The assertion has been put forth that I said I would never post here at TSZ again.

Alan Fox:

Welcome back, mung. Didn’t you say that you would never darken our door again? By your moral compass, don’t you have to call yourself a liar, now?

I’ve been searching for the post in which I made a statement that I would never post here again. I do recall being excessively miffed about something that petrushka wrote about me that I thought was egregiously false. Something about animals being meat puppets. But I haven’t yet been able to locate my response to that post.

What post is Alan is referring to?

Rupert Sheldrake obviously thinks so.  (I have no idea myself, but would be interested in comments on his piece by those who do.)

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A New Science of Life

The hypothesis of morphic resonance proposes that memory is inherent in nature. The laws of nature are more like habits. Each species has a collective memory on which all individuals draw and to which they contribute.

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Alan Fox:

Both Feser and Torley are both staunch Catholics, a religion that I find pretty objectionable (above all for it’s interference in private life and thought, the readiness of its leaders to tell others how to behave, oppression of women and minorities…).

Q1: Are these objections not all moral?

Q2: Are there other unlisted objections, and are they not also moral objections?

Q3: Is there any religion Alan Fox does not find objectionable?

Q4: Is there an objective basis for Alan’s objections?

I saw this photo at Jerry Coyne’s place a couple of days ago and laughed out loud.  It’s flippant, but the question actually deserves genuine, serious consideration.

To the theists reading this:  When you’re stranded on the throne, why doesn’t God poof a roll into existence for you? He’s surely powerful enough to do it, with less effort than it takes you to lift a finger, so what holds him back?

If your spouse, child, or even a roommate that you didn’t particularly like were in a similar predicament, you would surely be kind enough to rescue them by fetching a roll and placing it outside the bathroom door.  Why doesn’t God do the divine equivalent?

Is it for the same reason that he never restores the limbs of amputees?

People Talk ‘Brain-To-Brain’ For First Time Ever

In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.

I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.

My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.

After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.

I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.

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I was hoping some of you experts could tell me whether this article is any good.  Thanks in advance.

XXOXXOX

W

At UD StephenB stakes his claim:

Support the claim that one must always understand the context of a message in order to know that it is, indeed, a message.Describe a specific context, the absence of which would make it impossible to know if a meaningful message consisting of 100 characters was designed by an intelligent agent.

 

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I’m kind of busy, and negligent in posting here, but I simply couldn’t resist starting this discussion. We touched on it a while back, and it pushes a lot of my buttons. I think it lies behind most disagreements. (All disagreements on this site, because we assume honesty.)

Based on her work, and that of others, Tavris shows three ways that different people can present conflicting narratives of the same event—not because any of them are lying, but because they are presenting what she calls “honest false testimony.” That is, their views of what really happened aren’t made up, but are tinged by several factors that makes them believe they are telling the truth.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/08/07/carol-tavris-on-accusations-vs-skepticism/

I have been following Vincent’s spat with Edward Feser (A Catholic philosopher with some reactionary views – his blog) over whether Feser’s own “cosmological argument” has the merit Feser seems to think. Here’s Vincent’s latest post on the matter.

Not being able to post at Uncommon Descent, I thought I might catch up with Vincent at Feser’s blog but I seem to have worn out my welcome. In case anyone decides to pop in from Feser’s blog, I thought I’d offer this thread for discussion. And please regard it as an open thread. Nothing will be considered off-topic. Usual rules apply!

The debate regarding homosexuality reminds me of a larger issue. What do we mean by normality, and do we want everyone to be normal?

For example, some forms of deafness are inherited, and some deaf parents do not want their children “cured”. I do not know how homosexual parents feel about this. (There are gay parents. Some adopt children, and some marry and have children by conventional means.)

Not everyone who deviates from majority traits considers their variation to be a handicap. I come from a family where left-handedness is common. It causes some problems, the most notable of which is with using scissors. I wonder if parents would go for some simple and inexpensive intervention that would guarantee right-handedness. I also have color-blindness in the family, including a nephew who is totally color-blind. There are some benefits to these traits.

I thought it would be fun to make a list of such differences and toss around opinions about whether they are actually detrimental and whether people would readily adopt medical technology that normalized children.

It’s obviously controversial, but I hope we can play nice.