Jonathan

This question came up in light of Judy Jarvis Thompson's famous violin analogy as an argument for abortion rights. In her scenario, you wake up and find yourself attached to a famous violinist who needs your body parts to remain alive for the next nine months. She argues that although it might be a good thing if you were to agree to remain attached that you would nevertheless have no obligation to remain attached. Because of your bodily sovereignty, it would be morally permissible for you to refuse the famous violinist the use of your body even if detaching yourself meant the violinist would die. And in the same way, even if the unborn is a full member of the human family and is every bit a person as the rest of us are, abortion is still morally permissible on the basis of the bodily sovereignty of the mother.

So I'm curious how people will answer this question. Does bodily sovereignty give Siamese twins the right to kill and remove each other? If not, where does the analogy break down?

The internet is full of people quoting Aristotle as saying, "Nothing is what rocks dream about," but nobody cites where the quote comes from. It sounds like something that ought to be in his book on Metaphysics, but I've used the "search inside" feature on Amazon and have not been able to find the quote. Does anybody know where it comes from?

Although there'll be a gazillion other videos of people doing covers of popular songs, whenever I open one, they send me a dirty message saying it matched third party content, and it's banned in the US. Why is it that it seems like everybody else is able to upload covers of them singing and playing the guitar, but whenever I do it, the video gets blocked? What the fudge?

I'm curious because a lot of Mormons are offended that anyone would dare suggest that Mormons are not really Christians as if it were a breach of etiquette to say such a thing. Concerning other Mormon sects besides the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, do you think other groups and organizations that call themselves Mormons are really Mormons?

If there is no God, then how come the world fits so perfectly into a chicken?

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/imagebuzz/terminal...

Just pick one thing. This is for religious Jews, by the way. If you're an atheist or whatever, please don't answer.

Around October or so of last year, one of my cats got the itchies. I put some flea medicine on him, but no fleas jumped off, and he didn't get better. By December, he had a couple of bald spots where he had scratched himself silly, so I took him to the vet thinking he had mange. The vet told me it was probably an allergy, and he gave me a spray to put on him. The spray helped. My cat stopped scratching as much, the redness went away, and his hair grew back. But I eventually ran out of spray, and his allergy came back with a fury. His mouth and chin looked like meatloaf. I tried changing his diet. I've changed it twice now, most recently to this:

http://www.amazon.com/Holistic-Select-Feline-Radia...

In the meantime, I went to the pet store and got some anti-itch spray. His mouth and face cleared up, but now he's got a bald spot on his head and on the back of his shoulders, and they both appear to be getting worse in spite of the pray and in spite of the new cat food.

So I called the vet again today. They said there's a lot of allergies in our area, and there's not much I can do except wait it out. They said they can give my cat a shot, but that will only give him temporary relief. I can also give him benedryl or Zirtec.

Is there anything else I can do? He's seven years old, and I don't want to fight this for the rest of his life. Are there allergy tests I can give him? Is there another food I can give him? Anything?

There are many people predicting that computers will eventually become conscious. At the same time, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more sophisticated. It seems reasonable to believe that artificial intelligence might some day become so sophisticated that we won't be able to tell whether a computer is really conscious or just mimicking consciousness.

So it seems like some day we could be in a situation where we'll have to debate whether computers are really conscious or not. How do you think we could settle that debate? Assume, for the sake of arguments, that computers at least SEEM to be conscious, and the question is whether they are really conscious or just highly developed artificial intelligence. What line of reasoning or experimentation could you use to determine whether they're really conscious or not?

Or do you think we could never know?

Did the government use that extra money to pay down the national debt, or did they find something to spend it on? Has the nation debt ever gone down under any president other than Clinton?

I've had two dreams in the past week that I killed somebody. In the first dream, I stabbed somebody to death, then spent the rest of the dream trying to hide the body. In the second dream, I cut my brother's head off with a hand saw. I wasn't angry with either one of these people in the dream or in real life. Actually the first guy doesn't even exist in real life. This is not the first time I've had dreams where I killed somebody. I've had lots of these dreams. A long time ago, I dreamed that I stabbed my grandmother to death in the neck with a fork. It used to be that when I had these kinds of dreams that it created all kinds of anxiety, and I'd wake up and take about a minute to realize it was just a dream, then I'd be overwhelmed with relief. But lately, the dreams don't cause me nearly as much anxiety if any at all. Am I becoming a sociopath?

When I was a kid, I had a neighbor who claimed that he caught a bat on his porch, stuck it in the freezer a few days, then thawed it out. He said the bat survived. He said bats were the only mammals you could do that with. I didn't actually witness these things for myself, and now I'm wondering if he was just pulling my leg. Does anybody knows whether you can freeze a bat and have it survive?

Suppose you are in a crowded movie theater. In which of these scenarios would you feel more safe?

1. You know that everybody in the theater has a loaded gun.

or

2. You know that one and only one person in the theater has a loaded gun.

Do you believe Jesus was raised physically from the dead?

The reason I ask is because there are some similarities between you and Jehovah's Witnesses (e.g. you both subscribe to soul sleep), and I've heard Charles Russell came out of the adventist movement, and JW's deny that Jesus was raised bodily from the dead. They believe he ceased to exist when he died and was recreated as a spirit creature with no physical body. They believe the body in the tomb was disposed of by God and did not participate in the resurrection. So what do YOU believe about the nature of Jesus' resurrection?

At the Reason Rally, Dawkins said about religious people, "Mock them! Ridicule them! Don't fall for the convention that we're all too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt."

Do you agree with Dawkins? And if so, how to you reconcile the use of ridicule in dealing with those who disagree with you with your claim to use reason when addressing the subject of religion?

The comments are about 13 minutes into the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QocLHL-sVc

I used to have a philosophy teacher who was a Mahayana Buddhist, so my information is coming from him. If my understanding is wrong, blame him. Anyway, from what I understand, according to Mahayana Buddhist, none of us reach nirvana until all of us reach nirvana. A bodhisattva is a person who vows not to enter nirvana until every blade of grass reaches enlightenment, but in reality, nobody can reach nirvana until every blade of grass reaches enlightenment anyway.

If each person's fate is so closely tied to each other person's fate, then why don't Mahayana Buddhists evangelize more? It seems like if the goal is for all of us to reach nirvana, you guys ought to be out trying to help people reach enlightenment. You ought to be trying to win converts to Buddhism. Why aren't you doing that?

I have a few hypothetical scenarios and wondered how Jews might answer them.

1. If my mother was not Jewish when I was born, but converted to Judaism shortly after, would I be a Jew?

2. If my mother was Jewish when I was born, but converted to Christianity shortly after, would I be a Jew?

3. If my mother was born Jewish, but converted to Christianity while I was in her womb, would I be a Jew?

4. If my mother was not born Jewish, but converted to Judaism while I was in her womb, would I be a Jew?

I know you guys don't keep all the Laws, but how do you determine which laws you should keep and which ones you don't have to keep? For example, I was just thinking about the one that says if your brother dies without having any kids, you have to marry his wife or something and have kids for him. You guys don't keep that one, do you?

If you honestly think your religion is true, why wouldn't you want everybody else to know about it? If God requires things of people, and if God is going to judge people, then wouldn't we all benefit from adopting Judaism and trying to keep the Law? If God is going to bestow privileges on Jews in the end that he's not going to bestow on everybody else, then wouldn't people stand to gain by converting to Judaism? Do Jews just not care about everybody else? Or do most of you not really subscribe to the historical foundations of your religion--that there really is a God who judges people, that God gave his Law to Moses, that God made certain promises to Abraham, David, etc., concerning the Hebrews and the nation of Israel?