You know what sucks? The fact that I've been on this site for a few years now and have accumulated quite a few eRep points.  I was stoked cause I'm almost at enought to get a fucking swagger pack.  Fuck that.  Now we got some eBoner shit that pretty much made me start from scratch again with this shit.  eBaumsworld you fucking tease.  Time to go back to poking fun at nothing.

fuck

I don't give a fuck?

What happened to the news?

And how come my blog has to be 256 characters long?  WTF is that shit?

I just want to say shit about the news and how much it sucks nowadays... and I can't even do that without having to elaborate on my idea.

I would rather read about the inside of my asshole.

256 characters yet?

I was born and raised a Roman Catholic child and I can say that I have remained faithful up to these last few years on my own.  There are just so many flaws with the belief system.  Even in the bible there are numerous mistakes.  The same book which claims it was written by “God” himself.  Did you know that when the bible was originally written, the blind and deaf were originally thought to be possessed by the devil?  I mean c’mon!  That is what human kind resorts to when they do not have an answer for something.

Think about this with me for a second.  We don’t know the answer for a question, so what do we do?  We answer with something we don’t know exists.  That makes complete logical sense.

I mean, is it a bad thing that I think this way?  I’m not trying to call anyone out here but jeeze.  Is it so bad that I would rather choose facts over faith?  What are your opinions on the subject?

 Yes, CopyPasta, but after I read it, I wanted to see how our brilliant users would respond to these questions.  Enjoy!

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, its readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."

IN CONCLUSION

Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it's a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

"…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

I understand that most people believe in the idea of being Pro-Life, but if you believe so dearly in that, then why would you vote McCain?  The Republicans, while 'Pro-Life' are also 'Pro-War' and 'Pro-Capital Punishment'... I just don't see how you can justify one, and then support the other two... Please explain.

What is separation between church and state?  Where do you draw the line?  If there is this belief of separation of church and state, than why do most Americans believe this to be a Christian found country?

Separation of church and state is a political and legal doctrine that government and religious institutions be kept separate and independent from each other.

Apart from this legal doctrine that clearly states there is to be a separation between the two, then why, and how are some Americans still fixated on this idea that America is a Christian nation?

In the Constitution, it is written that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." (Article 6, section 3)  This was to ensure that no religion could claim itself “our nation’s religion”. 

Even when writing the Constitution, most of our fore fathers didn’t even practice the Christian faith.  Most were in fact Deist’s.  For those of you who do not know what Deism is, it is the thought that the universe has a creator, but that he does not concern himself with the daily lives of humans, and does not directly communicate with humans. 

Now if our nation was founded on the practice of Christianity, they weren’t very good Christians. 

"For rebellion as is the sin of witchcraft."  1 Samuel, 15:23

1 Peter 2:13:  "For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right."

Paul wrote in Romans 13:1:  "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment."

According to the Christian belief, the Revolutionary War was a sin, and should not have happened.  Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention religion, except in the exclusionary terms.  “Jesus Christ, Christianity, God, Bible” are never mentioned in the Constitution.

If all of this is so very evident and available to the masses, then how is it so planted in American minds that we are a Christian nation.  It’s not and it was never meant to be.