Love the Tom Delay - he is sooooo yesterday! :)

The clothing stylin' for Abramoff is highly apropos. But he really needed a black shirt and tie to make it really Gansta! :)

Received the DVD "The God Who Wasn't There" from www.thegodmovie.com and find that I am seeing more and more refrences to the lack of a real "Jesus". Must just be synchronistic. Hence the refrence to the CNN article about the Italian court case. I love the last line in the article. Funny and ironic. However the plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, is not sayng that there isn't a God, allah, G_D or Jack In The Box or FSM (www.venganza.org). He is just saying that there is no historical evidence that there ever was a physical man named Joshua Bar Joseph Cohen of Nazareth that was later called Jesus Christ.

Historically, Mr. Cascioli is accurate but since all of the facts are faith based, we shall see as to the outcome. Maybe - just maybe - there will be some confering with a particular Judge in PA.

my 20p

Thanks so much for linking to my Tom DeLay song parody, Norm. And thanks YankInOz! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

And by the way, obviously acts of violence (the death penalty, war, public beatings, sports, etc.) have convinced people all over the world that violence does not pay - even the fear of death does not prevent people from killing each other.

The death penalty was reinstituted because of the validity of it use as a deterrent. It has worked. No more killin' in the USofA. Yep. Looks like a weiner to me. :)

So how do you change the software or hardware of a killer's brain? Frontal lobotomy? Naw... didn't work when Egas Moniz developed it (devised it) in 1935. Vegetative killers - but still killers. So, what is the answer?

Send them to an enclosed extra-dimensional prison drifting through space like the traitors of Krypton in the Superman series? Maybe.

My concern is that we all have the act of muder in us - protective or vengeful - it is there. What keeps you from murdering the guy who cut you off to get ahead of you on the freeway? Consciousness or fear of reprisal from the rule of law?

I am in hope that it is in at least some of us - consciousness and awareness. (which is redundant). :)

Mad Kane - you da' man!!! Great stuff you do.

Despite not buying into Christian hype I personally hope that the person referred to as Jesus existed. However, the lack of any non-biblical evidence is disturbing and the evidence that he was cobbled together is compelling enough. Americans will ignore this I am sure.

Is the prevalence of murder in the US at all related to its religiosity. I wonder if many people commit murder because deep down subconsciously they think that death is not an end. You can kill then because you are not ending a life just sending someone a lil quicker to the ultimate judgment. Of course, the Christian god is not above terrorism and a firey hell awaits the damned, oh yeah, lotsa other bad stuff too. It is a pretty effective deterrent to those put to death though. Unfortunately a few innocent are put to death but that is just the cost of business many think, but then again, its not an end if you are a Christian just a chance at a new beginning. Certainly god will straighten things out, give the innocent who were executed a special place in heaven. (Not that it matters but I am a supporter of the death penalty in cases of overwhelming evidence and especially heinous crime.)

When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it.

The writer equates serious crime with a malfunction of the human brain! Their brain didn't malfunction you imbecile: they cheated and they got caught!

Actually, many people do 'punish' a malfunctioning computer, either by smashing it or throwing it out.

Mike writes: "Unfortunately a few innocent are put to death but that is just the cost of business many think..."

That's the attitude of some people but not all.

Collateral damage is all it is. We see all sorts of collateral killing: War, and casualties of imperfect justice.

But it can never be justified. Especially with a shrug of the shoulders and saying: "eh...it's just the cost of doing business"

I can understand why Utah was the first state to reactivate the death penalty. The citizens here in Utah are believers of the "blood atonement". But why Texas has so many executions?

I disagree with Dawkins' stance on retribution.

Articles like Dawkins' contribute to the feeling among us true believers that alls them athiests is amoral. Dawkin's central point is that it's silly to punish criminals because not only is the criminal not to blame, but the very concept of blame and responsibility is nonsense (as an aside, I hereby call upon you all to forgive Bush, Brownie, and FEMA for katrina -- the idea of blame and responsibility is nonsense. Stop being so retribution-itive).

To quote him: "But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility..."

I can't tell what Dawkin's thinks of the idea of punishing someone as an example for others ... deterrence, in other words. If you can admit such a thing as choice exists, then deterrence is a powerful force for social compliance. It's not all-powerful, of course, but it's still useful and worthwhile. If by hanging a few murderers we can prevent at least one murder then I'm in favor.

