Yes, the Catholic church threatened the Prime Minister of Ireland, Enda Kenny with excommunication if he instigates the abortion reform, where women will be allowed an abortion if it is deemed harmful to the woman's wellbeing.

His response was: “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion here but as explained to the Cardinal and members of the church my book is the constitution and the constitution is determined by the people. That’s the people’s book. We live in a Republic and I have a…

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In these discussions about self-determinism, some hard determinists dismissively parade opinion as fact. Their conviction trumps their rational integrity. We all need to be mindful that just about everything to do with free will and determinism is, thus far, a matter of opinion.



Almost 400 years ago, René Descartes claimed that, unlike the human body, the mind has no physical properties or spatial dimension: thus it can not be examined in the same way as the physical body. Today, we…

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Introduction:

I've grown disappointed with philosophers on the subject of free will. The great philosophers of the past knew nothing about the brain. Modern philosophers contradict each other. What I've been trying to do is to stick with the knowledge we have and avoid philosophical entanglements and conjecture as much as possible. However, certain philosophical conundrums must be addressed, such as: (1) the false dichotomy of free will versus causality; (2)…

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If God provided proof that he exists, then it would be logical to believe in him.  The absence of proof leaves only faith for belief.  You do not need faith if you have proof and vice versa.  By God’s own choice, he can only be known by faith.



But why have faith in this particular God?  If God won’t give us proof, what’s to stop us from believing in Allah or Zeus?  To have faith is to deny logic.  What alternative is there to logic?  How do we think?  Mindlessness is the absence…

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Ok, so of course I have to start off with why I became a christian in the first place. I was 'saved' when i was 14 at the end of June, right before my first year of high school. During my 6th and 7th grade years, I became very depressed. I had no true interest in life and in was due largely to the fact that I had no plans for my life. I didn't know what I wanted, and basically let everybody else, but myself, make my choices.

My 8th grade year, I went to a new school and was surrounded…

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The cells in our cortex are essentially machines ready to be influenced by the world as we are born. A blank slate, if you will. While there is some genetically programmed organization there from embryological development, all areas in the cortex pretty much do the same thing as far as pattern recognition (see YT video of Jeff Hawkins’ (On Intelligence, Hierarchical Temporal Memory)). What makes certain areas of our cortex perform different functions has more to do with which sense organs…

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‎"We'll look back on this 50 to 100 years from now- we'll shake our heads and say, 'What were people thinking? They took these people who were very nearly viable, just barely dysfunctional, and put them in an oven or buried them under the ground, when there were people who could have put them into cryopreservation.'"-Max More, New CEO of Alcor

This is just a very short and simple version of what I have argued as the proper way to understand choice. I believe there is no such thing as freewill. Choice, in my opinion is a causally determined mental calculation that we are all relatively free to make. Freedom and control are relative terms describing a relatioship between entities. Neither can be absolute, ever. Of course we have relative freedom to choose, it is just that that choice is not completely free from anything and not at…

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Taken from my blog: http://godlesspaladin.wordpress.com/

It seems to me that a lot of religious people are confused as to what exactly is a choice and what it means to be able to choose freely.

A choice in it's most basic form is when you are presented with two or more options on how to proceed and you must pic one.

There is a major difference, however, between a free choice and an unfree…

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I didn't find this out until just now, but a couple of weeks ago, Congress passed a bill that outlaws clove cigarettes and all other flavored tobacco products. It goes into effect in less than three months.



Supposedly, this is to keep kids from smoking. I call BULLSHIT.



It would be an understatement to say I'm not exactly a fan of Big Tobacco, and I'm certainly not a habitual smoker. And I think most flavored smokes taste like shit. But why the fuck is the government… Continue

Beliefs & Choices

Part Two

After I had gotten away from Jehovah's Witnesses, then from religion in general, and had shared stories with others of how it was like coming out of a cave you had been in all your life, and after reading Ingersoll's eloquence on how he felt upon become free of belief in gods, I was absolutely flumoxed by how people could believe such stuff as religion even AFTER being shown how illogical it was. How stupid could…

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Why Do People Have Kids?



I have always wondered why people choose to have children.



There is nothing rational about purposely raising one's own stress level, or having less discretionary income, or doing things your normally would not do in life. The answer most people often give for having kids is having a bloodline continuation, joy, or happiness. But why are children so expressly associated with happiness? Just because one has a child does, not automatically make… Continue

I posted a piece this morning on MySpace.
I woke up and ran to my laptop with the idea oozing from my ears.
Here is it:
Abortion is wrong.

I will accept any Atheist Nexus friend request with a smile.
We need more of us on MySpace.