Globally Optimistic,

Christopher Hitchens, one of my personal heroes, has written a piece on waterboarding ( a technique that goes back to the Spanish Inquisition ).  He did this from first hand experience ( yes he actually agreed to be tortured ).   He concludes (surprise surprise) that it is in fact torture.

While watching the video of his torture, I find myself asking where the hell am I?  Is this America, the land “with Liberty and Justice for all?”  This administration’s complete and blatant lack of all morals is astonishing.  It is never acceptable to torture and it is never acceptable to lock someone up without a trial.  Not only are these things dangerous, but they are immoral in any sense of the word.  They are dangerous because in the long term they will end our democracy.

I do not think that I am overstating this in the slightest.

I have just finished Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.  This was the first book I have agreed to read about Christianity.  I have to say this book was pretty entertaining.

He spends quite a bit of time in the beginning of the book attempting to show that there is an absolute morality.  He introduces a concept call The Law of Human Nature.  He attempts to put this new law on the same footing as the Laws of Nature, but these cannot be compared because what we call the Laws of Nature are always followed.  If we see an instance where one of the Laws of Nature is broken (i.e. a stone falls up instead of down) then it means that we had the law wrong and now we need to either modify it to include this odd event or failing that, throw the whole thing out and start over.  Now Lewis does admit the the two laws are of a different sort.  This whole idea of a “Law of Human Nature” really annoys me because it is trying to ride on the coat tails of science (by this I really mean Physics:), but in fact it has nothing to do with science. But I digress.

He argues that since we all share this idea of right behavior (Law of Human Nature) then it must be:

A.  “be a real thing”

B.  “Not made up by ourselves”

C.  “something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behavior, and yet quite definitely real-a real law, which we find pressing on us”

Even if we throw aside the facts about how different moral (1,2) systems have been over the course of human history I am still not sure how any of these things follow.  He seems to say that if it is real then it cannot be made up.  But this is clearly not the case.  We have a legal system ( it is a very real thing ), but this system is made up by law makers.

And again even if both A and B are true if does not have to be “beyond ordinary facts”.  It could be a product of our genes.  It could be that we evolved in small groups of hunter-gathers and most of the people in these groups would be related.  This would mean that any time you helped a member of that group you would be helping our own genes to survive ( Dawkins goes into this in better detail in the The God Delusion ).  You would also be helping yourself survive because a if you are in a strong group you would have a better chance of surviving.  This would mean that these “good” people would be more likely to survive and thereby likely to have more offspring.  I do not know that this is the case, but it is simply an example of how it could have  happened.

From here he basically goes on to say that an outside agent (read God) is directing man to do right.  Now if the arguments for the Law of Human Nature and A, B and C were convincing then maybe I would give this book a little more thought.

Most of the rest of the book is mainly about what christians believe which doesn’t really concern me very much.  Anyway, I am sure that my criticisms were not unique and have probably been made a hundred times.