Another thing he does that grates on us faithful is to compare a stalled car to a rapist. If my car is totalled and unfixable, there are no ethical problems with me simply throwing it away. If my blender shocks me every time I plug it in, I'll throw it away. It is conceivable that some particular dude's problems (caused of course by his faulty education, upbringing, parents, genes, and environmental pollution) are similarly unfixable and he can't be reliably rehabilitated into society (repaired, as it were). In my book a person, rapist though he might be, occupies a different ethical role than an espresso maker. When Dawkin's says things like this, it makes wonder what he means: "Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component?"

Suppose some big drug company purposely sells drugs at enormous profit after hiding unflattering study results. Thousands are disabled. What's to be done about it? According to Dawkins, since "Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour" we should just get the company to stop doing that. It doesn't make sense to punish their greed and make them pay the people they hurt; that's just vindictive. If an eye for an eye is bad, an eye for $10,000 is just the same isn't it.

I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.

I disagree with Dawkins' stance on retribution.

Articles like Dawkins' contribute to the feeling among us true believers that alls them athiests is amoral. Dawkin's central point is that it's silly to punish criminals because not only is the criminal not to blame, but the very concept of blame and responsibility is nonsense (as an aside, I hereby call upon you all to forgive Bush, Brownie, and FEMA for katrina -- the idea of blame and responsibility is nonsense. Stop being so retribution-itive).

To quote him: "But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility..."

I can't tell what Dawkin's thinks of the idea of punishing someone as an example for others ... deterrence, in other words. If you can admit such a thing as choice exists, then deterrence is a powerful force for social compliance. It's not all-powerful, of course, but it's still useful and worthwhile. If by hanging a few murderers we can prevent at least one murder then I'm in favor.

Another thing he does that grates on us faithful is to compare a stalled car to a rapist. If my car is totalled and unfixable, there are no ethical problems with me simply throwing it away. If my blender shocks me every time I plug it in, I'll throw it away. It is conceivable that some particular dude's problems (caused of course by his faulty education, upbringing, parents, genes, and environmental pollution) are similarly unfixable and he can't be reliably rehabilitated into society (repaired, as it were). In my book a person, rapist though he might be, occupies a different ethical role than an espresso maker. When Dawkin's says things like this, it makes wonder what he means: "Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component?"

Suppose some big drug company purposely sells drugs at enormous profit after hiding unflattering study results. Thousands are disabled. What's to be done about it? According to Dawkins, since "Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour" we should just get the company to stop doing that. It doesn't make sense to punish their greed and make them pay the people they hurt; that's just vindictive. If an eye for an eye is bad, an eye for $10,000 is just the same isn't it.

I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Mike, I think you touched on the real problem with Dawkins' argument: the matter of free will. Human beings are rational, thinking creatures. Machines do only what they are built to; they cannot choose their actions. As far as I know, all creatures with any kind of brain are best taught by reward and punishment - including humans. It's not as straighforward as engineering an engine, but we know far, far more about teaching by reward and punishment than about "fixing" a "broken" brain.

"The death penalty was reinstituted because of the validity of it use as a deterrent. It has worked. No more killin' in the USofA. Yep. Looks like a weiner to me"

Somebody else looks like the weiner to me.

The argument about the death penalty being a deterrent is bulletproof: it keeps the person being executed from doing it again, for damn sure. Anything else is pure conjecture, just like with any other kind of law enforcement.

The death penalty is not only justified, it's sensible. What do you do with someone who is a recidivist or unreformable murderer/rapist/child attacker, etc? Lock them up occasionally and let them repeat offend so you feel good about yourself, and pretend you can 'help' them? Or put them to death for the good of society?

Obviously the latter. Anything else is bleeding heart hippie crap.

Well, talk about beating a dead horse, I'll resurrect this old Jan 2006 Dawkins article topic on Beating Faulty cars.

I thought it was a good article that showed Dawkins as a forward thinking man, but understanding and living in the present. I like Dawkins more and more. We read about America's prisons being holding bins for the irreconcilable wrongdoers. There is little or no program to rehabilitate the wrongdoers... maybe a Quaker meeting for the violent inmate. Often, there is no attempt at even understanding the wrongdoers. In the end, we never fix the problems that make a wrongdoer. And these 'faulty cars' cause head on collisions before they get put on the heap of a junkyard. To me, this is the reciditive nature of our culture. We can't forgive or move beyond the wrongdoings. And it makes us lifelong slaves to offense through retributive solutions when there are better answers at hand. And I think religion is evil in that it takes away our right to formulate our personal faith that leads to better decisions and better thinking. And there is no reason people can't work to provide redemptive power without popes and crosses and holy books and holy wars. It's just a long ways off in religious nations.