Philosophy

The Pope’s Praise Of Agnostics

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I consider myself an agnostic, but not in this sense:

In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God.” They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.” They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it. But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others.

These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions. Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force.

That doesn’t really describe me at all. I don’t think that I “suffer” from God’s absence, and I’m no seeking Him in any way (other than in my religious belief that it is humanity’s teleological duty to bring life and awareness to the universe). I’m functionally an atheist, in the sense that I live my life as though there is no God — I’m an agnostic only in the sense that I know that I can’t know whether or not there is a God, so I’m not an evangelist of the belief that He doesn’t exist, as people like Dawkins and Hitchens are.

Business, Space

PDR or CDR?

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I’m glad that NASA has approved SpaceX’s Preliminary Design Review for the launch abort system, but this doesn’t seem right:

NASA has approved the preliminary design review of SpaceX’s launch abort system, which will help crews aboard the Dragon capsule get out of harm’s way should any problems crop up during liftoff, company officials announced last week. With this hurdle cleared, SpaceX can now start building hardware for the system.

Emphasis mine. That’s not my understanding of a PDR. I thought that PDR meant that you could start doing detailed design, advancing to a Critical Design Review. After passing CDR, you start bending metal. Is there not going to be a CDR?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Time To Go

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…Eric Holder. I doubt that he’ll go voluntarily, though. The House might want to start to think about impeachment.

[Update a while later]

This is almost certainly about the administration pushing a gun-control agenda:

AR-15 rifles routinely cost $750 for the most basic versions, and quality versions can easily run more than $1000 each. The cartels raid armories and buy selective-fire M-16 and M-4 rifles from deserting or corrupt Mexican military members for far less than the semi-automatic rifles finding their way to the cartels with federal government assistance, or obtain them from the same South American armories that they get their grenades from. It is a bit harder to pin-down a “street price” for an M-16/M-4 in Mexico, but cartels can probably obtain them for $5o0 or less.

The point, of course, is that it isn’t remotely cost-effective for cartels to buy these weapons in the U.S.

Yet the AK- and AR-pattern weapons that are most bitterly opposed by gun-grabbing groups and politicians in the United States are the most common weapons purchased by Operation Fast and Furious.

So they deliberately allowed hundreds to be murdered, here and in Mexico, so they could slander law-abiding gun dealers and subvert the Second Amendment. They shouldn’t be allowed to resign. They should be doing hard time.

[Update a while later]

Gang control, not gun control.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I hadn’t read the whole piece when I first posted the link (the first one in this post). Toward the end:

Prominent anti gun politicians who had been aggressively promoting the “90-percent lie” were in a position to use agencies under their control to carry out a gunwalking plot that planted the evidence to support their contentions. The very guns that these politicians wanted to most control or ban outright with far stricter gun control measures were then pushed to the cartels. No wonder the president laughed about his plot to advance gun control “under the radar.”

Hard time.

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