A View from the Right Science, POLITICS, & Religion

Part 4: Three Ways to Argue Meanwhile, at the clinic… Client (Michael Palin): “Aha! If you’re arguing, I must have paid.” Mr. Barnard (John Cleese): “Not necessarily. I could be arguing in my spare time….” OK, if you aren’t a Monty Python fan (and I am only marginally) and you don’t understand the above quote, […]

Part 3: Logical Suicide and Staying on TRACK “Without good support, not only is it a ‘bad argument’, it’s merely opinion.”  — me Welcome back! (Or, just “Welcome!”, if this is the first part you read in this series.) So far, we’ve been learning some fundamental ideas in what is known as “informal logic”. We […]

OK, time to resume the discussion. As explained in Part 1, I left a comment in my Facebook status, saying that I approved of the RNC’s reaffirming its support for traditional marriage and against same-sex “marriage”. A libertarian friend then challenged the wisdom of this stance by Republicans, the audacity of evangelical Christians for speaking […]

The following Independence Day speech was made by President George W. Bush a decade ago at the United States Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, where he honored U.S troops and commemorated the 100th anniversary of flight. I considered editing it down a little, maybe taking out some of the introductory […]

I give up. I wasn’t gonna do it, but I caved under (imagined) pressure. I wanted to blog on something else this week, but with the recent SCOTUS rulings involving same-sex marriage, I felt sort of obligated to publish some commentary of my own. So, though I had intended to save this for a later […]

I just saw an article about fracking that reminded me of a conversation I had on Facebook a couple months ago. (Yes, another one….) A liberal friend of mind had shared the anti-fracking image below from New Yorkers Against Fracking. It expresses a concern that isn’t usually highlighted in anti-fracking posts & rants. (At least, […]

Part 2: Propositions and Logical Relationships “Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism….”  — Samuel Butler, iconoclastic Victorian author Despite what you […]

Part 1:  Firm Foundation “I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam.”  — Popeye, the sailorman Given the subjects that I usually read and write about on this blog, critical thinking really comes in handy. Not that I’m some great logician or anything. Far from it! But, over the last few years, […]

“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”  — Proverbs 27:17 (NIV) Previously, I introduced “Darryl” and his idea that “sin is ultimately a consequence of Creation… albeit, an unintended consequence.” In fact, in an effort to exculpate God from all responsibility for sin, he hypothesized that perhaps “God sovereignly created a ‘Law of […]

We often hear people speak of “unintended consequences”. It certainly comes up a lot in talks of politics & economics. But, the other day — OK, it was a few months ago — I heard the term used regarding quite a different topic. I was browsing a Facebook thread, in which a bunch of people […]