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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (5452)	5/21/2010 8:38:52 PM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

It is irrational to believe that murder and rape are good. Why? Suppose you murder someone who will testify against you and cause you to lead the rest of your life in prison. Isn't it rational to kill him? After all you agree that there is no absolute morality - that means murder isn't always wrong: "There's no absolute morality is there?" No, of course not. Reason tells rational people that initiated force is wrong. No, it doesn't. There might be times "initiated force" is perfectly rational.

To: Solon who wrote (5452)	5/22/2010 4:37:02 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

What on earth does it mean to be a free thinker? Does this mean free will - or not following the party line - or using your powers of reason. "A man’s volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity “man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded. To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question “to be or not to be” is the question “to think or not to think.” A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions." AYN RAND