Marat

I think the real conspiracy came after 9/11 rather than leading up to it, in the sense that Bush II harnessed the political power generated by a dramatic, highly cinematic, and unexpected event and used it to promote the traditional Republican agenda. That agenda included feeding money away from domestic programs and into the military-industrial complex, restricting civil liberties and enhancing police powers, pursuing imperalistic aims abroad (the old Wolfawitz plan could be dusted off and put into operation if Iraq could be made to seem responsible for 9/11), and giving Bush II the aura of a 'wartime President' so he could get re-elected. Thus the 'conspiracy' of 9/11 was just like that associated with the burning down of the Reichstag in 1933. The Nazis didn't start the fire to create the appearance of an emergency that would allow them to enact their political program, but they certainly exploited that accidental event to make it work as a justification for enacting their pre-existing program.

Also, with respect to your points, Moontanman, it would have been so easy for an omniscient God, who would have anticipated all these terrible effects his book as written has inspired in the world, to have put various warnings in his book to forestall these developments -- but somehow, he forgot! This suggests a limit to his omniscience, which is inconsistent with the hypothesis, so his existence as the ultimate author of that book is disproved.

The data might not be so depressing as they appear, for it could be that the same bottom 25% subscribes to all the delusions surveyed, so it is not as if nearly everyone in America is dumb, just that a minority are very dumb. That said, sociologists have been asking for a long time why America "is the only first-world country with a third-world cultural niveau?" When I moved from the U.S. to Britain at age 28, I was shocked at how much higher the general intellectual level of the country was than what I had become familiar with in the U.S., and later, when I moved to Germany, I was surprised at how much more intelligent the culture was than Britain's. Is this difference due to America's extreme religiosity, to its large and still unassimilated culture of new immigrants, to the dilution of its intellectual quality by the over-expansion of university education, to its excessive capitalism with its attendant decline of all cultural products to the lowest cultural denominator, where the market is broadest, to the anti-intellectualism of its brand of populist democracy? Probably it is the result of all these factors.

That's a great video: It reminds me of the old song, "Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." The inevitable question has to be, "Why not?" Sometimes Christians say they sin because they are weak, but while people might step on the third rail of a subway by accident, they never do so out of weakness or lack of fortitude to act in their best interests, which is the supposed reason why believers threaten their admission into Heaven by sinning. No one is ever tempted to send the contents of his bank account to his worst enemy, or to drink Drano because of some irrational weakness, but somehow we are expected to believe that people endanger their admission to a realm of everlasting bliss because they are too weak to persist in seeking it. Even those religions which promise the remission of sins usually do so with the proviso that their rituals create the possibility of God forgiving sins, but cannot compel him to forgive them with certainty, so people would still excruciatingly careful to avoid sinning.

If I believed that this present life were just a brief test to determine whether I would be admitted after death to another life of eternal bliss, it is inconceivable to me that I would ever commit a sin, since it would simply be foolish. Yet I hear Christians all the time say that they were 'weak' or 'tempted' on a given occasion to sin, and so did so, thus jeopardizing their own rational best interest in enjoying infinite bliss for the sake of a brief moment of trivial indiscretion. But since sane people are never tempted to bend down and touch the third rail of a subway because they are tempted by a piece of candy they spot lying there, I would assume that no sane Christian would ever be tempted to sin. Since they so often do sin, however, demonstrates that they don't really believe in the doctrine they profess. Similarly, if I believed that my present life were just a brief test prior to a possibly infinite afterlife of heavenly bliss, nothing that goes wrong here could ever seriously bother me. If we were all at a giant garden party given by God, and he imposed a forfeit on someone and made him blind for the duration of the party prior to admission to Heaven at the end of the afternoon, that blindness would be no more distressing than being 'it' for a little while in a schoolyard game of tag. So the fact that Christians wail in despair when some serious but mundane tragedy ruins only this life for them makes me again suspect that they don't really believe what they profess. I do imagine that Christians seriously think that they believe, but this is only because they have never seriously examined the incongruities of their behavior in the situations I have sketched above.

