Category: Random Thoughts

Atheism and Reason

I’ve been reading and watching a fair amount by the late Christopher Hitchens and others arguing for atheism. A commonly brought up theme is that people are blindly following and refusing to give up their belief in books and notions of God and the world created by practically Stone Age people from thousands of years ago as opposed to the wisdom and and knowledge and truth of modern science, which seems to increasingly point to the natural origin of all things. However, have they forgotten the pyramids which were built thousands of years ago by these people.? We can’t build pyramids today because we don’t know how! So, we might want to hesitate a bit before giving short shrift to the words and ideas of people from thousands of years ago.

Students and stoves

My experience with socialism is exemplified by a community stove in a house full of students where I rented a room. Nobody cleaned the stove, ever. I have no reason to believe it would work any differently on an expanded scale. When everybody owns the stove nobody cleans the stove.

Second Amendment

To me a candidate’s stance on the Second Amendment is very important. No, it’s not because I’m a gun nut who loves guns more than children, I don’t even own a gun. Rather, it’s because the Second Amendment is fundamental to the ideas upon which this nation was founded however imperfectly or belatedly they were applied. The idea of limited government and individual liberty is taken so seriously that the ultimate deterrent against government tyranny is written explicitly into the nations founding documents as the Second Amendment. The idea of government regulation and permitting of firearms transforms that right into a privilege granted by government and renders the Second Amendment worthless, defanged by the same institution it was designed to keep in ultimate check. Hence my interest in a candidate’s stand on guns.

Marching on

One by one by one we are falling. Family, friends, acquaintances, classmates, colleagues, we are vanishing into the dust again and the years are marching on. Our generation is passing, fading into the dusty corridors of history as the world goes marching on.