We all have wounds. I was certainly pissed off about mine for a very long time. Took me decades to process. I do have sympathy and empathy.

At some point, though, it is up to us to work through our pain and stop projecting it out onto others.

Isn't it? Our personal responsibility? That is a core moral value of mine. Personal responsibility.

@bobknight33
unsure if you are gloating that you uncovered some deep,dark secret,and are exposing some political conspiracy.

or are just re-iterating what i already posted.

for years i have seen you promote and tout the validity and necessity of the tea party for those who may be disgruntled with the mainstream republican party.

a party that started with modest means,but is now funded by some of the most wealthy and influential political players in our country:the koch bothers.

they even changed their name to the freedom caucus.
and they nominate candidates,and come out to support them.

so how is the tea party,which broke away from the establishment republicans to promote a politics that is more in line with the constitution,ANY different from the people who are sick and tired of corporate,establishment democrats? who ALSO have decided that enough is enough and have banded together to nominate their own candidates,and support those candidates to represent THEIR politics and ideological philosophies.

how,exactly,is that different?

because while you may disagree with justice democrats politically,and i suspect you do,you should also be proud that they are taking a stand and sticking up for their beliefs.

are you SO unaware of your own bias,prejudice and hyper-partisanship as to not recognize when a group of people are doing the EXACT same thing as your tea party did?

be careful bob,your bias and hypocrisy are showing.
and you are becoming a partisan hack,attacking any and everything that is contrary to your own politics,even when in reality it is performing the very same thing that you state to admire.

so what is more important to you?
honesty,integrity and sticking to your moral values?
or political affilliations?

because i can disagree with someones politics,and still admire and respect them standing up for their values.(that includes you bob).

i gather this is something you are incapable of doing,because in bob's world"politics trumps everything else,end of discussion.

if you want to sully your eyes a bit,check out what the justice democrats are seeking to do,and what their base philosophy is:
https://justicedemocrats.com/platform

*promote
*quality

how did this thread steer into climate change waters?
heh...god i love this site,and i love all you fuckers as well!

i don't really understand the rehashing of the election,trump is president.it is a done deal.

which is probably why i am struggling with the hillary diehards.politics is not a binary equation,so stop acting like it IS,and for the love of god stop with the condescension directed at people who did not vote YOUR way.ya'all are acting like we are your wayward dog who just took a giant dump on your carpet.

just LOOK at what you have done! LOOK at it! bad dog..baaaad dog.

@Stormsinger and @MilkmanDan were kind enough to share who they voted for,but they should not be put in a position to defend their vote.their vote,their choice and their right.

you may disagree,and that is fine,but to place all the blame on them,and their "like-minded compatriots" is arrogant,presumptuous and condescending.the reason hillary lost is not simply due to a few small holdouts.there are a myriad of reasons,and in my opinion,hillary should take most of the blame.

and what is this purity test @bareboards2 ?
do you mean a person standing by their principles?
remaining steadfast in their moral values?
showing us all that they would rather lose,than give up one ounce of integrity?

are you seriously criticizing people for holding to their own standards of morality and decency?

politics is not binary,there a many mitigating factors and political affilliation is only one aspect.

i have seen friends who voted for trump,and were extremely vocal about their support in the run up to election day,only to become eerily silent the further we got into trumps presidency.many of these people had voted for obama..TWICE..they wanted change.were desperate for change,and now they are finding out,that change may not be what they were expecting.

because the trump presidency is going to one helluva horror show,but there are also positives to consider.it is not a total loss.

i have the seen the very same people who have ridiculed and berated fundamentalist christians for being ideologically rigid,and philosophically immovable.turn around and express the exact same rigidity,and binary thought processes when it comes to their girl hillary clinton.

i was talking the other day with a man i highly respect and admire,who flippantly and casually called me a racist.
my crime?
i had the audacity to criticize obama.
which he doubled down and accused me of being sexist for not supporting hillary,and being critical of her as well.

how is this NOT ideological rigidity?
that to critically examine two prominent public figures automatically equates to:racism and sexism.

this is the metric that i see so many hillary supporters use when dealing with someone that they may disagree.this is a cheap,ill thought and ultimately WEAK counter to valid criticisms.

at what point do hillary supporters stop labeling other people the most vile of terms,simply because they did not step into line with THEIR thinking,and begin to examine the very REAL problems that both the hillary campaign,and the DNC,created for themselves?

or is everybody simply a racist and sexist?
that's it..no discussion.

this is akin to the fundamentalist christian labeling anybody who disagrees with their religion,or has brought up solid criticisms,as being an agent of satan.

" i do not like what you are saying about hillary,so therefore you must be a sexist".

the easiest,and most human,thing we do when faced with information and/or criticism that is in direct opposition to our long held beliefs.is to demonize the person making those claims,and therefore silence any further disruption to our own subjective belief system.

so when i talk about "insulated bubbles",and "echo chambers".that right there is what i am referring to,and it is dangerous.

i refuse to judge anybody on how they voted.they had their reasons,and i may even disagree with those reasons,but they have a right to their vote and who am i to judge them?

rehashing the election,or assigning blame based on ideological differences,accomplishes nothing.the REAL work starts now.trump is in office,and he is gearing up to be an unmitigated disaster.

so get involved.head to your next town hall meeting and speak your piece.start to connect with the political movements in your area and start to put pressure on your local representative.

i think we can all agree that trump is awful on so many levels,but to witness the american people become so politically engaged,so politically active,more active than they have been in decades.it really is inspiring,and all this is due to trump.

if hillary had won,would we see the same kind of newly energized,and politically active public?

i don't think so.

so let us stop with the rehashing.
stop with the blaming.
and get off our asses,step outside our own little,insulated echo chamber and start to engage.

don't know how to step outside your own bubble?
there is an app for that:
https://videosift.com/video/it-is-time-to-pop-your-social-media-echo-chamber-bubble

*oh,and even though i may have alluded to who i voted for.let me state clearly that i voted for hillary.i stick by my dislike of the "lesser of two evils" but come on...trump in the white house?

yeeesh....

