thoughts on life and liberty

You can be an atheist and you can be a sadomasochist.  You can be an atheist and a psychopath.  You can be an atheist and be fascist.  To be a communist, you practically have to be an atheist.  It doesn’t commit you to anything.  But it certainly does not commit you to the absurd belief that if you don’t have a supernatural belief you have no morals.  ~ Christopher Hitchens

If you have not yet seen the film Collision, I highly recommend it.  In it Christopher Hitchens takes on Christian apologist Douglas Wilson in a series of lively debates on the validity and value of Christian theism.  Hitchens’ trademark rhetorical style is on full display and does not fail to entertain even as it instructs.  Again and again Hitchens levels devastating blows to Christianity’s reputation as he makes the case that not only is Christianity untrue, but that it is a “wicked cult”.  The inconsistencies inherent in Christianity are serious problems that Christians must make sense of in order to convince thinking people to embrace their system, and Hitchens makes this painfully clear.

At the same time, Wilson puts Hitchens on the defensive repeatedly on one critical point:
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…you really need to cut out the asinine bickering.  Neither of you are getting anywhere.

Take a look at this.

Extraterrestrial Life

Life on other planets—does it exist?  We want to know.  Why?  Perhaps we suspect that life on this planet is ultimately doomed and so we hope that the opportunity for life exists elsewhere.  Is it that we simply find life fascinating, and any new exotic form tickles our wonder?  Is it because we are looking for a greater intelligence from which we may learn?  Are we seeking new friends?
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Being an American means recognizing that America is primarily an idea, not a plot of land, and not an order of authority and rule.

Being an American does not imply collective identity.

Being an American is not about national pride.

Being an American does not mean the inheritance of, or the obligation to adhere to, any particular culture.

Being an American does not mean particular privilege.
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There is a flavor of political activism for every belief, background, or personal preference. We have them for gays, Christians, atheists, gun lovers, Jews, gun haters, women, Muslims, homeschoolers, public school teachers, children, families, poor people, businesspeople, environmentalists, etc.

Almost all of these movements arose out of a condition of encroachment, oppression, or violence. This means that most of these groups began with an excellent cause and were justified in their advocacy. The problem is that most of these niche movements will continue to exist and operate long after they have achieved justice and fairness. The reason is that these advocacy groups were never founded on any kind of a rational principle, rather they were founded on the basis of self-interest—a group of people were not happy with the way things were working out for them. But self-interest is no ethical principle at all. Unrestrained self-interest is the lack of ethical principle. At first this seems obvious, but it gets fuzzy when self-interest and ethical principle happen to overlap.
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There is no denying that the Occupy Wall Street movement is a powerful
phenomenon. There is also no denying that they have some legitimate
grievances.

If I had a chance, I would like to communicate to members of OWS that
the Federal Reserve is easily the most dangerous part of the 1%. The
Reserve’s policy of creating money devalues the savings accounts of
the 99% and encourages debt. It encourages conspicuous, wasteful
consumerism. The cheap credit credited by new money benefits the 1%
at the expense of the 99%.

The slideshow explains it best:

http://www.matt.com/SlideShow/

An entertaining illustration of the irrationality of collectivist thinking.

The United Nations is considering a proposal that would grant the Earth rights similar to those of humans.

What is a right?  Where does it come from?  Perhaps Merriam-Webster can help:

• right: something to which one has a just claim (So what makes a claim just?)
• just: acting or being in conformity with what is morally upright or good (What is moral?)
• moral: conforming to a standard of right behavior (What is right?  Oh crap.  That’s where we started.  And where do we get this “standard” from?)

Useless.

If you’re a theist, and you believe that God has revealed to us rights and wrongs, it’s simple; God grants and ultimately enforces those rights.

What if you don’t believe in God?
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Charles Davis suggests that they should.  He says that Ron Paul…

…would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There’d be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn’t be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Davis notes the leftist’s readiness to abandon principle, as long as that principle is defiled by their own man:

Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged…liberals, especially the pundit class, don’t much care about dead foreigners. They’re a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama’s re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they’ll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean ‘ol Rethuglican.

We are so consumed with fighting for our side that we are apathetic when our own party abandons our core principles.  This touches on a post I made a while back on the danger of the us vs. them mentality.

You don’t get cosmic moral credit by association. If you believe that something “ought to be done” about any issue, it isn’t enough to merely associate with a particular church, organization, or political party. T-shirts and bumper stickers (and even blog posts) don’t change the world. The only measure of how much a person cares is how much they do.