Yesterday, I posted an adaptation of a speech I gave at Yale and promised to use it as a lens on why some Christian metaphysics is a good match for my ethics. Here goes. Questions welcome. The first, and most obvious problem in the essay and in my views is that I have a pretty bad grounding for my virtue ethics. It's hard to explain why exactly it is important that people not desire to harm others rather than we just prevent them from harming others through law or other barriers … [Read more...]
Prep for a Case Study in Christian Thought
February 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment
When people read my "Testing the Truth-Telling Thing" post in my Chesterton series, the first question everyone asked was: Which ethical beliefs do you have that fit better into a Christian context? As luck would have it I recently gave a speech for my debating group that drew heavily on Christian ideas (even though I scrubbed them from the speech). The speech is up at the Huffington Post, and if you go check it out, I'll be back this afternoon to explain how most of the ideas I expressed … [Read more...]
Other Thoughts on Prayer
January 15, 2011 By 3 Comments
The pitch that prayer can change anyone's life, if you give it a try, is hard to rebut. The obvious objection, as is often the case with religious experiments, is that the definition of success and the length of time required for a valid trial are never time. But even ignoring that problem, the odds are already stacked in favor of religion. There's plenty of reason to think that prayer could be beneficial even if God did not exist. If prayer is a way of setting apart a part of … [Read more...]
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