@alcom

I hear you shinyblurry, but I feel that your argument meanders back to the original appeal to authority that most believers resort to when justifying their positions. I also find that the related video links provided by TheGenk provide a valid refutation of the idea that God is The One who put values of good and evil inside each of us.

There is always an appeal to authority, either to God or to men. There are either objective moral values which are imposed by God, or morality is relative and determined by men. If morality is relative then there is no good or evil, and what is considered good today may be evil tomorrow. If it isn't absolutely wrong to murder indiscriminately, for instance, then if enough people agreed that it was right, it would be. Yet, this does not cohere with reality because we all know that murdering indiscriminately is absolutely wrong. The true test of a worldview is its coherence to reality and atheism is incoherent with our experience, whereas Christian theism describes it perfectly.

If you feel the videos provide a valid refutation, could you articulate the argument that they are using so we can discuss them here?

In my mind, Zacharias' incoherence with the atheist's ability to love and live morally is influenced by his own understanding of the source of moral truth. Because he defines the origin of pure love as Jesus' sacrifice on behalf of mankind, it is unfathomable to him that love could be found as a result of human survival/selection based of traits of cooperation, peace and mutual benefits of our social structure. His logic is therefore coloured and his mind is closed to certain ideas and possibilities.

The idea of agape love is a Christian idea, and agape love is unconditional love. You do not get agape love out of natural selection because it is sacrificial and sacrificing your well being or your life has a very negative impact on your chance to survive and pass on your genes. However, Christ provided the perfect example of agape love by sacrificing His life not only for His friends and family, but for people who hate and despise Him. In the natural sense, since Jesus failed to pass on His genes His traits should be selected out of the gene pool. Christ demonstrated a higher love that transcends the worldly idea of love. Often when the world speaks of love, it is speaking of eros love, which is love based on physical attraction, or philial love, which is brotherly love. The world knows very little of agape love outside of Christ. Christ taught agape love as the universal duty of men towards God:

Luke 6:27 "But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
Luke 6:28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Luke 6:29 To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.
Luke 6:30 Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back.
Luke 6:31 And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
Luke 6:32 "If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
Luke 6:33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.
Luke 6:34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount.
Luke 6:35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.
Luke 6:36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

Indeed, moral foundations can and must change with the times. As our understanding of empathy, personal freedoms and the greater good of mankind develops with our societal and cultural evolution, so too must our standards of morality. This is most evident when concepts such as slavery and revenge (an eye for an eye) are seen as commonplace and acceptable throughout old scripture where modern society has evolved a greater understanding of the need for equality and basic human rights and policing and corrections as a measure of deterrence and rehabilitation for those individuals that stray from the path of greatest utility.

This is why slavery is no more, why racism is in decline and why eventually gay rights and green thought will be universal and our struggle to stifle the rights of gays and exploit the planet's resources to the point of our own self-extinction simply will be seen by future historians as sheer ignorance. Leviticus still pops up when people try to brand gays as deviant, even though most it is itself incoherent by today's standards. Remember that "defecating within the camp was unacceptable lest God step in it while walking in the evening." Well, today we just call that sewage management.

Some people, like Richard Dawkins, see infanticide as being the greatest utility. Some believe that to save the planet around 70 percent of the population must be exterminated. Green thought is to value the health of the planet above individual lives; to basically say that human lives are expendable to preserve the collective. This is why abortion is not questionable to many who hold these ideals; because human life isn't that valuable to them. I see many who have green thoughts contrast human beings to cattle or cockroaches. Utility is an insufficient moral standard because it is in the eye of the beholder.

In regards to the Levitical laws, those were given to the Jews and not the world, and for that time and place. God made a covenant with the Jewish people which they agreed to follow. The covenant God made with the world through Christ is different than the Mosaic law, and it makes those older laws irrelevant. If you would like to understand why God would give laws regarding slavery, or homosexuality, I can elucidate further.

In regards to your paraphrasing of Deuteronomy 23:13-14, this is really a classic example of how the scripture can be made to look like it is saying one thing, when it is actually saying something completely different. Did you read this scripture? It does not say that:

Deuteronomy 23:13 And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement.

Deuteronomy 23:14 Because the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.

Gods home on Earth was in the tabernacle, and because God dwelled with His people, He exorted them to keep the camp holy out of reverence for Him.

The rules that God gave for cleanliness were 2500 years ahead of their time:

"In the Bible greater stress was placed upon prevention of disease than was given to the treatment of bodily ailments, and in this no race of people, before or since, has left us such a wealth of LAWS RELATIVE TO HYGIENE AND SANITATION as the Hebrews. These important laws, coming down through the ages, are still used to a marked degree in every country in the world sufficiently enlightened to observe them. One has but to read the book of Leviticus carefully and thoughtfully to conclude that the admonitions of Moses contained therein are, in fact, the groundwork of most of today's sanitary laws. As one closes the book, he must, regardless of his spiritual leanings, feel that the wisdom therein expressed regarding the rules to protect health are superior to any which then existed in the world and that to this day they have been little improved upon" (Magic, Myth and Medicine, Atkinson, p. 20). Dr. D. T. Atkinson

What's interesting about that is that Moses was trained in the knowledge of the Egyptians, the most advanced civilization in the world at that time. Yet you will not find even a shred of it in the bible. Their understanding of medicine at that time led to them doing things like rubbing feces into wounds; ie, it was completely primitive in comparison to the commands that God gave to Moses about cleanliness. Moses didn't know about germs but God did.

