Science and faith... The search for perspective

My dad was in town last week, which was a good thing :)

We started having a conversation on reason and faith, and my old man seems to steer further and further away from ideas of faith the older he gets. In my experience, faith, like science, is generally agnostic and it is the intentional manipulation that both are vulnerable to by those wanting to take some advantage. Now the idea of agnostic faith may seem strange, but there is some significant literature that suggests that many of the founders of the United States were in fact Deists. I believe that science will ultimately fail to answer questions concerning "soul", "mind" or "consciousness" in any meaningful way, but I've been wrong a time or two before. My point is that it is the search for the meaning of those terms that have driven many of our most cherished philosophical endeavors. In any event, I turned to Bill Moyers for a little help on this one in a series he did for PBS titled "On Faith and Reason"

The voice of conservative reason...

The unreserved, orgiastic love of authoritarianism that drools from the poorly educated lips of the "new" right talking heads (O'Reilly, Coulter, et al.) who have forgotten the faces of their fathers is sometimes all we think of when we think "conservatives" these days. But there was a time when conservatives actually had real philosophies, ones that could be argued and debated and respected, even in disagreement. John Dean's new book is a vivid reminder that real conservatives aren't dead, and that's not a bad thing at all. I'm sure this will earn him loads of love from the goosestepping Zeitright...

A little reason from the Deans...

In the wake of some unprecendented and truly vicious right-wing attacks against the NY Times, Dean's at several of the United States' most renowned Journalism schools did a nice j-o-b of putting the matter of what needs protection in it's proper place... read on

I latched onto this from Chris Hutchinson's Salon article, which caries the question of "prior restraint" a little further...

Just plain funny - The Bush Pilot

What many have suspected about GW turns out to be true... memories of Men In Black.