She Was Born With the Gift of Laughter

A Beach, A Cool Breeze, and a Babe --- Nothing Better

A Ghostly Armada Approaches

Reasoning and Evolution

     A high school student once asked me about the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning, and I explained that the second consists of going from particulars (this particular footprint), to the general (generally, when you see footprints they have been caused by someone walking).  Syllogistic reasoning, the kind of reasoning which this illustrates, is basic.  Why do most people seem unable to engage in it?  Reasoning is an acquired process.  It is one of several ways of knowing things through the five senses or by memory.  It is either taught in school or by parents or by experience.  You may learn it through the press of necessity.  A battlefield soldier learns to reason because his life, and the lives of his friends, depends on it.  As a lawyer, I learned that if you can't reason you lose cases.

     Here is an example of the failure of reasoning, because both sides are guilty of it.  I mean Darwin's Theory of Evolution (including certain variations of it.  The Evolutionists and the Creationists scream at each other that they are right and the other side is wrong while neither one ever really knows what the Theory is, usually, or that before you can argue anything you must know what your premise is.  if you are a biologists with all the necessary academic credentials you can argue science.  But few people are in that position.  About as far as most people can go is to pose questions which have not, so far as they can tell, been answered.  It isn't that there are no answers, but if there are, what are they?  For example, if an unassisted process of mutation and natural selection is the sole cause for man's existence in his present state, why did nature have to get so complicated?  The simple botulism has been around longer than man and did not, to survive, require eyes, with their lens, cornea, retina, optic nerve, and brain just to mention the requirements for sight?  And we could go through equally complex systems, such as the reproductive system.  Why wasn't Nature content with the lowly botulism which survived without all that?

     I do not mean to suggest that there is no answer to that and many other questions.  But what is   wrong with asking the question and why does that provoke insulting and sometimes hysterical reponses?  Why are only "fundamentalist nut cases" accused of holding Creationist views?  And where is the vaunted "missing link" that Evolutionists are so fond of?  They once came up with a skull called the "Piltdown Man", which made them so happy until it proved to be a fraud.  Otherwise, they have struck out.  Search the world over; you probably won't find a "missing link" or, if you do, the ball will be in the Creationist's court on that issue.

     But here is the denouement.  What the parties to this hypothetical argument are really debating is whether there is a God who created the Universe, including man.  It is in fact a religious argument, typically engaged in by people who do not know the first thing about the science implicit in the question, if there even is any science.  So why don't they face the real question?  Because there is some silly social taboo against discussing religion and politics in polite society, even though they are two subjects very much worth discussing.

 

Are these lovely creatures related to apes? I may be, and you may be, but not these babes.

What government should do but doesn't

    The federal government pokes its nose into all things which are none of its business, such as worrying about whether you are too fat, and ignores the very things it should be concerned with.  For example every single developed nation in the world regards safe and comfortable passenger rail travel as one of the signs of a great civilization.  The USA is one of the few, if not the only, developed industrialized countries which practically ignores this even though the Constitution specifically makes interstate commerce one domestic responsibility with which the government is expressly charged.  All good passenger rail systems require subsidies.  Not one in the world is paid for entirely by passengers.  Now, with that in mind, try to get a train from St. Louis to Miami or Indianapolis to Houston.  Where rail does exist the roadbeds are dangerous and the tracks and railroad bridges are rotting away.  Yet you can travel all over Western Europe, Japan and China by rail and enjoy every minute of the trip (except for some trains in France where some cars do not have automatic door openers).

      More to the point.  We are pro-life.  Yet there is a crying need for assistance for teenage girls, sometimes victims of rape or incest and in some cases caught in the bind of violent alcoholic parents, no money, no friends, no place to go and then told to go to term by some pompous busybody who thinks he's an agent for the Lord and will never have to worry about having a baby himself.  We need safe houses, protection, counseling, etc.  This is one thing the government should do.  But the "conservatives" would rather pontificate to get the credit for being righteous and the liberals (and to be honest, a lot of "conservatives") really don't give a damn about anything but reelection so we get nothing but free contraceptives as the answer.  (I am for contraceptives, but that's the only answer that the holier-than-thou types ever offer.  They would rather have abortions, the more the better).  So we get nothing.  For all of the "caring" and Kumbayah bull shit in Washington, help for Saudi Arabia, crocodile tears for misunderstood terrorists, Obamacare and all the other nonsensical "solutions" to non-existing problems, the American girl has to shift for herself while being bombarded with lectures about moral behaviour.  As St. Paul wrote 2000 years ago "The good that I would I do not.  The evil that I would not, that I do". 

                                                                             

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Is the United States a Christian Nation?

Is the United States a Christian Nation?

     The United States is a Christian nation.   This is not to say that Americans have any official church with powers of taxation or coercion fixed by law as some nations do or have in the past.  No one wants that and any claim that anyone does is a red herring designed to obscure the real issue.  It simply means that America was founded by Christians for Christian purposes and  principles.  Americans are always free peacefully to practice any religion or no religion, as the First Amendment makes clear, but the right of the people as a whole to honor God through speeches, monuments, plaques on and within public buildings, and the voluntary practice of prayer in public schools or at public events is inherent in the "free exercise" of religion, understood from the beginning to apply to the people individually and collectively.  When George Washington declared the first Thanksgiving on October 3, 1789 he stated:  "Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God . . . we may . . . unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations".  The anti-Christian bigots notwithstanding, that is the core of America's purpose in the world.