Paedophilia will never emerge as acceptable because it violates our basic understanding of human rights and the acceptable age of sexual consent. I know this is a common warning about the "slippery slope of a Godless definition of morality," but it's really a red herring. Do you honestly think society would someday deem that it carries a benefit to society? I just can't see it happening.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_Ancient_Greece

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
Related

Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph.D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting “Hamlet” : “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.” A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. “I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,” he once told me. “It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul.”

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s “Final Exit” in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.

Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.

He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast. Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants.

My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. “And then she would have been all right.” It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more.

As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.

A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker.

Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and prestroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment.

My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual. According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would “rather die” than live permanently in a nursing home. In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state.

When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his trade­offs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with caregiving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes. One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax.

Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery. But my mother never consulted Fales. And the system would have effectively penalized him if she had. Medicare would have paid him a standard office-visit rate of $54 for what would undoubtedly have been a long meeting — and nothing for phone calls to work out a plan with Rogan and the surgeon.

Medicare has made minor improvements since then, and in the House version of the health care reform bill debated last year, much better payments for such conversations were included. But after the provision was distorted as reimbursement for “death panels,” it was dropped. In my father’s case, there was only a brief informed-consent process, covering the boilerplate risks of minor surgery, handled by the general surgeon.

I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions. Had we been at the Mayo Clinic — where doctors are salaried, medical records are electronically organized and care is coordinated by a single doctor — things might have turned out differently. But Middletown is part of the fee-for-service medical economy. Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.

And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later.

It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr. Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way.

Last year, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-equipment manufacturers and other medical professionals spent $545 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This may help explain why researchers estimate that 20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment. Why cost-containment received short shrift in health care reform. Why physicians like Fales net an average of $173,000 a year, while noninvasive cardiologists like Rogan net about $419,000.

The system rewarded nobody for saying “no” or even “wait” — not even my frugal, intelligent, Consumer-Reports-reading mother. Medicare and supplemental insurance covered almost every penny of my father’s pacemaker. My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.

And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent. Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits.

Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death.

The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell. At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living,” bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate.

In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house.

In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. “The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,” my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. “My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years.” His pacemaker kept on ticking.

When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year.

When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house. When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm. If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood.

If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia,” it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin. If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant.

On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When Medicare approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded. Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness.

Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown. In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended as “indicated” or mildly approved as “reasonable” for 56 heart conditions and “not indicated” for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm “reasonable” category.

The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Over all, only 5 percent of the positive recommendations were supported by research from multiple double-blind randomized studies, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. And 58 percent were based on no studies at all, only a “consensus of expert opinion.” Of the 17 cardiologists who wrote the 2008 guidelines, 11 received financing from cardiac-device makers or worked at institutions receiving it. Seven, due to the extent of their financial connections, were recused from voting on the guidelines they helped write.

This pattern — a paucity of scientific support and a plethora of industry connections — holds across almost all cardiac treatments, according to the cardiologist Pierluigi Tricoci of Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute. Last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Tricoci and his co-authors wrote that only 11 percent of 2,700 widely used cardiac-treatment guidelines were based on that gold standard. Most were based only on expert opinion.

Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, the authors warned, because “expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, speakers bureau [fees], consulting fees or research support from industry.” They called the current cardiac-research agenda “strongly influenced by industry’s natural desire to introduce new products.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I also discovered others puzzling over cardiologists who recommended pacemakers for relatives with advanced dementia. “78-year-old mother-in-law has dementia; severe short-term memory issues,” read an Internet post by “soninlaw” on Elderhope.com, a caregivers’ site, in 2007. “On a routine trip to her cardiologist, doctor decides she needs a pacemaker. . . . Anyone have a similar encounter?”

By the summer of 2007, my dad had forgotten the purpose of a dinner napkin and had to be coached to remove his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes. After a lifetime of promoting my father’s health, my mother reversed course. On a routine visit, she asked Rogan to deactivate the pacemaker. “It was hard,” she later told me. “I was doing for Jeff what I would have wanted Jeff to do for me.” Rogan soon made it clear he was morally opposed. “It would have been like putting a pillow over your father’s head,” he later told me.

Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. “I take responsibility for whatever,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine?”

Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact. I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, predementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a “life,” but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice.

Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things. We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical.

(Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values. In such cases, it continued, doctors “cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure.” This came, of course, too late for us.)

In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father. This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love.

Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone.

A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, “To ask questions.” She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost.

The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years. If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function.) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team. She would be revived if she collapsed. “If I have a stroke,” my mother said, nearly in tears, “I want you to let me go.” What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side?

I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me.

The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram. A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. “No,” she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. “I will not do it.”

She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. “I’m aching to garden,” she wrote in her journal. “But so it goes. ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT.”

Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather. She was continent and lucid to her end.

