Vivat Libertas

Take your morals. Now burn them to the ground. You might be wondering what the hell I'd do that for. When I was younger, I used to be very focused on questions of ethics and morality and how one should live. Even most adults believe that trying to do the right thing - whatever that might be - is a worthy goal, even if we're not always actively pursuing it. A large part of my disappointment and disillusionment comes from not being able to build a perfectly consistent and complete moral framework. In some ways that's a given - not even mathematical systems can be consistent and complete, so there's absolutely no reason why a system based on informal logic should be consistent and complete either - but finding parts of my system which are incommensurable (or rather, having someone else find them because I'm too stupid to do so) is still annoying and upsetting. That's a rather silly reason for abandoning the pursuit of doing the right thing altogether, thoug...

I never did like the idea of inherent evil. I grew up annoyingly strong-willed and a passionate believer in the idea of free choice; I really don't know why either should be the case. I don't think anyone's managed to break my strong will out of me yet, which is really a shame, but through twists and turns of life and most importantly through evidence I've been rethinking my ideas about free will. Anyway, those two things set me in diametric opposition to the kind of people who believe that some people are inherently good and some people are inherently evil, and never shall they change. After all, people being able to make free choices and then having the will to carry them through sort of puts the kibosh on some people being predestined to make Jesus look mean-spirited, while other people are stuck with just being awful human beings. I have less of a problem with people who think that we're all inherently good; firstly, they're quieter, and secondly, they don...

At the risk of overloading people with a low tolerance for glurge , (for those who don't know, glurge refers to those sickeningly saccharine anecdotes and media tidbits with puppies, kittens, Jesus, inspirationally disadvantaged little kids and all sorts of other equally disgusting things), I'd like to link to the Paradoxical Commandments . As downright sentimental as it is, it's still just a tiny bit heartwarming...yes, I'm a big softie inside. The thing about the Paradoxical Commandments is that they're not actually that much of a paradox - they only look that way because most of the steps have been left out. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. [sic] Love them anyway. Yes, they're all of those things, but they're also rational, reasonable and altruistic. They help you through troubled times and they'll stand behind you when you really need them. John Donne once wrote that "no man is an island" - and although the quote...