point is to force critics to pay so much in court costs that effectively criticizing Islam is too costly for them to afford. [Enter justified insult mode now.] This is a technique of people who do not wish to play fair. Rather than trying to prove to anyone else that their ideas are true, they try to silence the competition. In effect, the would-be silencers admit that their ideas are without merit, because if they had any good defense to the criticisms, they would use that rather than the dishonorable technique of frivolous |
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