A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Katy Butler lives in Mill Valley, Calif., and teaches memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

What your analysis is missing is any kind of cultural context. These things don't just happen in a vacuum, and nor are all ideas created equal. In many cases you are just trading one type of chain for another. Yes, mass media certainly has the ability to create and shape the prevailing social norms, and this can inspire counter cultural movements within a society. That's what happened in the 1960s with the sexual revolution, which is a root cause for the sexual immorality we see in society today. But it didn't just happen because people 'gained more knowledge', it happened because there was already a fundamental shift in the cultural ethos. An idea does not begin to grow unless its seed lands on fertile ground. The social mores of this nation were always decidedly Christian, but were steadily eroding by the beginning of the 20th century (for various reasons). The deeper truth is that people rejected traditional morality because they wanted to be free to indulge their carnal desires without restriction. Transcendent moral values were being replaced with moral relativism, fueled by the notion that man was a higher primate and had no moral responsibilities to a creator, leaving people free to invent whatever style of living pleased them. It was only the world wars that temporarily reversed this trend and brought the nation back together under the banner of an American moral imperative. But the foundation, weakened as it was by radical liberal ideology, was thoroughly rotten. America snapped back like a rubber band, bursting open the flood gates during the 60's, and changing the cultural landscape forever. Now traditional values are viewed as archaic, a throwback to a bygone era, and it is the "new" thing which is touted as "enlightenment".

Yet, this new thing is simply what is old in different packaging. The behavior of human beings today isn't noticeably different from anything that hasn't been tried in countless failed civilizations in the past. The song remains the same, despite the shiny new backdrops. Bible prophecy predicts that knowledge will increase in the last times, but it mentions nothing about wisdom. The human condition hasn't changed; men are ruled by their passions, and no matter how much knowledge they gain, the same mistakes are repeated endlessly. Look at the world today and tell me that isn't true. If humans are learning anything it is something they've always known and loved; rebellion. This is certainly the age of self-glorification, but history will tell you that is nothing new either. You're right in that "the church", ie, the catholic religion, tried to impose (a caricature of) Christian morality on the masses, with horrific results. That is a nightmare any decent person should be awoken from. However, as it pertains to describing the essential human condition, it was entirely correct. Sin is increasing in the world, not decreasing. Human nature is inherently sinful.

Everyone has a different way of describing the problem. Most look to place the blame and hand wave everything on to a particular condition. They say it's because of overpopulation. They say it's because of religion (an atheist favorite). They say it's because of ignorance. They say it's because (insert your favorite reason here). The reality is, it's because human beings are corrupt sinners, and always will be corrupt sinners until the end of time; that's why Jesus Christ came. He came to restore us to right relationship with our Creator. Don't place your faith and trust in man, because man cannot save himself, and all men are headed for a day of judgment. As scripture predicts, there will be a one world government headed by the antichrist, a seven year tribulation where all the world will become deluded and follow after the beast. Those who refuse to love the truth will believe the lie that the antichrist will be selling. At the end of the tribulation, Jesus Christ will return as the Lord and judge of all the earth. No amount of knowledge will prepare for you that day; only a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

>> ^Sagemind:

In the past era, we hit a communications Boom.

This is typical Republican vs Democrat thinking. Repub look at averages and ignore the realities of the edges. Dems look at all the data and say -- you can't ignore the realities on the edges.

I'm sure that guy is right. Women in that demographic are making more, when you lump all those SINGLE women together. Parse it out, look at different industries, you will get a very different picture.

Hence the Fair Pay Act.

I don't say this as a complete dis to Republicans. It is their world view -- don't get caught up in the details. They honestly want to look at the overall picture.

If you like to think that way, then you will vote Repub. If you are more "fair-minded" -- a moral value that Dems value higher than Reps -- then you will want to legislate fairness.

To be clear, I am all for legislation. However, I also can stand some inequity in the world, more than some of my uber-progressive friends -- I don't think it is possible to legislate away all unfairness. We just will have to live with some.

Fair Pay Act seems like a good piece of legislation.

I think that our disagreement centers around our differing opinion of the utility of religion. In my opinion, these transcendental states you speak of are not in any way dependent on a religious belief. It is true that many beautiful things have been created within the confines of religious experience. But almost all of the most profound thoughts, intricately beautiful music and profound works of literature I can think of are all written or composed in absence of religious inspiration. Sure, this is certainly a matter of opinion, but I do not think there is any denying that atheists can create beauty in their lives just as I don't deny that the religious can. Which begs the question, is it necessary? Sure many people have found inspiration in religion, however the ecstasies you speak of can just as easily be created by the biochemical effects of substances or - perhaps more healthily - the close ties of relationships or the beauty of nature.

So seeing as how beauty is not exclusively inspired by religion, I prefer my art to be entirely reality-based. And I think it's better that way. To me, knowing that that painting I am looking at, the music I am hearing or the book that I am reading has a long lineage of innovation and creativity traceable through the efforts of countless individual minds throughout time is far more interesting to me than the simple notion that someone contemplated an extremely ambiguous and enigmatic all powerful being and decided to write something about it.

Again, this is all a matter of opinion, but my point is that religion is not necessary for this transcendentalist beauty.

Which brings me to the video. I agree with you that religion is diverse and individuals typically lie along a continuum of adherence levels within each religious tradition. I also agree with you that it is far nicer when a Christian chooses to take most of the bible metaphorically, and as such has no reason to oppress homosexuals, shun scientific understanding and so on. What I do think, however, is that the step between calling yourself religious and taking most of the bible as metaphorical teachings with moral value and calling yourself an atheist and taking the entire bible as metaphorical teachings with moral value is a small and painless one.