Although common law countries in some cases have a good rights record, the British Parliament has considered instituting anti-hate speech laws and Canadian Supreme Court judgments have restricted holocaust-denying speech on fairly flimsy grounds. The U.S. 'clear and present danger' standard is a good one for limiting restrictions on free speech, since it strikes at the tendency of majorities to believe that everything they morally disapprove must also, somehow, somewhere, ultimately also cause real harm. (E.g., masturbation will cause hairy palms and blindness) Now feminists are making a strong bid to trim free speech rights around the world to deny the right of people to publish, buy, possess, or view pornography, on the argument that the very existence of pornography somehow poisons the social atmosphere and harms women by mysterious causal chains which no one has yet been able to trace.

Sometimes those objecting to a kidney market say that it would result in all sorts of desperate sales, such as extremely poor people selling a kidney to buy enough food for their starving children, etc., and so for this reason it should be forbidden. But in fact, our society allows such desperate bargains all the time already, such as when poor people join the army during a war simply because that is the only work they can find, or when impoverished families in West Virginia all work in coal mines, which are among the most dangerous places to work in the world, or when poor men from the inner city try to make money by becoming boxers. All these choices are both legal, risky, and potentially damaging to health or lethal, just a selling a kidney on an unregulated market could be.

Needimprovement, when you say that there are some elements of the Bible which are just the 'setting' of the story and so need not be literally true, while there are other elements which are the necessarily true message of God, we are confronted by the question, how do we tell which are the essential and which are the inessential parts of the story, so we know which are literally and necessarily true, and which are just unnecessary background details? In a book filled with mythological and fantastic features, there is no evident criterion for identifying one detail as essential (say, Christ being resurrected from his tomb), and another detail (Noah's flood) being just a metaphor which need not be taken seriously. Similarly, when you admit that the Bible is a composite production of human and divine authorship, how can we tell now, at this distance, which parts are which, and thus which sections we can dismiss as inessential and which are vital? If you reply that you believe all of it because even the human-authored parts were written under divine inspiration, then that is just an assertion of a belief which itself cannot be proved. But if it all comes down to a belief in an assertion of divine inspiration which cannot be proved, then how do the miracles help us believe any of it, since they could just be the tricks of an illlusionist operating in a gullible, superstitious age? But wouldn't an omiscient Deity have realized that the story would affect people that way and thus fail to convince them? If the Bible were just made up by a group of humans, I could understand why the proof of its validity has such obvious flaws. But if it was of divine authorship, then I wonder why the idea was not communicated in such a way that it would have been clear and convincing? An omniscient intelligence could have inscribed the Christian teaching and Biblical message on everyone's brain, and then made us capable of accessing that message only if wee were good. If that had been done, then salvation would have an ethical basis and the message of God would be available to all, not just to those 'lucky' enough to live where the message of God was spread by the contingent forces of history. But that the message was not so inscribed, but was only communicated by the unreliable, arbitrary, and clumsy way it was, with linguistic, historical, and interpretive puzzles about its meaning and authenticity, is consistent with its authorship by people rather than by the divinity.

I agree with what the previous posters have said about the difficulty politicians and others encounter in defending free speech when hate speech is at issue. Fortunately the United States has a very strong free speech right able to resist the forces of political correctness which would like to impose paternalistic restrictions on liberties. But the problem is that no freedoms in a civil society can be absolute, since any constitutionally entrenched liberty will always have to accommodate pressing and substantial policy interests. For example, no government could operate if officials had to get a search warrant to be able to search every individual at customs, and free speech cannot mean the right to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater. The problem is that this need to moderate rights opens rights up to both necessary and unnecessary limitations, and in countries without a strong tradition of individual liberty like the U.S., rights limits quickly come to include limitations on people using rights in harmless ways the majority doesn't like.

