iwpoe wrote:

I don't think anyone that matters is going to be lost to emails any more than they were to Benghazi. It would have to come out that she was committing treason or illegal bribery or some kind of gross cover-up.

Honestly, since they didn't throw Bill out over the old lying under oath thing, I doubt as well that they are going to do so on this sort of "triviality" either.

Not that it would be consistent with fairness and the rule of law; Petraeus was sentenced to two years probation over mishandling classified information, and despite what Clinton has claimed, it seems pretty clear now that some of the e-mails were in fact marked as classified. At the very least, for her to claim that she wasn't knowingly playing fast-and-loose with her emails and at least potentially classified information betrays a belief in the rank credulity of the American populace that they would buy that Clinton is operating at a worse than W Bush aww-gee shucks level.

And former head of the CIA General Petraeus himself wasn't exactly small-fries; at one point, he was considered a likely strong contender for the 2016 DNC presidential nomination.

Still, Clinton is a useful weasel, and Petraeus had the old affair thing also working against him; if she looses the general though, I'm not sure if the vultures might not "find new evidence" and make their attack.

Greg wrote:

Part of the problem with philosophical defenses of theism is that they are among the few philosophical defenses of anything that are widely heard by non-philosophical audiences. I imagine lots of people would not like other philosophical arguments and would respond to them uncharitably, if only they heard them.

I've played around with the idea of how well mathematical proofs would stand up to the "scrutiny" most philosophers, and especially non-philosophers, put to cosmological arguments and such.

I really have my doubts that such proofs would enjoy anything close to the level of indubitablity must people are willing to allow mathematics free reign over; even mathematicians doubt their arithmetic when they figure out that they have come up short on the rent.

And theistic arguments built on metaphysical suppositions have conclusions that imply so many things that would have a direct influence on one's life that many people would just rather not go there; even if they might be willing to grant that the argument works, they are squemish when it comes to the certainty.

For instance, how many people, even people who accept the thereom, would grant that the well over two hundred page proof for Fermat's Last Thereom works if it had the same sort of consequences for one's life that cosmological arguments have? I doubt anyone would have even ever got to the position to launch such a proof, since much the same could be said for a lot of the background ideas that are used in said proof.

May I also point out though that it is only in the last two hundred years or so where the dialectical situation is such that there is such widespread doubt that a successful argument for God's existence can be lanched, even if only a rather Deistic one.

So Crash Course has made another sequel, this time on the nature of God. Here's the link: https://youtu.be/gs_gY1K1AMU

This video is just plain despicable; it obviously was made by a man who plain refuses to take the idea of God seriously, and parades out the worst sort of objections to omnipotence and omniscience, implying that they're "decisive".

Oh, and by the way, did you know that the Bible, neither Old nor New Testament gives direct warrant for the claim that God has these attributes? That it never says that God is eternal, all knowing, all powerful, and perfect? I certainly didn't, but this vicious lie is tranced out as if it is a simple truism.

Also, did you know that analogical predication means that we cannot make any real claims about God's nature? Not just that we cannot make any positive claims, which is stronger than Aquinas's view, but that we cannot make ANY claims!

I don't know how to respond to such sheer sophistry; I'm not sure if one should go and demand that they get their act together, or if one should refrain and not throw their pearls before such swine.

Sigh, he mentions Aquinas's argument without ever even giving it, and makes the mistake of treating it as a design argument.

Just for the record, I wrote a paper on Aquinas's fifth way once, and I went back and checked the original Latin; in many translations of it, Aquinas is presented as arguing that since everything is acts towards a definite end, this cannot by chance, but must be designedly. The Latin however reads "ex intentione" where designedly appears in the English, and "ex intentione" translates to something more like from/out of the aim/intention, which is a much weaker claim. If Aquinas had wanted to say designedly here, he would have, since design is itself a Latin-derived word, and there was a plethora of other words in Latin for design as well.

Hence, Aquinas's teleological argument is not a design argument; it's a cosmological argument given from the perspective of final causality.

But of course y'all already knew that; now you've got some more evidence for why it's not.

Also, isn't it a little funny that the video jumps to Paley as the great formulator of the design argument, and then jumps back about 50+ years to Hume as its greatest objector? Was Paley answered so adequately that he couldn't even formulate a somewhat convincing response to Hume before he even gave his original watchmaker argument? Could none of Paley's contemporaries give a rebuttal that could outdo a sceptic whose famous objections Paley would have carefully formulated his argument in an attempt to avoid? That would be quite damning if they couldn't; so please, let's stop this Hume hero-worship, and actually get into the meat and potatoes of the argument.

Finally, the video makes the classic mistake of shifting all purpose talk from proximate purposes to remote purposes, which inevitably lends to a reductio of non-speculative purpose talk. Thus, that the eyes are for seeing is a very different purpose claim than that the eyes are for the glory of God, but BOTH claims are le

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

 I think Poe is right about what really matters here: what transsexuality is? Personally, I'm not really sure. But I also know that the left-liberals pushing the issue aren't really sure either; yet they treat the issue as if it is settled and even as if dissent from their conclusions if a sign of both grave intellectual and moral failing.

I also think that, although there is a certain triteness in the concern over public toilets, which left-liberals exploit to its full, there is actually some validity in certain popular sentiments and prejudices on issues like these: we shouldn't always scorn instinctive unease. 

Whilst I am pessimistic about moral and cultural issues like these and where Western civilisation is going, I'm not quite so sure that there will be an unstoppable movement towards left-liberalism. I think there are a lot of deep seated beliefs, values, and even instincts to uproot. Even on issues like homosexual acts, where left-liberals think they have triumphed, I think there is more unease and possibility for reversal than is sometimes admitted. Even in Britain, there is the constant need still for left-liberals to hammer home their message about homosexuality and so called homophobia. I think there is a significant part of the population that is quietly doesn't fully accept this message - it has just been beaten down horse, foot, and dragoons and lacks any sort of intelligent articulation or leadership. Whether this state of affairs will continue, I don't know. 

Besides, I don't know that left-liberalism itself will hold together into the future. Already it is a hotch-potch of liberal and radical elements. The tensions and contradictions seem to me to threaten the entire cultural movement. Even on the very issue of transsexuality, there has been a very public split between pro-transsexual activists and radical feminists. The former have certainly carried the majority of left-liberals, but not the latter have been put

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