First Contact

Ultrasound of twins at 6 weeks (not mine, fyi!)

Question of the week (for me) -- when do people have first contact with their children? I may have seen mine very early on, when I was only about 6 weeks pregnant. I saw two blobs on an ultrasound image, anyway. But was that them--Becky and Sam? 

One thing seems pretty clear--it's not until 20 weeks gestation (very roughly, and at the very least

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion
and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations
like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for
Science Education that engage in the same

A Puzzle About Twins

Suppose people start existing on the first day after conception--just suppose.  Here's an argument that seems to show that identical twins must be an exception.  Take Betty and Casey, who come into existence as my diagram depicts--


Jeff McMahan makes this argument--

[Betty and Casey] ... cannot both be identical with the original zygote for, given the transitivity of identity, that would imply

Progress Report

I've been working slowly on a book (well, so far a WORD file) about parenthood. I'm dealing with topics in the order in which people encounter them, so the first several chapters are about the reasons why we have children, whether there are good reasons not to have children, and how choosy we ought to be about the kind of children we have. I'm trying to delve into the most thorny puzzles about

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--



Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left
to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of

Dear NRA

Words can't really express how I feel about yesterday's massacre, considering that I have teenagers I routinely drop off at movie theaters, so I'll just pass on a letter that came into my possession. It's from an NRA fan by the name of I. Amanidiot.

***

Dear NRA,

Consider, please, my little Swiss Army knife.



The US Government forbids me to carry it onto an airplane. This really upsets me.

Aristotle on Parenthood

Here are some passages from Aristotle that I've been pondering (all from Nichomachean Ethics Book VIII, Chapter 12). Maybe you'd like to ponder too--

A parent is fond of his children because he regards them as something of himself; and children are fond of a parent because they regard themselves as coming from him.
The parent regards his children as his own more than the product regards the

Circumcision Debate

Interesting debate here that touches on my post about religious circumcision at several points. Fuzzy picture quality, unfortunately. How to pronounce "Kazez"? Kuh-ZEZ.  Looks exotic, sounds pretty plain vanilla!

Graphing Ideas

This is beautiful, check it out.

What is Feminism?

For lovers of Scottish accents and feisty red-headed girls, nothing could possibly beat the movie Brave. So funny, so heart-warming, so adorable.  And a feminist movie for kids, too!  Let's just say I'm in love.  Funny thing, though-- after the movie I gently queried my two kids, 15 year old boy/girl twins, about the feminist message of the movie, and discovered, to my surprise, that they

Religious Circumcision

picture from www.brityy.org


I am against infant circumcision. That said, I hasten to add that I don't think circumcising boys is the world's greatest crime.  Many circumcised boys have lived to tell the story.  They are not enormously deprived.  Circumcising boys is nothing like "circumcising" girls.  Still--I think the practice is wrong and should stop.



But what if you're Jewish? Don't

Jeff

When I taught a course on procreative ethics last year, my students were exposed to all sorts of odd thought experiments.  For example, we talked about a thought experiment devised by Gregory Kavka.  Imagine a couple that uses a sex pill to increase sexual pleasure, with the result that their offspring are born with some minor abnormality.  The intuition is that there's something wrong with this,

Beautiful World

I had my musical interlude, now it's time for natural beauty.  (This is what happens when you try to read an excruciatingly boring book--there have to be a lot of interludes. To protect the innocent, I won't be saying who wrote the book.)  The picture, with credits, is from Jerry Coyne's blog, and he credits it to Jens Kolk.

The Rifle's Spiral

Musical interlude.  At first I thought Port of Morrow was a tad bland, but I've come to love it. No--to be honest!--I'm obsessed with it. James Mercer's voice is perfectly warm and melodious, but with hints of edginess. Reminds me of something from the 60s--but for the life of me I can't think exactly what. 

Conservatives are Happier?

So says Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in today's New York Times--




WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? The answer might
seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature
in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally
authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and
loss, low in

Bullying

I've been on the road a lot in the last month, so away from a full-size computer. For rest and relaxation, I've been on Twitter quite a bit. Hey, it's fun compressing messages! Except some things are too complicated to talk about in tiny bursts.

Like Bullying.  Someone started a Twitter hashtag, #FTBullies, meant to call attention to bullying at Free Thought Blogs. If you don't define your