Evasion Central, Alaskan Headquarters

I did not have earmark relations with that bridge, to nowhere.

See this Youtube video. I'm sorry, but this doesn't pass the smell test.

On truthfulness in the campaign

From the New York Times article on McCain and the truthfulness of his campaign.

Mr. Obama’s hands have not always been clean in this regard. He was called out earlier for saying, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain supported a “hundred-year war” in Iraq after Mr. McCain said in January that he would be fine with a hypothetical 100-year American presence in Iraq, as long as Americans were not being injured or killed there.

More recently, Mr. Obama has been criticized for advertisements that have distorted Mr. McCain’s record on schools financing and incorrectly accused him of not supporting loan guarantees for the auto industry — a hot topic in Michigan. He has also taken Mr. McCain’s repeated comments that American economy is “fundamentally sound” out of context, leaving out the fact that Mr. McCain almost always adds at the same time that he understands that times are tough and “people are hurting.”

And not being truthful is a problem for either side. Should we demand that candidates raise the standard of truthfulness, not lower it?

A (very) basic account of knowledge

The traditional concept of knowledge is a justified true belief.

Let's take an example. Suppose the Cubs win the World Series this year. A lot of fans are going to come out and say that they knew at the beginning of the season this would be the year the Cubs win the series.

First, the Cubs have to win the series in order for someone to know that the Cubs won the series. If the Angels win the series, no one can know that the Cubs won it.

Second, the person has to believe it. So someone who says he knew the Cubs would win would have to believe that the Cubs would win. Someone who was picking the Diamondbacks would not qualify as someone who knew that the Cubs would win.

Third, a person has to be justified in believing it. So the mere fact that one is a die-hard, incurably optimistic Cubs fan, who have predicted victory for the last 70 seasons would not qualify as someone who knew that the Cubs would win the series.

Some philosophers have posed problems with this definition (google the word Gettier if you want to know about that) but this is a fair enough rough idea of what knowledge is.

And now for something completely different, a ticket I could really support!

Too bad they're constitutionally ineligible.

Does Lying Matter?

"I said thanks, but no thanks, to the bridge to nowhere."

Does anyone really care that this statement is exceedingly misleading at best and a bald-faced lie at worst. I think the latter is closer to the mark.

But does this matter? Should we care? Now telling me all the lies you think the Obamacrats might have told doesn't answer the question. That just gives us more lies to either care, or not care about.

Did it matter when Clinton lied? Should we give up on expecting our candidates to be truthful?

Jewish rejection of Original Sin

Original sin and inherited guilt

Does it make sense to say that we inherit guilt from our ancestors, recent or remote? It makes sense that you can inherit money from Mom and Dad. Guilt? I would admit that that is harder to see.

Christian Atheism?

Thomas J. J. Altizer's book The Gospel of Christian Atheism is online.

Some important distinctions in response to Christian Reconstructinoism

This is a Huffington Post piece by Chip Berlet.

This is the Wikipedia entry on Christian Reconstructionism

This is a description of Christian reconstructionism from Wikipedia. It looks pretty scary to me, not perfectly normal, as Ilion seems to suggest.

Why a Fellow POW won't vote for McCain

Rebuttals to anti-Palin claims

To be fair, this is a rebuttal page to the anti-Palin rumors that have gotten about. It will take some effort to sort out all the facts on this sort of thing.

Is Palin a Christian Reconstructionist

I've been reading Daily Kos stuff, which is, after all Daily Kos, and so they often aren't very good at distinguishing various strands of what has come to be known as the Religious Right. In their minds, Campus Crusade, and James Dobson, and ID, and Christian Reconstructionism all smush together, and that really weakens their case when they talk about this sort of thing. There may be bones to pick with all of them, but they are different entities.

However, this Christian Reconstructionist is praying for McCain to die so Palin can run the country. Wow. I have the suspicion that defending herself against the charge of right-wing Christian extremism will probably be the most critical challenge for candidate Palin.

Pro-Life, Soft Pro-choice, and saving real babies

I think Clayton makes a legitimate point. Let's think about what it will take to outlaw abortion. First, we have to add a justice to the court with just the right legal philosophy to seriously consider overturning a 35-year-old precent like that one. Now you can't ask potential justices how they will rule on cases, so you have to go by overall legal philosophy. This has all sorts of implications about how the Constitution will be applied to many cases which have nothing to do with abortion. OK, so Roe finally gets overturned. Then I take it whatever laws were in place back in 1973 would go back in force, but then I seriously doubt that many states will go for a blanket ban on abortion. So how many real babies will it save. As many babies as would be saved by, let's say, health care reform? We have two parties, the majority of one says they don't like abortion and want it outlawed, and the other side says they want it to be safe legal and rare. But it is not rare. Most pro-choice people seem to me to be what I would call "soft pro-choice," they think abortion a moral tragedy, one they would like to see as little of as possible. It looks as if the soft pro-choicers and the pro-lifers could team up to work on making abortion as rare as possible. I can't help thinking that interest in appearing ideologically pure to their "base," on both sides of the aisle, is keeping the abortion rate higher than it would otherwise be.

