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.

How do you create fewer terrorists? Give them something to live for....

This is one of those articles I stumble across now and again that just sort of hits me at the right time. Maybe it's crazy, but I can't help thinking of the vast number of terrorists that the U.S. has created since Operation Iraqi Liberation and, well, maybe we oughta start thinking about how to slow production...

On the importance of the suggested changes to the Voting Rights Act...

The GOP is getting ready to eliminate the VRA in anticipation of the 2008 elections. Having learned a lesson or two from the fradulant challenges they made in the 2004 elections, the GOP is positioning itself to continue those illegal tactics by getting rid of the Voting Rights Act. While southern states have some reason to feel picked on by the law, the answer isn't to abolish the act but to provide the same protections to voters in all states. Greg Palast, who covered the 2004 elections for the BBC and did a solid job of digging into the nuts and bolts of what happened, has a great piece on this and what it will portends for the next major election.

RFK Jr's Rolling Stone article on the 2004 election

I've been trying desperately to put this election behind me, but can't get the cliché about "those forgetting history are doomed to repeat it" out of my head. I'm not a hardcore conspiracy theorist, but I'm thinking that you don't really need to be to have a high level of confidence that there was an unprecedented amount of shenanigans going on during the 2004 presidential election, and that the guy who really lost still lives on Pennsylvania Avenue. RFK Jr's article does a nice job of putting the whole enchilada on the table to see...