Monday, March 22, 2010

How Shall We Cherish Our Lives?

People who cherish their lives are egoists, and therefore normative and good and decent people. But where does the blessing come from? At one time, it came from Jefferson, Madison, and their cohorts who gave us the legal "blessing" to be ourselves and find the best way to honor our own lives and the lives of those we cherished.

Today, the Originalist readers of that wonderful document called the Constitution of the United States are harassed as being behind the times. The only "blessing" we get from the progressive thinkers is the blessing of higher taxes to pay for enlargement of government and in the process for the shrinking of our liberties.

The Founders believed that God had blessed the U.S. and given all mankind a place to peacefully find a place to pursue his or her own happiness. Now, if it was God, he has either forsaken the idea of a place to seek our own happiness; or he has condemned us for choosing leaders who routinely destroy the Tenth Amendment. [For Tenth Amendment references see A and B.]

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Saturday, March 13, 2010

On Earth There Is Nothing Great But Mind

I just read something I've heard before, written by William Hamilton: 
On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.
On earth there is nothing greater than man when man is at his greatest, and that is when he chooses to use his mind. But it is a choice. Our description as "the rational animal" doesn't mean we are infallibly rational. It means we have the capacity to reason unlimitedly. After all, by the rules of logic we know which deductions are fallacies, because they break the rules. But TV commercials use such fallacies to sell their wares and often they are upfront, blatant, about it, sometimes to prove a point, sometimes to make us laugh.

Shysters know the rules of logic and break every one they can get away with, so long as you believe them and don't know they have broken a rule of logic.

But even knowing all the rules we can sometimes make the mistake of missing one of them, or we become unwilling to do what is rational because it would hurt too bad. I think that most mothers who kill their children in post-partum depression know they are doing wrong; but the alternative of doing the rational thing, of giving up their kids, would hurt them unbearably so that they could not live with it.

Well, of course they could live with it if they were given immediate help, put on suicide watch, and coached back into the world of sanity. But moments of insanity are often only moments of refusing to live according to reason because it would cause insanity.

And yet, without mind, there is nothing greater in man than in any animal on earth. The mind helps others in their time of need, during earthquakes and typhoons and hurricanes; through the death of loved ones; with soup kitchens, food banks, and food stamps; and even going to war to save others from tyrants.


There is nothing on Earth that is worth having without mind, because to have known "mind" is to know all that is great in Man.







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Monday, March 1, 2010

Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing?



It's really simple, but not simple to always understand.

If "nothing" existed, then "something" would exist--namely, "nothing".

If "nothing" had no existence, by definition "existence" would have existence and anything that has "existence" absolutely exists. That would not be "nothing".

"Nothingness" cannot "exist". It also cannot not exist. If it did "not not exist", the double negative means something would exist, and it can't be "nothingness".

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©2008-2010 by Curtis Edward Clark and, Naturalist Academy Publishing, sm