Staying in the Game

The man who has no problems to solve is out of the game.

Elbert Hubbard

I Was Wrong

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than yesterday.

Jonathan Swift

Picking and Choosing

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Oscar Wilde

Finding Your Way

Love is the compass of life.

Fearing Humanity

The main thing is life is not to be afraid to be human.

Pablo Casals

Losing Our Way

It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meanings of love.

Rollo May

Love & Will

Hard and Easy

Make simple things easy and hard things possible.

Defining Romatic Love

Love is friendship set on fire

Proper Grammar

Love is a verb.

Find a Clear Vision and Stick With It

Six years ago, when Amazon was just getting off the ground, CEO Jeff Bezos was widely criticized for taking on $2.8 billion in debt to make Amazon’s user interface “intuitive to the point of being completely natural.” Once the interface was up and running, investors started “calling for Bezos’ head” for his “unorthodox approach of favoring revenue growth over profit margin.” Bezos can now say, “I told you so.” By passing up short-term profits, he has built a large and loyal customer base. And thanks to customers’ steady purchases, Amazon will soon be virtually debt-free. By no coincidence, Amazon shares are up 26 percent this year. The company’s showing in the worst economy in 75 years offers “an important lesson for tech companies”: Find a clear vision and stick with it. “It’s a very hard road to take. But at least it’s simple.”

Kevin Kelleher
CNNmoney.com

Finding Happiness

A lot of happiness is overlooked because it doesn’t cost anything.

Isn’t My Conscience Enough?

We know something is crooked when we see it - even though we’ve never seen something perfectly straight. We are comparing it to an idea we have in our mind about straightness. Your conscience may be evidence of the existence of “moral straightness” but that does not tell me why I should follow its edicts.

You may slap actions with labels like “good” or “evil” but your conscience, by itself, offers no more than your preferences. The real question is, “How do you move the beyond your opinions as more than your preferences? How do you move into the realm of an ethical "ought"? And you’ll want to get to the “oughts”. Because otherwise, you have no way to condemn the mass murderer who claims he didn’t know any better or has another sets of moral views than you or simply comes from a society with a different belief system than you do.

Perhaps a whole lot of consciences saying the same thing will do it. If society has general rules, is that enough?

It could very well be that your conscience is just your "superego" at work, blandly repeating the rules society has taught you. Leaving you operating out of a sense of guilt.

“So, how do we know what is right, given that “good people” disagree on a number of moral issues?”

While religion is filled with superstition and hypocrisy, there are plenty of exceptions and pointing at people’s inconsistent behavior is not a substitute for addressing the issues. It’s not reasonable to argue that “because the politicians I know behave in a blameworthy manner” therefore “all politicians act immorally.”

What if a society decides it's ok to kill Jews or some other minority? How do we justify taking our society's views and imposing them on others (like Nazi Germany)? Somehow these "rules" must supersede individual societies, so they apply across cultures and generations.

Stephen Goforth

Pros and Amateurs

A lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

Appreciating What We Have

It’s not so much this generation coming up that’s the trouble but human nature itself. Once our expectations are set a certain way, it is difficult to change them, even when we appear ridiculous in context.

Art Divides the Sexes

Both men and women may admire art together but they don’t do it in the same way. A new study out of Spain’s University of Baleares suggests men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job. Men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object- how it takes up space and relates to the world around it. But women go a step further and tie the visual object to language, applying verbal labels what they experience. Details are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The Climb

Life is in the climb.

Toby Mckeehan

Do We Need God if we make Claims of Morality?

“I think good people are good people, with or without a ‘God’ to pin it on.”

A friend wrote that statement to me. Is she right? Is God really a necessary underpinning for our beliefs, if we want to call something good or bad?

People who chose to behave morally without acknowledging God are still behaving in a praiseworthy manner. But their actions lack an underlying justification. One day, their effects will evaporate into the cold cosmos. So what’s the purpose? If we are “all there is” then there’s no compelling reason to behave "morally" ..other than out of self-interest.. so we might enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings it produces or avoid society’s punishment.

If you want to be able to point to the child abuser and say, “This is wrong!” and not just lobby for others to accept your own preferences, then you need to hang your hat on something (or someone) bigger than any single person or culture.

Stephen Goforth

Going Forward

Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments.

John Calvin

When Numbers Deceive

Michael Ranney likes asking questions.

Being a professor of education at UCLA, he has plenty of young people around who can act as guinea pigs. For example: For every 1,000 U.S. residents, how many legal immigrants are there each year? How many people, per thousand residents, are incarcerated? For every thousand people, how many computers are there? How many abortions?Few of us spend our leisure hours looking up and memorizing data. But many of us flatter ourselves that we know about these issues. And yet …

On abortion and immigration, says Ranney, about 80 percent of those questioned base their opinions on inaccurate information. For example, students at one college typically estimated annual legal immigration at about 10 percent of the U.S. population (implying 30 million legal immigrants every year). Nonstudents guessed even higher. The actual rate in 2006 was about 0.3 percent. That is, even the lower estimates were more than 30 times too high.

The students’ estimates for the number of abortions varied widely, but the middle of the range was about 5,000 for every million live births. The actual figure in the United States in 2006 was 335,000 per million live births—67 times higher than the typical estimate.

The good news: Many respondents found the correct answers so surprising that they adjusted their political views on the spot.

Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
The Numbers Game