Which is the whole point of this video.

This video is not directed at the fundamentalist Christians who hold to the literal teachings of the Bible. It is far too great a leap for them. It is directed towards people who have thought about their faith and concluded that they can not take certain parts of the bible as literal and authoritative, but still give biblical teachings some sort of privileged authority over other ideas put forth. There are many, but one of the main problems I see with this type of religion is that the privileged authority given to the bible tends to cause ignorance of other those other ideas that in reality have an equal opportunity at validity.

Which is why I posted the video.

Because it points out that applying a logical, reality-based analysis of the bible's claims (in this case, one that accepts the fact of evolution) will lead you to the conclusion that the overarching religious point of the bible is invalid. And it is simply attempting to nudge the liberal Christians who attempt to interpret the bible with a huge grain of salt just a little bit closer to atheism.

The fact is that an absence original sin means we don't need to be saved from it. Sure, we do sin and we need to do something about it, but if you are going to take the original sin as metaphorical (because evolution discredits the concept) then why should you take the biblically proposed remedy as literal? And if you're going to take the resurrection as a metaphorical assertion that you need to do this or that to improve your life and the lives of others, than why pay particular attention to that metaphorical assertion. To me, a someone who takes a vast majority of the bible as metaphorical but lives his or her life by it, is about the same as someone saying that they favor a Zizekian outlook on life - which is great and all, but again, it's limiting. There are plenty of ideas out there, go discover them and decide if they should shape your worldview!

Whether or not you think the above proposition is a better way of doing this or not, is up for debate. I think it's the way forward and videos like these help people move in that direction. They did for me.

@HadouKen24 - I think that our disagreement centers around our differing opinion of the utility of religion. In my opinion, these transcendental states you speak of are not in any way dependent on a religious belief. It is true that many beautiful things have been created within the confines of religious experience. But almost all of the most profound thoughts, intricately beautiful music and profound works of literature I can think of are all written or composed in absence of religious inspiration. Sure, this is certainly a matter of opinion, but I do not think there is any denying that atheists can create beauty in their lives just as I don't deny that the religious can. Which begs the question, is it necessary? Sure many people have found inspiration in religion, however the ecstasies you speak of can just as easily be created by the biochemical effects of substances or - perhaps more healthily - the close ties of relationships or the beauty of nature.

So seeing as how beauty is not exclusively inspired by religion, I prefer my art to be entirely reality-based. And I think it's better that way. To me, knowing that that painting I am looking at, the music I am hearing or the book that I am reading has a long lineage of innovation and creativity traceable through the efforts of countless individual minds throughout time is far more interesting to me than the simple notion that someone contemplated an extremely ambiguous and enigmatic all powerful being and decided to write something about it.

Again, this is all a matter of opinion, but my point is that religion is not necessary for this transcendentalist beauty.

Which brings me to the video. I agree with you that religion is diverse and individuals typically lie along a continuum of adherence levels within each religious tradition. I also agree with you that it is far nicer when a Christian chooses to take most of the bible metaphorically, and as such has no reason to oppress homosexuals, shun scientific understanding and so on. What I do think, however, is that the step between calling yourself religious and taking most of the bible as metaphorical teachings with moral value and calling yourself an atheist and taking the entire bible as metaphorical teachings with moral value is a small and painless one.

Which is the whole point of this video.

This video is not directed at the fundamentalist Christians who hold to the literal teachings of the Bible. It is far too great a leap for them. It is directed towards people who have thought about their faith and concluded that they can not take certain parts of the bible as literal and authoritative, but still give biblical teachings some sort of privileged authority over other ideas put forth. There are many, but one of the main problems I see with this type of religion is that the privileged authority given to the bible tends to cause ignorance of other those other ideas that in reality have an equal opportunity at validity.

Which is why I posted the video.

Because it points out that applying a logical, reality-based analysis of the bible's claims (in this case, one that accepts the fact of evolution) will lead you to the conclusion that the overarching religious point of the bible is invalid. And it is simply attempting to nudge the liberal Christians who attempt to interpret the bible with a huge grain of salt just a little bit closer to atheism.

The fact is that an absence original sin means we don't need to be saved from it. Sure, we do sin and we need to do something about it, but if you are going to take the original sin as metaphorical (because evolution discredits the concept) then why should you take the biblically proposed remedy as literal? And if you're going to take the resurrection as a metaphorical assertion that you need to do this or that to improve your life and the lives of others, than why pay particular attention to that metaphorical assertion. To me, a someone who takes a vast majority of the bible as metaphorical but lives his or her life by it, is about the same as someone saying that they favor a Zizekian outlook on life - which is great and all, but again, it's limiting. There are plenty of ideas out there, go discover them and decide if they should shape your worldview!

Whether or not you think the above proposition is a better way of doing this or not, is up for debate. I think it's the way forward and videos like these help people move in that direction. They did for me.

My mistake about the numbers. It's 1%, or 70,000,000 people (every website I went to had the same number, so I'm sure you can find it yourself).

There's no context and no references there, but to me it means psychopaths are aware society holds there to be a difference between right actions and and wrong actions, not that they themselves feel it's wrong, as evidenced by the lack of empathy, which is how the rest of us perceive moral values. That's just because I've done some casual reading about psychopathy in the past, not because I remember that statement clearly. If Hare or someone like that ever clearly stated that psychopaths are innately aware of what's right and wrong, then I'll drop my point. But I don't see how someone could feel something is wrong if they are unable to empathetically perceive how it hurts someone else.>> ^shinyblurry:

10 percent of the worlds population are psychopaths? Have any evidence for this claim? In any case, you're wrong. Even psychopaths know good from evil:
"Psychopaths have a total lack of remorse for the abuses they commit. They generally know the difference between right and wrong, but they do not care."

