D

Unseen wrote:
You seem to see malevolence as just an evolutionary thing and thus perfectly normal and thus maybe even good. Agree or disagree?

To see it as “normal” or “good” would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy: that natural things are good because they are natural.  Good or bad means to uphold or violate moral norms.  Malevolence v…[Read more]

@Davis,

What is defined as Christianity today is just a straw man fallacy and easy to refute. There are no miracles, no  true casting out of devils and cleansing of lepers, the true signs that follow them that believe. Emperor Constantine was a pagan and his parochial authority massacred the bearers of the truth under the guise of imposing…[Read more]

@Davis,
Unfortunately my comment to Unseen must apply to you too. And of course it is your prerogative not to read. But the  Silurian hypothesis is not my invention nor is there evidence that hoaxers planted objects in 22 feet of coal. Davis I have always perceived you as one of the more intelligent debaters, but your last comment appears…[Read more]

@Davis

The sort of ideas that find favor with @Enco is why Americans can’t have nice things like people in Europe. Healthcare with acceptable rates of good results, for example, and with virtually no possibility of a person or family being bankrupted due to one serious incident. Free education, sometimes with stipends as well, in contrast to the…[Read more]

@Davis

Thom Hartmann is a well-known and widely-respected journalist and author. Just go to ThomHartmann.com and you’ll find he’s a widely-respected author of many books. He does a weekday 3-hour webcast on Youtube, does podcasts, writes articles, and is the author of numerous books. Info on all of that is right there on the above link.

@Davis

I know all about black swan events. For years I made a decent living doing girlie photography and as time went by, I got pretty good at it self-taught. Then, suddenly, cheap digital cameras came along. I’m talking $350-$600. They took 2 or 3 megapixel photos, but that size was large enough for the customers I worked for. I was working with…[Read more]

@Davis – ….it just seems like “fairness” is a half-hearted concept in sports.

Any Olympian with a medal would say “I won my Olympic medal because I was ruthless in my pursuit of it”.  There might be less than once second between first place and last place in the 100M final. When Usain Bolt won his, who finished 4th in any of those races? I can’…[Read more]

@davis – there’s a lot of confusion in the literature over what psychopathy is.  Some people confuse it with narcissism, some with antisocial personality disorder.  The Abigail Marsh article goes into how psychopaths don’t feel or recognise fear.

This is from the first paper:

Moreover, recent imaging studies indicate that psychopathic i…

[Read more]

@Davis We have handed over many essential systems to technology so that they pretty much run on computer-managed autopilot. Electrical grids, water systems, sewage systems, a lot of air traffic control is computer-assisted. You can probably think of even more. There’s a lot of damage they can do “bolted to the floor.”

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
@davis – let’s give the theologians a break. Some of them are still working on the implications of cloning “Dolly the sheep”. I have often had conversations with theists on the ethics of creating “fronkeys” by genetically mixing the DNA of frogs and donkeys 🙂

Does it matter which one is the male and female? It…[Read more]

@Davis – let’s give the theologians a break. Some of them are still working on the implications of cloning “Dolly the sheep”. I have often had conversations with theists on the ethics of creating “fronkeys” by genetically mixing the DNA of frogs and donkeys 🙂

@Davis

I’vy that definition is so broad that even cats have free will. Do you think cats have free will?

I don’t know enough about cat brain anatomy to answer that question. I think they have a prefrontal cortex but it’s not like ours. I don’t know enough about cat brains to comment LOL