In May the benign-sounding Anti-Semitism Awareness Act appeared before the U.S Congress “to provide for consideration a definition of anti-Semitism for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities.” No big deal? Let us see. S. 2940 is sponsored by Republican Sen. Tim Scott and has four co-sponsors: Republican Lindsey Graham and…
Tag: faith
The Danger of Discipline without Direction
The value of finishing a task is relative to what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If finishing a task makes you a better human being and you genuinely believe that it’s the right choice for you, then you should finish what you started even it’s uncomfortable. If sticking with a task robs you of your time, your money, your health, your joy, or anything else that really matters to you, then it’s self-defeating to keep going merely for the sake of proving to others that you’re a disciplined person.
What’s Next?
When our sense of possibility is diminished, we compensate by placing blind faith in our negative assumptions or by convincing ourselves that we need to make positive ones. Instead of placing blind faith in your negative assumptions or forcing yourself to believe positive assumptions, try making zero assumptions.
Helsinki: How About a Fresh START?
Nuclear weapons are weapons of terror and of Mutual Assured Destruction. They’re not militarily useful outside those two ways of thinking. It’s time for the two countries with the largest stockpiles of such weapons to move together toward decommissioning and destroying those stockpiles. We may never again live in a world without nuclear weapons, but we can aspire to a world with as few of them as possible.
The Cost of Dependency
Instead of dropping the taxi business and its precious “medallions” like a rotting gopher, the drivers are killing themselves. Can they not imagine a way of life without their expensive government monopoly? If liberty is killing the taxi monopoly, as they claim, why not adapt and start driving for one of the other options? Why demand a place on the sinking ship?
A “Red Flag” for Your Rights; Yes, They’re Coming for Your Guns
The latest scheme from the gun grabbers is called “red flag” laws and, unlike most their other schemes, even nominally conservative pundits and publications are getting on board with this attempt to disarm certain people. That’s the trick, you see, the classic divide-and-conquer strategy that has worked in so many other cases. They don’t want to take away your guns, oh no, they just want to take away that guy’s guns. He’s kind of weird, anyway, right?
Government Not Designed to Help
No government has ever protected life, liberty, or property when it meant scaling back its own power. Expecting government to do so is like hopping in your family SUV expecting to drive it to Alpha Centauri. That’s not what it was designed to do, and not in the realm of possibility, no matter how much you wish it were.
On Coming to Grips with the Nature of the State
That so many intellectuals talk about the state as if it were a sort of garden-party amusement, rather than the cold, merciless killing and plundering machine that it really is, now puzzles me. I don’t think the disconnect between the ivory-tower conceptions and the reality of the state springs so much from the philosophers and political scientists having prostituted themselves to the state as it springs from these thinkers’ not getting out more—or, barring actual first-hand involvement in the relevant realms, from their failure to learn more realistic history.
Government: The God of Statism
AronRa, a popular outspoken atelatheist, whose work (in general) I love, defines a religion as “a faith-based belief system, including the notion that some element of self, be it memories or consciousness …a soul, perhaps… continues beyond the death of the physical body; transcends and survives that…”. I see no mention of belief in a god being a requirement for something to be a religion. But, do they really not believe in a god?
An Atelatheist Exposes the Religion of Statism
Yes, belief in the State results in buildings being built, people molested due to “laws”, and other physical effects in the real world, but those are no more proof of the existence of the State than churches, inquisitions, martyrs, or charities are proof of the existence of God. People who believe something do things based on that belief. Such is the nature of belief. Beliefs have effects on the behavior of people who believe, even when the belief is in something imaginary.