10 percent of the worlds population are psychopaths? Have any evidence for this claim? In any case, you're wrong. Even psychopaths know good from evil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Lack_of_empathy

"Psychopaths have a total lack of remorse for the abuses they commit. They generally know the difference between right and wrong, but they do not care. Even when they are aware of the consequences of their actions, they frequently rationalize their behavior so as to minimize the seriousness or shrug off responsibility. They often blame their victims for their own crimes; "he shouldn't have provoked me" and "suckers deserve to be swindled" are common sayings."

Everyone is born with their special challenges. Psychopaths struggle with adhering to moral standards, but this isn't because they aren't aware that they exist. They know what they're doing is wrong but they do it anyway. A person can become like this for a lot of reasons. We live in a fallen world and this manifests in genetic defects, mental defects, and yes, even defects in following our conscience. I have the opinion that many of these defects are self-created. In any case, God can still present those so afflicted with real choices, and the opportunity to receive salvation.

>> ^messenger:
@shinyblurry
Subjective perception of moral values by humans is the basis of your ontological argument here, which rests on the premise that everyone can subjectively perceive moral values. We've just learned that not everyone can do so: an estimated 700,000,000 people around the world cannot perceive moral values subjectively. Do you still maintain that we can all directly perceive moral values?
A related theological argument goes that God made moral values and then gave us free will to choose to follow them or not "because robots would be undesirable", according to you in that same dialogue. "Unfortunately", we break those rules all the time. Now, he can put any barrier in our way, and make life as difficult as possible, and this will be a test of our desire to follow our God-given conscience. But he didn't give everyone a conscience. It's nothing like depriving someone of one sense. It's like depriving someone of all senses so they can't understand what is expected of us morally, nor even that anything is expected. It's like expecting a robot to know right from wrong without telling it that these two categories even exist. What's the point of having free will if you don't have a conscience? Did God want some people not to perceive him, and to wander around being the worst people on the planet to everyone else? Was this "desirable?"

@shinyblurry

Subjective perception of moral values by humans is the basis of your ontological argument here, which rests on the premise that everyone can subjectively perceive moral values. We've just learned that not everyone can do so: an estimated 700,000,000 people around the world cannot perceive moral values subjectively. Do you still maintain that we can all directly perceive moral values?

A related theological argument goes that God made moral values and then gave us free will to choose to follow them or not "because robots would be undesirable", according to you in that same dialogue. "Unfortunately", we break those rules all the time. Now, he can put any barrier in our way, and make life as difficult as possible, and this will be a test of our desire to follow our God-given conscience. But he didn't give everyone a conscience. It's nothing like depriving someone of one sense. It's like depriving someone of all senses so they can't understand what is expected of us morally, nor even that anything is expected. It's like expecting a robot to know right from wrong without telling it that these two categories even exist. What's the point of having free will if you don't have a conscience? Did God want some people not to perceive him, and to wander around being the worst people on the planet to everyone else? Was this "desirable?"

@hpqp

Thank you for the polite reply. I look forward to reading your SiftTalk.

Mostly yes, I was annoyed by the tone more than the content. I'll just point out, though, that neither Harris nor Blackford think morality is arbitrary.

If I understand Harris's view correctly, there are objective moral truths which are theoretically knowable through science (although the science may not have advanced enough for us to conclusively discover them yet--hence his book which encourages basically a new field of science specially dedicated to investigating such truths).

Blackford, on the other hand, posits that while Harris might theoretically be right, the book didn't do enough to show that science could in actuality "determine" such truths. Blackford in fact goes further to stipulate that morality is subjective (in the sense that it relates to our individual experiences, not in the sense that it is "biased" in some way) and that it is impossible to understand morality bereft of a social context. In other words, while morality may be subjective, it isn't arbitrary because it is grounded by social phenomena and our own personal values, desires, etc. Blackford agrees with Harris that we should--in fact must--use science to help us make moral decisions but only after we've decided what it is we're going to value. He finds Harris's claim that science can actually determine what we should value dubious given the subjective (again, in the sense of relating to individual experiences and social environment) nature of morality, although he seems to concede that there appear to be universal moral values (customs and laws that "provide us a degree of personal security, enhance the prospect of (at least intra-societal) peace, and assist social cooperation") which appear across all cultures, most likely a result of our shared human heritage as social animals.

So they both agree that morality isn't arbitrary but they disagree about the mechanisms of how that morality is determined.

Or at least that's how I understood it. It's not exactly light reading.

@longde

Tone of posts is something @hpqp and I have discussed previously, which is probably why I'm a little more sensitive about it. But I think a recent lack of sleep had a lot to do with it too, particularly the third comment which I completely misread.

@shinyblurry

Aside
I'm not trying to win the argument, and it isn't important for me to do so. I am only interested in what you believe and having a fruitful dialogue.

In my reply, I gave a refutation to your objection as well as noting that I would like to advance to the actual argument. I don't have a problem with logical argumentation, I just was somewhat disheartened to see you were trying to kill off the argument without engaging it.

Now I get what you're saying. Check my next message. It's going to be full of that stuff. This message thread is only about the validity of Craig's proof. And when you reply, I'd prefer it if you kept your replies to the two messages separate, as logical discourse must be kept separate from and exchange of personally held opinions, especially where the lines between subjective and objective are being defined. Thanks!

