Xray

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Everything posted by Xray

  1. Xray
    The fallacy in your above argumentation is the wrong analogy. Since there exists (as opposed to smoking), no correlation between chocoate-eating and getting lung cancer, one could not "just as easily say that Ayn Rand ate chocolate, then got lung cancer".
  2. Xray
    We too are primates, sharing more than 95% of our genetic material with our chimp and bonobo 'cousins'. In that context, I'm not so much interested in disproving false premises based on religious tenets; my focus is on collecting 'evidence' suitable for building a secular ethics. Not to be misunderstood: I'm not an advocating a reductionist 'biologism'. But what is biologically hardwired cannot be disregarded if an ethical system is going to work. Aquiring a productive balance between our (often conflcting) biological impulses is among the challenges any ethics has to deal with. Which is often a tightrope walk. I don't envy those who sit in ethics commissions and have to struggle over decisions that have far-reaching consequences, like for example allowing doctors, under certain circumstances, to put a patient off life support, or in decisions concerning 'genetic engineering'. To get back to our 'animal cousins': if they too show forms of empathic behavior, imo it allows the inference that the capacity for feeling empathy is biologically hardwired in them as well as in us humans. Mirror neurons seem to play a crucial role.
  3. Xray
    J. Burns http://www.bloomberg...nd-debate-.html Imo the referendum was not on the long conservative fascination with Ayn Rand - those conservatives who have been fascinated for decades by Rand's advocacy of unregulated capitalism will stay fascinated by her ideas, I think. The result of the election has merely disproved their belief that using Rand's radical ideas in a political campaign would convince the majority of voters.
  4. Xray
    Your hobby horse is quite alive and kicking, I think.
  5. Xray
    From a customer review: If it is true that 'what we want to believe' trumps our objectivity, does this mean that the 'man as a rational being' premise would have to be corrected?
  6. Xray
    Thank you William for the info about de Waal's new book. What makes the case for the secular ethics advocated by de Waal so strong: it is supported by empirical research.
  7. Xray
    I think the 'magic' in the writing of ancient days was closely connected to which 'source' gave the message to the scribe; if the source was believed to be 'divine' (e. g. rulers/leaders that were worshiped as gods, or regarded as representing god on earth, or who were seen (like Moses) as coming in closest possible contact with their god (directly receiving his 'message') - written words of that kind certainly had a magic quality. But if for example another scribe's job was more mundane - like listing the food portions fed to the slaves building the pyramids - I don't think this kind of written language had an aura of magic to it.
  8. Xray
    From the article: Imo "an increasingly secularized America" no longer accepting the Bible as an authority on moral issues is an indicator that the realm of ethics is in the process of being set free from the shackles of religious dogma.
  9. Xray
    MSK's # 26 post lists some examples, like e. g. the information overload. But just think of how a "simple" click on the internet button can open the door to multiple complexities. For example, I recently tried to get some basic information via Wikipedia on "abiogenesis". I could not go on because my head was spinning alone from looking at this "basic" info in the long article: http://en.wikipedia....iki/Abiogenesis The examples you have provided above are more about the opposition 'drudgery' in former times vs. modern 'comfort'. But beneath the surface of our comfortable everyday-living, there lies lot of complexity, and it is this complexity which mostly does not fit a binary friend-foe picture of the world anymore. Take for example the raised awarenes of the circumstances in which people in other parts of the world have to live, and from which we might even 'profit'. If for example one buys a t-shirt which has "made in [a third word country]" on it, in all likelihood it has been been sewn together in a sweatshop, possibly even in one employing children. The first thought I had about 'carton of eggs' was 'I hope the eggs are from free-range chickens! ' A few decades agos, no one in my environment (including myself) bothered much about how domestic animals were being kept. Whereas today, one we can observe a continually rising awareness toward the well-being of animals. Here too, things are getting more complex in terms of many feeling a heightened responsibility toward those who can't help themseves. . And who bothered about issues like "sustainability" and the global environment back then?