Many liberal democracies made it illegal to deny the Holocaust, and some impose serious criminal penalities for doing so. The Netherlands even criminalizes 'relativizing' the Holocaust by calibrating its magnitude against other genocides and arguing that it is comparable. Some court judgments have even argued that it is just the pain that Holocaust denial causes Holocaust survivors which justifies the statute; others suggest that if Holocaust denial is permitted, the state risks the rebirth of Nazism as a serious danger. But it seems to me that the essence of living in a liberal state means that we have to be prepared to hear things we don't like. Everybody hates something, so if we were to forbid free speech for irritating people, we would all have to be silent. The anti-Christian German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, for example, said he couldn't stand church bells ringing, but no one would seriously say that is a reason for forbidding churches to do so. Free speech doesn't have to be formulated as a right if we only want to allow what the majority doesn't mind hearing. And certainly there is no modern state where Nazism is a serious threat, and such neo-Nazi groups as exist are simply pathetic; the more they speak, the more they increase public anger against them. I am not even sure why denying an historical fact helps promote Nazism. If the speaker denies that the Holocaust happened, doesn't he just say that the Nazis were so incompetent that when they had most of Europe under their control they could not do what they intended to so? And what type of political system is the Holocaust-denier defending? If Nazism really didn't commit the Holocaust, then it was nothing worse than a militaristic, fascist regime like Franco's Spain, and it would seem positively silly to criminalize people for saying today that they like Franco's policies. Typically it is religions which insist that people affirm a specific historical event is a factual truth, such as Christ's resurrection or Mohammed's flight into the sky after his death in Jerusalem. It thus seems almost as if modern liberal states are trying to impose a new state religion of 'Holocaust belief' on their citizens, which is utterly inconsistent with the freedoms those states otherwise affirm. In England until the 19th century you couldn't hold government office unless you swore belief in the Holy Trinity, and you wouldn't be invited to cocktail parties in America until the 1960s if you were known to be an atheist, and now no historian could hold a university academic post, nor would anyone invite a neighbor to dinner, if that person seriously questioned any aspect of the Holocaust. Sociologists have written of the need for society to find a replacement religion as a social glue now that traditional religious belief in the West has declined, and for society to unite on its common agreement that the Holocaust is the most evil event in history seems a vital part of this attempt to generate a new source of social cohesion.

It would be a very interesting discussion if Needimprovement were to engage some of the points made against his views specifically and directly. If anyone is going to be persuaded by anything said, we need to answer each other's points punctatim.

While the gigantic financial meltdown of 2008 wiped $1.8 trillion in value off the nation's books, the War on Terrorism from 2001 to 2009 had already cost $2.4 trillion, against a total value of all goods and services produced in the United States of $17.5 trillion. Although the number of people killed in the 9/11 tragedy was only equal to the number of people killed every year in the United States by accidental drowning -- a problem which attracts very little funding -- the money spent preventing another 9/11 amounts to $800 million per person killed, or about 700 times more than the value ordinarily assigned to a human life lost by someone else's negligence in a tort suit. To determine whether the 9/11 attacks were a catastrophic but rare event, a one-off crime committed by a group of about 100 well-funded individuals -- really just another blip in the series of terrorist attacks which began with the Anarchists' assassination of President McKinley, continued with the explosion of a wagon filled with nails on Wall Street in the 1920s, and persisted through the plane hijackings of the 1970s -- or the first salvo in a never-ending, new Third World War of the West against Terrorism, would really have to be determined by a blue-ribbon commission of experts studying the event for a year or so. But instead, a day after the event, a single 'gentleman's C' history student from Yale, George Bush II, jumped atop the rubble in Manhattan and screamed through a megaphone that this tragedy could only possibly be understood as the inauguration of a New World War that would forever require inflated funding for the military-industrial complex, would perfectly compensate for the lack of excuses for large military budgets caused by the end of the Cold War, would require police powers to be enhanced and civil liberties to be curtailed, and would also, as a side-effect, forever require domestic programs to be severely underfunded or slashed so that the massive diversion of tax money to war contractors would not generate too great a deficit. That all these results of the event being interpreted as the beginning of a new, perpetual World War rather than an unfortunate but unique crime just happened to support traditional Republican Party policy preferences was of course just a lucky coincidence. Makes you wonder if the spending is really worth it.