The issue
Yes, I agree that even if every human decided that torturing babies was good, it would still be objectively evil.

Great. Then you'll agree we now have to determine logically that objective moral values, as defined by Craig, exist, or fail to do so. You must also agree that if we fail to prove that they exist by our definition, then we cannot say that Craig has proved his conclusion. I state again in advance that Craig's failure to make his case will not constitute disproof of any god, nor of the existence of objective moral values.

That there are universal moral values in humanity is clearly evidence for and not against the existence of objective moral values. To turn around and say that just because they exist doesn't automatically mean they are objective isn't an argument. You need to flesh this out. Are you saying there aren't any objective moral values? That it isn't absolutely wrong to torture babies for fun?

Let's clearly separate the two meanings of "evidence", which are: "indication/support/things that point to/suggest/etc." (what courts call circumstantial evidence); and "proof".

That there are universal moral values in humanity stands well enough proven. I agree this doesn't in any way contradict the possibility of objective moral values. It could be taken as evidence supporting OMVs if it weren't the only evidence for proposing OMVs to begin with (besides the evidence of God, of course, which is what is in contention here, so can't be taken as evidence). Weaker even than a tautological proof, this is a kind of tautological suggestion. And it sure doesn't prove the case. Lack of disproof is not equal to proof, nor even an indication of truth, on its own.

"Universal" means everybody has them (like large brains, or opinions). "Objective" means they exist outside of and independent of humans.

Let's say, Statement O = "Objective moral values exist", and Statement U = "Universal moral values exist".

We have already proven that U is true.
I think we also agree: "If O, then U." (Or, only as long as humans exist, for those who want to quibble)

This does not entail, "If U then O," as the two terms OMV and UMV are not functionally equivalent, even though the existence of one of them entails the existence of the other. So you cannot determine from the existence of UMVs that OMVs must exist. The two terms are not interchangeable.

Semantically this doesn't contradict the possibility of OMVs, but doesn't logically prove anything either. So Premise 2 remains unproven. As long as it's unproven, Craig cannot claim his conclusion proven, even if you both know in your minds that it's true. Even if you're right in your knowledge that god is real, you have to admit that this particular formulation of the argument fails to prove it.

Back to the aside
I would say though that if you accuse some of having beliefs which lack evidence, and you yourself have beliefs that lack evidence, then there is indeed a parity, no matter how internally consistent you believe you're being.

You've misread my statements. I first said that disproven beliefs/theories are not on par with unproven beliefs/theories. Demonstrating that my theories aren't proven (or even provable) doesn't make them equal with beliefs that cannot be rationally held. Then I said that many believers annoyingly think it's a victory to point out that my beliefs aren't provable in response to my doing the same to theirs, when I had never made any claim that mine were absolutely true, but they had.

And by "evidence", I'm going to infer from the context that you mean "proof". Scientific theories are not proven, and most are unprovable, but there's mountains of objective evidence that "suggests" scientific theories are true, but none whatsoever to suggest any single religious belief is true. Sometimes the theories change too as their early incarnations are proven incorrect or incomplete, as Einstein did to Newton, and as the folks at CERN may be doing to Einstein right now. That's the way of science, and it's the strength of science, not the weakenss. What I'm not comfortable with is religious beliefs/theories that are internally unchallengeable due to a part of the theory itself -- it's own infallibility. Imagine if science was based on the premise that by definition none of it's theories are false. Laughable, right? That's what I think of religion.

Your beliefs lack proof. But you claim yours have proof. I claim yours don't. This is the main issue raised by this video, and the only one I'm interested in laying to rest. Everything else in the other several comment threads you and I have going is just conjecture, an exchange of ideas. It's not logically sound of me to say that your beliefs are unproven simply because I have different ones. Mine might be total crap and not stand up to any scrutiny, so I don't present them here.

Of course, just about universally, humans hold very similar moral values about certain behaviours like killing, inflicting pain, caring, protecting and so on. To determine what this entails, I need to know if you agree with this snippet from my earlier comment:

...[our agreed-upon standard definition of "objective moral values" as given verbatim by Craig] entails that if all humans on Earth agreed that torturing babies for fun was morally acceptable, that it would still not be morally acceptable. In fact, it also entails that if all humans were dead, those moral values would still exist...

This part of the definition (the "objective" part) is necessary for determining that a god must have made the OMVs.

Yes, I agree that even if every human decided that torturing babies was good, it would still be objectively evil.

On the other hand, if you agree with that quote, then you have to admit that just because humans all exhibit the moral belief that torturing children is bad, it isn't entailed that torturing children would continue to be bad if humans all changed their minds about it or if humans were all wiped out. In other words, to say there is a universal human moral value is not to say that the value itself transcends our DNA and is therefore an objective moral value (by Craig's definition: "independent of whether anybody believes it to be so"). In this case, Premise 2, the existence of an objective moral value, remains unproven.

That there are universal moral values in humanity is clearly evidence for and not against the existence of objective moral values. To turn around and say that just because they exist doesn't automatically mean they are objective isn't an argument. You need to flesh this out. Are you saying there aren't any objective moral values? That it isn't absolutely wrong to torture babies for fun?

In this argument, I have taken no position whatsoever about the nature of moral values. This was on purpose and with great restraint. I've had dozens of serious drawn-out ontological discussions with believers, and when their own position is pushed against the wall, they get desperate to find out what I think, then when I tell them, they point out how it's possible that my theory is wrong or that it doesn't explain everything, and say I'm close-minded for not considering their theory, and dance around the room saying that my theory isn't necessarily true either. It's the "either" that really pisses me off because it implies that their various beliefs are merely "not necessarily true", and on equal footing with my own non-proven beliefs, whereas I have actually shown their beliefs to be self-contradictory, unlike my own.

