My son and I continue to talk about equality and religion. My interest was always to know if our respect for one another, our giving value and importance to each individual life, if this stemmed from religious teachings, or from our very nature. I still tend to believe the latter. Now that same son has [...]
Archive for December 2008
Steven Pinker’s The Moral Instinct
December 19, 2008the limits of law, not the need for more of it
December 19, 2008In retrospect, the current Madoff story is about someone who was as perfectly suited to swindling as Horowitz was to playing piano. The violation of trust at the heart of that story — of trust by those with the greatest reason to trust — cries out for sympathy. It illustrates the limits of law, not [...]
The meaning of better
December 19, 2008Man will become better when you show him what he is like. (Anton Chekhov) Here is the complete passage from a Chekhov letter (1900?): “I will be reproved for writing only about mediocre events, for not having any positive heroes… We are leading a provincial life, the streets of our city are not even paved, [...]
We are all equal.
December 18, 2008Says who? Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Dinesh D’Souza, the author, “What’s So Great About Christianity,” says in a November Imprimis article that [...]
Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls
December 18, 2008“Shovel Ready”
December 18, 2008“the ocean is flat again”
December 17, 2008Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.(John Maynard Keynes, 1923)
Ray Chandler on the Pacific
December 9, 2008"Too much water. Too many drowned men."(Raymond Chandler)
