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This will sound a little skeptical, but my experience is that people with an escatological bent tend to get really dire as they approach their own demise. There is internal pressure to finish one's work and wrap it all up, and folks who have been looking forward to, and hoping for the end of...

OK, I haven't finished reading the thread yet, but I'm definitely in the Pro camp. I would say that will comes before desire, so choices made from desire- even from programming are still free. To deny free will you would have to start from some point of predestination BEFORE the human...

You can't nail down a historical Jesus, Buddha, or Lao Tzu for that matter, so the real question becomes "what accounts for the veracity of the message?" Chris

I like this answer because it encapsulates an essential disillusion, but my current experience is that philosophy is the escape hatch: not only from youthful idealism and angst driven artifice, but from the jading of age as it confronts the futility of such. Having recently barely survived my...

It started in earnest when we had kids, which was about six years into our relationship, but in retrospect I can see that she had been trying to ramp up her control from the moment we were married, and that having the children, she felt, gave her the leverage to try to exert total control. I...

I'll try to keep this short. A year ago I was divorced from a woman who I had to fight tooth and nail just to get my concerns heard, much less considered. You can't let someone give you ultimatums, period. I'll leave that there since others have covered it pretty well. I do think that there...

Hello Raven! My animal totem is raven, or crow more precisely. Welcome aboard! Chris

This is an interesting thread. I've been buried in homework for my college classes, and haven't had the time to return to some of the threads I was following. A lot has transpired, I see. I've very much enjoyed reading the comments of Thomas, as always, and vizenos and Will, of course, and I...

In retrospect, there were a number of women who tried to scam me. I might be lucky, but I'm pretty wily. Of the women I "met", I'd say a third were scammers, a third weren't amenable to actually meeting, and a third had genuine potential. Every woman I actually, physically met lived up to her...

Right. All good points, Enlightenment. I think maybe I just got extremely lucky. OTOH, most of the people on there were genuinely looking for someone in whatever capacity. I have a very small group of friends. I don't work with any eligible women; didn't know any, and didn't know how to...

OK, but look...if you want radical change people have to die. Look at what Gandhi's death did. Look at what MLK's death did. Look at what the Kent State deaths did. Look at what photo journalism of the Vietnam war did. Look at what happened in the aftermath of Columbine, of Matthew...

Thank you! It's wonderful that you and the Que ball were able to meet here at good ole' IO! You know, I was so beat down at the end of my marriage that I had barely any self-esteem to scrape together. I thought "who would want me?" I was shocked to find that there was a whole universe of...

I hadn't heard about all of that, but I think any fairly intelligent person has to have a goodly portion of skepticism when it comes to any sort of e-commerce- and especially dating over the internet. I'll tell you a little about the Match.com experience and make several observations based...

Yeah. I met my fiancee on Yahoo's Match.com. We're getting married May 28. When I found out I was getting divorced I didn't know how to go about finding someone to date. I was pretty skeptical of online dating services as you might imagine. My plan A was to go to one of those mega churches...

Have you read Cornell West or Ernest Becker? Chris

1) Do you believe that it is only Christians who will be considered for Heaven? No. 2) Do you have a good idea of what life in Heaven would be like, besides a bunch of platitutdes? No. 3) If you believe in a literal Hell, then do you think those there get the opportunity to redeem...

I've put a great deal of thought into every aspect of what I do as a parent. There's nothing accidental about any of it. I wanted children, and I waited until I felt that I had the resources, time, energy, and intellectual and emotional maturity to raise them properly. I carefully nurtured...

No. There is always the innate fear of the miraculous. Labeling it doesn't help, though. Chris

We have to dispense with human projections of nobility and debauchery. Think about lions. Are they good or evil? Predatory nature, male domination, pack behavior- are these things evil or good when it comes to lions? Is a comet destroying the earth evil? Beyond philosophy and morality is...

There's something that's always bugged me about theistic apologetics. It's the idea that since one cannot know for certain, belief and disbelief have the same intellectual value, so why not choose belief? It's like saying that since I don't know for sure that holding a banana to my ear won't...