I would just re-emphasize the many varied options which open up with an M.D. which would not be available with a Ph.D., if only because admission to medical degrees is so much more restrictive. Many M.D.s spend their whole lives doing lab work, but discover that they have an easier time getting hired because a medical research lab may need a few M.D.s but find that many of them have been attracted away to more lucrative work in private practise, so the M.D.s are 'precious' while the Ph.D.s are a dime a dozen. M.D.s can work in pharmaceutical labs, as scientific pathologists, as government regulators, as medical ethicists, as journal editors, or as academics, and in none of these positions do they ever have to hand out death sentences to individual patients they cannot help, as so often happens in regular practise.

I must confess that I never understand what Christians are saying when they assert that 'I feel in my heart that Jesus/God loves me.' It seems to me that they simply carve off one part of their consciousness and label it 'the Divinity,' another part and label it 'me,' and then intuit a relation of 'loving' flowing from the former to the latter. I don't see how you can informatively say that you can test whether one mentally-constructed thing, your idea of God, is really related via love to another mentally-constituted thing, your sense of selfhood. Could you, in good Popperian fashion, imagine a test that would indicate that that love had ceased? If not, then I'm not sure how you can be sure it is continuing, or real in the first place. Even the Bible says that the Devil may delude us and make us think he is himself the Divinity, so how do you independently test this loving moment in the continuum of your consciousness to ensure that it is really God and not just the Devil fooling you?

Both scientifically-oriented thinkers and religiously-oriented thinkers occasionally encounter phenomena they can't explain. But while the religious people quickly leap to the assumption that what they cannot explain has to be interpreted as the manifestation of a divine miracle, the scientists say that what cannot be explained is just a temporarily blank spot on the map of scientific accounts, an open space lying unfilled and waiting for additional data or rational inference to fill it in. The essential point is, however, that these two approaches are not equally rational, since the religious approach illegitimately assigns the explanation, 'divinely caused miracle,' for something it cannot explain by natural causes, while the scientific approach honestly leaves unexplained what for the moment cannot be explained by normal, objective, publicly accessible, universally shareable data and rational inference. Consider the 'unexplained phenomenon' of the waviform propagation of light through space in the 1890s. The fact that light had this transmission pattern rationally implied that it was being carried in some medium able to preserve its waviform structure in motion, like the waves propagated from a turtle swimming on the surface of a pond. But then the Michealson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of propagation of light didn't change whether you fired a light beam into space with the motion of the Earth or against it, so it couldn't be moving through a resisting medium such as was required to account for its waviform structure. At this point, no scientist said that inexplicable result was a 'miracle' requiring some magical force to 'explain' it, but rather, they just left it as an open question and continued to tinker with aether explanations to try to come up with a natural explanation. The reason they didn't fill this blank space on the scientific map with a miracle, a special kind of being with magical powers, was that special hypotheses with unique properties really can't explain anything, since they fail to connect the phenomenon to be explained with anything more well understood. Instead, they just re-depict what is to be explained on a lower ontological level, much as the Ancients 'explained' thunder by the action of the Thunder God. An 'explanation' like that is just circular and uninformative.

