As CNN reports:

The first time he kills a villager, it is terrifying. The second time, it is hard. The third or fourth time, it starts to feel almost easy. Eventually, he finds himself competing with his fellow soldiers to see who can do it fastest, most often, most creatively.

A conscience can be dulled to permit any arbitrarily horrible action, which is why your conscience isn't a terribly good guide of what is horrible and what is good.

Labels: morality

Long story short - the names of people in the Gospels suggest at the least that they were written by local yokels in Palestine at approximately the correct time.

Labels: Bible, history

It is profoundly human in that sense for women to say, “I would like us humans to use our big brains to master a genuine difference between the sexes: the fact women have babies and men do not.” And much like many cases with disability accommodation, in order for the accommodation to be provided, someone else’s rights must be curtailed. A business owner might prefer to avoid the expense of making his business wheelchair accessible. Heck, he might not even like the handicapped. But his failure to accommodate limits the freedom of disabled people and we as a society have said that in most cases the rights of the business must give way.

The problem in the case of abortion is the fear that you are actually costing people’s lives when you do it. And if we can borrow a little more language from the law of disability accommodation, what the pro-life forces are saying is that at some point after conception and before birth, the fetus becomes a living baby in gestation and therefore the desire for an abortion is an unreasonable request for accommodation.

An interesting perspective indeed. He also ties all of this into gun ownership, an impressive combination.

Labels: prolife

Not such a great thing after all ...

The study makes clear that homeowners don't necessarily have higher rates of unemployment. Instead -- and this is really important -- they conclude that high rates of homeownership affect the entire labor market through lower rates of productivity and entrepreneurship. Regions with higher homeownership created fewer new businesses and had longer commute times and lower rates of labor mobility.

You tend to get tied down and unable to do new things. Which can be good or bad, I suppose, depending on your perspective. If you want to prove to someone like a spouse that you're not a flight risk, buying a house may be on the same order of signaling as a diamond engagement ring.

Labels: economics

Overrated!

As C. S. Lewis said in God in the Dock, "I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."

I need a little more religion, and a lot more wine.

Labels: quotes, religion

Add a disgruntled federal judge, and I'm in heaven!

Labels: law, technology

I love that N. T. Wright.

Labels: morality, religion

Said it before. Will say it again.

The bill was passed rapidly: Mr. Cuomo, a longtime gun control supporter, was eager to move when public outrage was high, because, he said, that was the only way to get the Legislature to act on the issue. The Legislature moved so fast — the Senate approved the measure on its first day in session, and the Assembly on its second — that few lawmakers, and almost no one in the public, had time to read, digest or debate the details.

From the NYT.

Labels: politics, trends

Just read a post advocating this. Survey says no.

Labels: religion, science

I say yes. That Blackberry Q10 looks pretty sweet to me.

Labels: technology

For all those who are studying for their finals, and for some in particular.

Labels: education, prayer requests

Clark and Ken argue. Chaos erupts in the comboxes. And I find a lovely new image:

So, by this heuristic, how does Broussard do?

Well he stands up for traditional Christian sexual morality – whatever you think of that – and was very clear that he considers premarital heterosexual sex to be sinful as well.

That itself is a wildly unpopular position. To use Ken's term, this isn't just snarling against the next asteroid; it's snarling against the one that already hit (and had a detrimental effect on the dinosaurs).

Snarling against an already hit asteroid. Does that sum up my life? Maybe, yes.

And all this in what's not actually a Catholic blog, despite the name.

Seriously though Clark and the comboxen makes some good points about how these things all fit together, point out some common faults in popular reasoning (why do people who have divorced and remarried three times seem to talk about the sanctity of marriage? Why do people seem to turn a blind eye to heterosexual fornication disapprove so much of homosexual fornication?), and also manage to talk about bananas with dreadlocks, which I suspect is some cultural reference that I just missed.

Labels: love, morality

Still looking good after two thousand years, and with more evidence of authenticity, or at least non-forgery. And of course you get some insight from Mark Shea

Still, I have a high degree of confidence this will not turn out to be a fake, not because I believe it to be the burial cloth of Jesus by faith, but for much the same reason I have a high degree of confidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy: because it's the most sensible synthesis of the available physical evidence. I have nothing riding on the authenticity of the Shroud. I just think it's the best explanation of all the data.

And a quote from Chesterton. How could you go wrong?

Labels: catholic, history