Barack Obama Campaign on Community Organizers

In watching the convention speeches last night I was struck by the ridicule that was given to Obama's experience as a community organizer. I think the attack was seriously misguided. This is from a response by David Plouffe of the Obama campaign.

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.

Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies. And it's no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.

Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America's promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women's suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it's happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.

How would you explain sin to someone who had no idea what it means?

Suppose you were explaining all of this to someone who didn't know what sin is. You had to explain sin to them because they just didn't know what you were talking about when you used the word. How would you explain it to them?

It's a little like this when we are having religions of the world explained to us, religions of which we are not a part. In the Buddhist religion they have a conception of dukkha. It's translated "suffering" into English, but Buddhists tell me that that simple transliteration doesn't capture the meaning completely.

I suspect Buddhists react the same way when Christian talk about sin. How would you make the idea clear to them?

Limbaugh and Hannity on the Palin choice

Rush Limbaugh said that McCain's choice of Sarah Palin shows him to be a true maverick. That is just before he made the ludicrously sexist comment "We got the babe on our ticket." (So much for shattering any glass ceilings.) Sean Hannity interviews Karl Rove as the "architect" of the Palin selection. Both can't be right. Rove is the Republican party establisment, tied to George W. Bush. Doing what Rove wants is precisely not to be a maverick in today's Republican party. It is kowtowing to the "architect" of the dirty anti-McCain attacks that derailed his own bid for the Presidency in 2000.

If Palin was Rove's choice, then this shows that McCain is under the thumb of the Bush-Cheney wing of the party. His maverick status is forfeited.

Nor would the ascendancy of Palin to the Vice-Presidency shatter any glass ceilings. Palin didn't get the votes necessary to be nominated, the way Hillary Clinton nearly did. She got hand-picked by the Republican establishment. The Vice-President has as much of a job as the president permits him or her to have. John Garner, FDR's VP, said that job was worth a cup of warm spit. Only he didn't say spit, he said something else.

Comparing Palin's qualifications to Obama's is also absurd, at least at this point. Obama has executed a primary campaign, taken on formidable opponents within his own party, won the support of the Clintons for his general election campaign, and developed policy positions on the issues facing the President. He has also selected a running-mate. So we've seen him in action making presidential-type decisions.

In the coming weeks we shall see if Palin is capable of developing policy positions on the major issues of our time. Obama has chosen Biden, someone who is not only capable of assuming the presidency should Obama's heart stop beating, but someone capable of posing tough questions concerning the President's policies. Someone who will not be a rubber-stamp and a yes-man. The ability to choose people is the best sign of qualification for the presidency.

Palin may prove me wrong. She may prove that she is able to think seriously and independently about national issues. But I think the chances of the are about the chances of my mastering the nuances of string theory in the next week or so.

Doctor Logic's Humean Objection

You can also criticize the argument by maintaining, in a broadly Humean way, that the claim that Jesus is God is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Hence if you have some evidence that Jesus claimed to be God, and that Jesus possessed the character of a great moral teacher, and that it is highly improbable that Jesus could have had the character of a great moral teacher while at the same time falsely claiming to be God, you still can't get to the conclusion that Jesus was God if the claim that Jesus is God is so antecedently improbable that the evidence for the other propostions can't get the claim anywhere near probability .5. I can lay this all out with Bayes'theorem:

p (h/e) (The consequent probability of the claim Jesus is God after the evidence concerning Jesus' claim to be God and his being a great moral teacher is considered) = P (h) (the antecedent probability that Jesus is God) X P (e/h), (how probable the evidence would be if Jesus were God) over P (e) (how probable the evidence would be whether or not Jesus is God.

Doctor Logic's claim is that the claim "Jesus is God" is so antecedently improbable that the even if historical evidence provides some confirmation of the claim, and if all the naturalistic scenarios have plausibility problems, the argument still fails.

I addressed this issue in my essay replying to Hume on miracles, and C. S. Lewis addressed in in chapter 13 of Miracles. I link to my own essay here.

Does Scripture Support the Right to Life?

J. P. Holding says that it does, and that pro-chioce interpretations are unreasonable.

Now I've seen everything

Here's something I expected to see about the time hell freezes over. A Republican commercial extolling one of the Clintons because she "told the truth." Politics makes strange bedfellows!