In the British Museum there is an Ancient Babylonian object that has been hypothesized to have been an operating battery, in which case there must have been some experience with current electricity. But this interpretation has been disputed. However, if the Babylonians really did have batteries, then their imagination may have wandered into high-tech realms and included images of robotic creatures. But the Ancient Hebrews, when they indulged in imaginative excursions, confined their speculations to the organic rather than venturing into the mechanical, which is what you would expect from their level of culture. This is why the Ezekiel story stands out for its detailed, technological character. The most unrestrainedly imaginative work by the Ancient Hebrews is the Book of Revelation, but every image in it is borrowed and developed from the natural, organic world of beasts, landscapes, and weather, with a modicum of conventional artifacts. We read there about dragons, lambs, archangels, a beast with seven heads and ten horns, the whore of Babylon, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, locusts, poisonous rivers, blood, earthquakes, and golden bowls, but nothing like the highly complex image of a machine that we find in Ezekiel.

Don't think instrumentally about what you want to do, but rather, follow your interests. I say this for three reasons: First, as long as you are doing what you enjoy, it hardly matters whether it leads to something profitable in other terms or not. Second, if you do something you do not enjoy just because it is more practical, you will wind up spending 90% of your life experiencing a career you don't like, which will make the money and success you obtain pale in comparison. Third, you will find that the only way to do advanced work well in any field is to be able to find a way to fall in love with it. If you can't do that, then you will only lead a life of frustration and inability to do your best. But having said all that, I wonder if, with your knowledge of biochem, immunology, etc., you have considered studying medicine? There are so many different lifestyles and types of medicine you can pursue with an M.D. that it is the perfect qualification to have in your pocket while you are trying to figure out what to do with your life. An MBA is just a utilitarian degree with very little conceptual interest. From the 1980s to the year 2000 was the great era of the profitable MBA, but that has now passed, and most firms prefer someone with technical knowledge in the relevant field rather than with the sort of amorphous, brain-dead, 'leadership' skills of an MBA. You wouldn't really want to appear before the world armed with the degree that everyone now blames for the 2008 financial collapse.

It is certainly true that in a universe in which there were no constraints to give shape to the will by confining it, we would never be able to become aware of being either free or unfree. But what gives shape to our awareness of will doesn't have to be law, and certainly not law from some superstitious source. Instead it could take shape from any constraint, such as the resistance of matter to what we want to do with it, for example. I agree that by definition, conscience as opposed to subjective whim has to be essentially related to objectivity. But here again, the relation of conscience to the objective world can be just to facts, to rational arguments about how we should lead our lives in a social setting so that we can all thrive together, or to publicly demonstrable reasons about the proper way to act. The objective anchor of conscience required to distinguish it from any purely subjective mental state need not be in some theological entity or dogma.

I want to concede right away that my earlier statement that the Ezekiel passage 'obviously' shows a Bronze Age observer reacting to a robotic probe was a misstatement, as my other comments about that passage demonstrate. What I really meant was that that passage suggests that some observer was struggling to interpret something he saw rather than just making it up, in which case the story would have had more of the characteristics of the many invented tales of the age. Derek Price, a professor of the history of science at the University of London, Cambridge University, and finally Yale University, did a lot of research on robotics in the Ancient world. In the writings of Socrates (ca. 300 BC) there is an account of robotic manniquins which moved spontaneously unless they were restrained. Since Socrates just mentions these in passing to illustrate some other point he is making, it is clear that he was referring to something he could expect his readers/listeners to be generally familiar with, so there must have been more than a few of these devices around. There is also the Greek legend of Talus, the giant being of metal who supposedly patrolled around Crete to keep robbers away. Price also interpreted some documents to support the theory that at Julius Caesar's famous funeral, there was a robotic display of Caesar's dead body, which rose out of its casket during Antony's funeral oration and horrified the crowd with fake blood being pumped out of his wounds by some mechanical device hidden within the catafalque. Heron of Alexandria also used his simple machines to perform religious stage tricks, but whether he fashioned anything like a humanoid robot is unknown. Stories of purportedly real robots don't reappear in the West until the reports of Albertus Magnus' robot ca. 1200 AD, which could supposedly perform chores around his apartment, but which was destroyed after his death by superstitious people who were afraid of it. But although the scientific Greeks knew a lot about machines at least by 300 BC, I doubt that the then much less scientific tribe of Israelites would have had much ability to imagine robotic entities ca. 1400 BC when the Ezekiel story appeared.

