Gaston High School v. Nestucca High

After I took this shot I had to ask someone if he made it, because I was too caught up in what I was doing to pay attention to the score. It did go in, by the way.

Speak up, I Kant hear you

Why do we have a duty to be happy? Kant claims that people who are not happy are less likely to do their duty in other areas because they are not as predisposed to moral actions, but If we do good because we want to, Kant says it has no moral worth, in other words those good acts are actually amoral. shouldn't we who wish to be as moral as possible therefore hope for circumstances to disincline us toward acting morally? If the only actions of moral worth are those moral actions we take that we are not inclined toward, it would seem that anyone who wishes to live a life of moral worth is duty bound to be as unhappy as possible. How else are we to increase the moral worth of our actions? According to Kant, the most moral man in the world hates his life and wants to die. His wife despises him, but he stays with her and treats her well. He has a pathological fear of snakes, so to be moral he runs a snake rescue out of his home. He always gives every dollar he has to panhandlers, even though his job as a snake wrangler never did bring in much money. To top it all off, he has to convince himself to be happy in these miserable circumstances, ignoring the cognitive dissonance of happiness in the midst of a terrible life in which he does everything he is disinclined to do. And what of the poor soul who just happens to be well adjusted, happy, and never wants to do anything immoral? According to Kant, even if he never does anything bad, he is at best an amoral man because he is inclined to do good, so none of his good actions have any moral value whatsoever. I realize he was going for a model of morality, but what he came up with falls short, and Kant ends up as one more opiate for the masses. His work boils down to, 'do your duty because you should'. Kant's view of morality is so sublime, so rarified, that it becomes almost impossible to find a moral act in all the world. Who does anything at all out of pure duty? I would propose that all actions are either motivated by some form of self interest or by the inclination or character of the doer. If reason works in to cause a person to act against their baser self, and the result is a moral act, then so much the better that they were able to rise above and do good. Perhaps I could shed more light on the subject by discussing an immoral act. If one were to commit murder, whether in harmony with or against their inclination to kill, the foul deed is done and the consequences follow. That is to say, for practical purposes, an immoral act is immoral regardless of the motivation behind it. I say the same thing goes for a moral act. I don't care how much good will someone might have, I care about what they do.

Augustine shmagusteen

Saint Augustine. Even his name sounds big. Like Goliath. I feel like I am taking on a giant here, because as far as Christian thinking goes, he certainly looms large, but he was wrong, so I shall call him Gus.

He veers sharply from reality in the first sentence of his first paragraph, when he states that, "God ... derived all men from one individual ... (God) created man..." and "the one (man) was created out of nothing, ..." Gus got right to the point with his fallacies. He was wrong in two ways, first, it is impossible to create something from nothing. I will not offer an in depth defense of this statement here for lack of room and time, but suffice it to say that there has never been an observed example of something coming from nothing in the physical realm. Second, modern genetic research suggests that Homo Sapiens did in fact experience a population bottleneck some 70,000 years ago when the Toba Volcano exploded, and though there is much debate about how few Homo Sapiens remained after that cataclysm, the accepted range of surviving humans is between ten and two thousand.

But Gus would say that God exists outside of the material world, and that I am missing the point by arguing such small matters. He would be right of course. The bigger issue here is the existence of God. If I were to attempt to take on Gus point for point, I would have to write a book larger than "The City of God".

But disproving the existence of God, Gus would say, is impossible! Maybe, but I don't have to do that. Rather, the burden of proof for a mythology as baseless as Christianity lies not on me, but on those who profess the myth as truth. I have evidence to support what I believe. Gus, sadly, produced not a shred of it. I no more have to believe what he says than I have to believe someone who says the aliens are coming on the next comet to take them away.

Gus spent quite a bit of time trying to defend and explain the concept of free will in the presence of his omniscient god. The trouble is that a god who knows everything by definition knows what is about to happen. This presents a problem to any free spirit who thinks they can choose to do what they want when they want. If our free-spirited fellow decides to hop on one foot, blow a smoke ring, and then juggle sea bass, Gus's god would just say, I knew you were going to do that! It is quite demoralizing to try to throw a surprise birthday party for the god of the bible. Furthermore, it is very hard to salvage free will as a concept when somewhere in the universe a being exists who has known for all eternity that today you have an appointment to juggle sea bass at exactly 3:46 pm. Some claimed that the act of choosing was at best experiential, and not really effectual. It was, in the editorial matter of the text, "a link in the causal chain or, perhaps, a curious side effect. William James later called this the "epiphenomenon". I like to think that Alexander the Great, as much a student of his master Aristotle as Plato was of Socrates, would have, sliced this Gordian Knot in two.

The question of how Man can have free will in the presence of an all-knowing God can be a baffling conundrum until someone happens by and comments, "There is no God".

Therefore the City of God, deprived of it's foundation, crumbles and falls.

To use Gus's own argument, how can one see a God that isn't there? It is like listening to silence.

To be Hume-an

David Hume was a skeptic. He only trusted those things that he could experience with his senses and emotions, and even those he only trusted to an extent. The third British empiricist after Locke and Bernards, his work helped usher in the scientific process. He was unique in questioning even reason. It seemed to him that reason had little effect on the moral actions of Man, so why base morality on it? To Hume, humans were collections of transitory sensory impressions, without so much as a stable sense of self. He doubted that out of such chaos as exists in the human mind that even cause and effect could be trusted.

Hume would have felt very much at home if he lived today, but his ideas and particularly his disbelief in a deity made him unpopular in his time. He had to censor his book about the history of England, and much of his work was not even published during his lifetime because it was considered too scandalous to print.

Hume was a significant thinker because he took nothing for granted. It was common before the empiricists to assume a point, like the existence of God, and base an entire philosophy on that assumption. Hume questioned everything, leaving nothing to chance. He was shown little gratitude in his time for this hard stance, but the world has benefited greatly from his writing and that of so many others who took similar stands.