  10. Xray
    It depends on what you understand by 'nature of reality'. Take the internet for example: it has created a new reality that didn't exist before: the possibility to directly exchange one's thoughts with people all over the world in a matter of seconds; it enables us to quickly find information that in former days would have taken a lot of time to dig up. I'm not sure what you mean by 'source' of human rights. Do you mean fundamental human needs that have provided the basis for declaring certain rights inalienable? True, but Jennifer Burns was specifically referring to the binary picture of the world Rand created in Atlas Shrugged.
  11. Xray
    Epistemologically speaking, we are all 'a-gnostic' because we cannot know whether or not a god exists. But as for the attitude of belief/non-belief in a god, I would not be surprised if most agnostics today lean more toward the non-believer side of the fence, the reason being that religious agnosticism often is a 'child of doubt'. Of doubt in the religious doctrine and dogma one has grown up with. At least that's where my own road to agnosticism began.
  12. Xray
    Why? Because the awareness of just how 'connected' we all are in our global village has substantially increased in recent years.
  13. Xray
    We might be standing at the threshold where binary, enemy/foe pictures don't work anymore because they don't cover the complexities of life in our contemporary society.
  14. Xray
    Happy birthday, Michael. Many happy returns of the day! Angela
  15. Xray
    I can't answer this because I wouldn't want to listen to any music when reading fiction.
  16. Xray
    From the article: http://www.bloomberg...nd-debate-.html "Among the many ironies of Ryan’s attraction to Rand is that “Atlas Shrugged” depicted politicians as among the worst moochers of them all, followed closely by their business allies." (Jennifer Burns) Another irony is that conservative Christian politicians who praise Rand's philosophy seem to blank out her pronounced atheism.
  17. Xray
    But isn't - regardless of how much one loathes state regulations and taxes - filing for Social Security and living off the government dole totally 'un-Galtish'?
  18. Xray
    I'm afraid my idea of 'game' is a bit different - seeing all these charts and lists makes my head spin and connotes "you've got to learn about a subject matter" to me, with the pleasure aspect in eating getting somehow lost. If I feel like eating e. g. a generous helping of crispy, greasy French fries, I give in to the craving and don't feel 'immoral' at all.
  19. Xray
    I had a certain sympathy for the villain Vandamm in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (due to my 'bias' for James Mason, one of my all-time favorite actors. )
  20. Xray
    Oh my God. Brant, what a horrible tragedy! My heart goes out to you and all others who witnessed it. So sorry about your poor friend. This is so heartbreaking.
  21. Xray
    I'd also be interested in the poster's own interpretation of this Jamesian novella. interesting coincidence: just two days ago, when sorting out/rearranging my books on the shelves, I held The Turn of the Screw in my hands (after an interval of many, many years - it must be about thirty years that I last read it). I recall leaning, back then, toward the interpretation that the governess imagined it all and that what she 'saw' were projections of what she had repressed in her psyche (I was very interested in psychonalysis at that time). But the fascination of the story lies in its ambiguousness. I'd like to read The Turn of the Screw again - we often perceive a work of literature differently when rereading it after many years, because our interpretation always also reflects what preccupies our mind. Today my focus would be less on psychoanalysis than on discussing the idea of 'truth' in fiction.
  22. Xray
    But doesn't Henry James belong to the literary period called "Realism"?
  23. Xray
    Peikoff thinks of Romney as a politician who [just as Obama] "will move us closer to dictatorship", but who [as opposed to Obama] "moves by groping through compromises". But isn't the recommendation to vote for a "non-entity" totally going against Objectivist premises?
  24. Xray
    Galt's speech plays such an important part in the novel that cutting it out in the film version would mean cutting out Rand's philosophical credo. But the speech is quite problematic in the architecture of the novel. It is so long and repetive that it comes across as a 'verbal atheroma' sticking out unevenly. In the movie as an audiovisual medium, the 'stlltedness' of the speech is likely to come across as quite odd.
  25. Xray

    Is this immoral?

    Xray replied to equinox's topic in 3 - Ethics

    Or about wearing surgical maks and rubber gloves. Just think of all those potentialy life-threatening viruses and bacteria ...!