Well, we haven't gotten anywhere near what you're talking about. I said that your beliefs are relevant in engaging the argument. I do find it fairly common though that atheists will resist revealing their true positions, nearly to the brink of death. Probably for the reason you have revealed, that they balk at there being any inference drawn to a parity between the respective belief systems. I would say though that if you accuse some of having beliefs which lack evidence, and you yourself have beliefs that lack evidence, then there is indeed a parity, no matter how internally consistent you believe you're being.

Or if I have merely shown that one particular assertion of theirs is not necessarily true, they think it's a massive victory to prove the same about something, anything that I believe, and spend a great deal of effort in the process, even though I already knew it wasn't necessarily true when I woke up that morning, and I don't care.

I'm not trying to win the argument, and it isn't important for me to do so. I am only interested in what you believe and having a fruitful dialogue.

"Breaking apart" an argument is how I "engage the argument". What other way is there? You say Craig is right, and I go about proving he's not necessarily right, then you say I'm not engaging the argument because I won't talk about the side issue of my own beliefs. I'll answer any questions you have about my beliefs once this Craig argument is settled. If we can't settle a formal logical debate on logical terms, then I don't see any point in having any logical discussions.

In my reply, I gave a refutation to your objection as well as noting that I would like to advance to the actual argument. I don't have a problem with logical argumentation, I just was somewhat disheartened to see you were trying to kill off the argument without engaging it.

>> ^messenger:

@shinyblurry
Of course, just about universally, humans hold very similar moral values about certain behaviours like killing, inflicting pain, caring, protecting and so on. To determine what this entails, I need to know if you agree with this snippet from my earlier comment:
...[our agreed-upon standard definition of "objective moral values" as given verbatim by Craig] entails that if all humans on Earth agreed that torturing babies for fun was morally acceptable, that it would still not be morally acceptable. In fact, it also entails that if all humans were dead, those moral values would still exist...
This part of the definition (the "objective" part) is necessary for determining that a god must have made the OMVs.
If you don't agree with that quote, then all you're saying is if any moral values (not necessarily objective moral values) demonstrably exist in humans, then a god exists, without determining what is so special about these moral values that a god must have made them. If human moral values are no more metaphysically significant than large brains, upright posture, self-awareness, reason, guile, or any other human characteristic, then there's no reason to suggest they must have come from a god, and Premise 1 (that a god necessarily created OMVs) remains unproven.
On the other hand, if you agree with that quote, then you have to admit that just because humans all exhibit the moral belief that torturing children is bad, it isn't entailed that torturing children would continue to be bad if humans all changed their minds about it or if humans were all wiped out. In other words, to say there is a universal human moral value is not to say that the value itself transcends our DNA and is therefore an objective moral value (by Craig's definition: "independent of whether anybody believes it to be so"). In this case, Premise 2, the existence of an objective moral value, remains unproven.
what do you believe? That is what is truly relevant to the argument.
If you want to take a position of moral skepticism, then feel free, but you don't get to dismiss the argument over it. How we determine whether premise 2 is true or false is at the heart of how you approach this entire problem. How about you engage the argument rather than trying to break it apart so you don't have to take any position? It would be nice if we could advance the discussion.
I joined this argument to see how you think, and how someone being logical might think that Craig's argument was valid, and to challenge that position. What I personally believe has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of Craig's argument, just as a defence attorney's opinion of their client's guilt or innocence holds no weight in the courtroom. It's only the people who make propositions (like Craig) who must defend them. I have no interest in defending my own positions because I know they're not provable, and may even be false. I also don't guide my life by them, so it doesn't matter.
In this argument, I have taken no position whatsoever about the nature of moral values. This was on purpose and with great restraint. I've had dozens of serious drawn-out ontological discussions with believers, and when their own position is pushed against the wall, they get desperate to find out what I think, then when I tell them, they point out how it's possible that my theory is wrong or that it doesn't explain everything, and say I'm close-minded for not considering their theory, and dance around the room saying that my theory isn't necessarily true either. It's the "either" that really pisses me off because it implies that their various beliefs are merely "not necessarily true", and on equal footing with my own non-proven beliefs, whereas I have actually shown their beliefs to be self-contradictory, unlike my own.
Or if I have merely shown that one particular assertion of theirs is not necessarily true, they think it's a massive victory to prove the same about something, anything that I believe, and spend a great deal of effort in the process, even though I already knew it wasn't necessarily true when I woke up that morning, and I don't care.
So as a rule, if I'm in an ontological debate with an opponent and I intend to join the debate seriously, I keep my own opinions out because I'm not trying to prove any propositions, and my own unproven opinions cannot disprove anyone else's anyway. Only logic and reason can do that, so that's what I use. I don't hold anything to be absolutely true, so if they demonstrate what I believe is not necessarily true by proposing an intelligent creator as an alternate theory to mine, I'll just agree.
"Breaking apart" an argument is how I "engage the argument". What other way is there? You say Craig is right, and I go about proving he's not necessarily right, then you say I'm not engaging the argument because I won't talk about the side issue of my own beliefs. I'll answer any questions you have about my beliefs once this Craig argument is settled. If we can't settle a formal logical debate on logical terms, then I don't see any point in having any logical discussions.