Newly Debuted iPad
This is a slice of Apple’s home page, which shows the debut of the iPad. If you click on the image and open up the larger size, you’ll see it better.
Apple is billing its new play-work-gadget-tool as “magical.” The sad thing is that some MacHeads probably believe it.
I mean, come on. Magical. Really?
And revolutionary. Magical and revolutionary. Brilliant.
The Abrahamic religious tradition talks about God as a “Living God.”
For sake of this argument, we need not assume that God does exist or does not exist. So, let’s assume that God exists.
By strong induction, we can say that all living beings start to live at some discreet point in time.
We can point to no living being and show that it did not first start to live.
Life, as I refer to here, is biological life. Some other kind of life is not logically impossible, but any other type of life is merely speculative (even if this or that holy book tells you otherwise).
Let’s ignore death for this argument.
I think it is both common and fair to define God as eternal, including having no starting point in time (either existed before time, or time and God always existed prior to our spacetime — pick your poison).
Does our strong induction that any given living being started to live at some discreet time t therefore lead to the conclusion that God is not a living being? (more…)
I am not satisfied with President Obama’s first year, but I temper that with the idea that one year is not long enough to get everything done that a president would probably like to accomplish.
I hope that whatever health care reform comes out of this is smart and, more importantly, sustainable without burdening the middle class with more tax liability.
I do not think that the president has done enough to either disengage from the Middle East conflicts or to go all out and accomplish the goals there. It’s got to be one or the other — win or go home (whatever ‘win’ there means). I know the soldiers work their butts off there, but after so many years there, it is time to either eliminate the radicalized threats from the inside or get out and contain them from the outside. Maybe neither of those is possible.
I am disappointed that Mr. Obama has not closed down the ‘faith-based initiatives’ yet. Such blatant entanglement between church and state is unacceptable, and yet he is carrying on without any obvious deviation from his predecessor (though now I guess they’re called ‘faith-based and neighborhood initiatives’, or something of the sort).
I am displeased with the lack of openness in government, in opposition to what the president promised during his campaign. There are still too many secrets, too much rushing, too many hidden aspects to the federal government. I hope that Jim Webb of VA and others can convince the rest of the Democrats that the loss in Massachusetts means it’s time to slow down and open up the process.
I am happy with a few things, as well, like the way the economy is beginning to recover and Mr Obama’s clear and continuing message to the world that we are not a bunch of self-centered jerks over here and that we’re not a Christianist Nation, but of course it’s easier to be critical than praising when there’s so much to be critical about.
I recently watched a video on YouTube featuring William Lane Craig. His assertion was that the “new atheists” were rather not intellectually bright, and that they present no sophisticated philosophical arguments. The new atheists, he claims, are doing little more than rehashing arguments from the intellectual giants (my words) who were their predecessors, such as Bertrand Russell.
Presenting Russell’s arguments, for example, is hard not to do. The man, right or wrong, truly was an intellectual giant. A behemoth of a beast of a philosophical machine. You cannot, I think, blame the new atheists, such as Dawkins and Hitchens, for carrying on with Russell’s arguments, as far as they go. (more…)