Is Theistic Morality Necessarily Objectivist?:

Let us assume for the moment that the Biblical position on rape is clear: God condemns rape. But why? One possibility is that He condemns rape because it is wrong. Why is it wrong? It might be supposed that God has various reasons for thinking rape is wrong: it violates the victim’s rights, it traumatizes the victim, it undermines the fabric of society, and so on. All of these are bad making properties. However, if these reasons provide objective grounds for God thinking that rape is wrong, then they provide objective grounds for others as well. Moreover, these reasons would hold even if God did not exist. For example, rape would still traumatize the victim and rape would still undermine the fabric of society even. Thus, on this assumption, In…

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A powerful aftershock sent Haitians screaming into the streets on Wednesday, collapsing buildings, cracking roads and adding to the trauma of a nation stunned by an apocalyptic quake eight days ago.

The magnitude-5.9 jolt matched the strongest of the aftershocks that have followed the huge quake of Jan. 12 that devastated Haiti’s capital.

The new temblor collapsed seven buildings in Petit-Goave, the seaside town closest to the epicenter, according to Mike Morton of the U.N. Disaster Assessment and Coordination agency, but there were no reports of people crushed or trapped, perhaps because the earlier quake frightened most people into sleeping outside.

Wails of terror erupted in Port-au-Prince, where the aftershock briefly interrupted rescue efforts amid the broken concrete of collapsed buildings, and prompted doctors and patients to flee the University Hospital.

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians remain homeless, hungry and…

Powerful stuff, that porn. The Indonesian Minister of Communication and Information (who must be very smart to have a title like that) has determined that recent natural disasters in his country are a consequence of the ubiquity of pornographic DVDs. His logic is something like this:

1) it is a fact that one can easily buy porn in local markets, and

2) it is a fact that the Padang earthquake killed over a thousand people and that the Aceh tsunami devastated an entire region, therefore

3) it is a fact that the two are causally related.

Well, point 3 is a little shaky, but 1 and 2 are so strong it must make up for the absence of a causal relationship. Right? Right?

Anyway, you must all now unplug the internet and go through your magazines and DVDs and dispose of anything that might stir the wrath of gods.…