The thing that inclines me away from interpreting this passage as evidence of an anachronistically lucky imaginative construct by an early Jules Verne is that so many different elements of this tale seem to fit the hypothesis that it is the honest report of some hi-tech, robotic device seen by a Bronze Age witness. The 'vision' begins with flashing fire, clouds, and four apparently living creatures emerging from it. The author notes that "their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of a calf's foot." The object "sparkles like burnished bronze," and its wheels shine "like the gleaming of beryl." There is also some structure (an observation light?) on top which consists of gleaming metal "like the appearance of fire enclosed all around." These apparently metallic, moving, humanoid objects glow like "burning coals of fire" and "out of the fire comes lightning," suggesting something like the leaking of an electric charge. The objects can rise into the sky, drawing their wheels up with them, and move very fast, darting to and fro "like the appearance of a flash of lightning." When it moves the author says it emits a (possibly mechanical whirring?) noise "like the tumult of an army." What intrigues me about this passage is precisely because its imagery sounds so much like Jules Verne, i.e., like a 19th century imaginative author, with lots of electricity, clouds of smoke, burnished metal, glowing lights, whirring wheels, astonishing speeds, and flying machines, not like the invented story of someone living in a world of wood, canvas, camels, simple bronze tools, and the constant intrusion into every story of gods and moral lessons, with few things worth describing in detail unless they had some theological significance.

That is actually Kant's starting point for this reasoning, so it reflects the view of late 18th century natural science, which of course hadn't anticipated the questions about universal causality posed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, Copenhagen quantum mechanics, etc. But many theorists have argued in recent years that even these new discoveries don't undermine the basic premise that natural science is the science of causes. Ever since the 17th century, it was accepted as axiomatic that hylozoism, saying for example that an apple fell from a tree because it just wanted to, or that the Moon orbits the Earth because its inner nature compels it to, is the death of scientific explanation. Science essentially operates by explaining events in terms of relations extending into quantifiable contexts of time and space, and the external relations among objects which are quantifiable in spatio-temporal terms are causal. Aristotelian physics said that things moved because they tended to flee toward their natural place in the universe, which for fire was up and for matter was down. But the great advance to modern physics by Newton and others was to insist that things move because something else collides with them to cause them to move. Just about any work on the philosophy of science will discuss the view that causal accounts are the essence of scientific explanation.

Bignose: The clumsiness, ineptness, and strained character of the Old Testament passage in Ezekiel has to do with the nature of the image described rather than with any specific language used in the description, so I would not attribute the awkwardness of the text to the quality of the translation. The author seems to be struggling to report all the details of what he has actually seen, since the image he gives is highly complex, technical, and aesthetically unimpressive, being burdened with too many details. It also has no specific connections to anything in the theology of the Ancient Hebrews, and there is nothing with links up with or adumbrates the Ark of the Covenant, the message of the Psalms, Passover, or anything else which figures prominently in the rest of Ancient Hebrew mythology. To get a flavor of the text, just consider the following excerpt: "I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. ... Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting with a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. .... When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose." While the detail here sounds nothing like the objects which the author of the passage would have encountered in his own life, it does suggest aspects of machines which are much more familiar to modern readers, such as perhaps a mobile probe with four sides, each having features a Bronze-age observer would interpret as a face, supported by a imbricated system of wheels (familiar from tank tracks), which had limited turning mobility and so could only move in one of the four major compass directions at a time.

Thanks for that very interesting link. Some of those images and anecdotes can be explained away, in part because the predominant religion of modern times is a religion of what anthropologists call 'sky-gods,' so it is only natural to imagine that remarkable things will appear in the sky. But in many other cases interpreting the stories and images as something other than UFO sightings seems perverse. In saying this, however, I would put the emphasis on the 'unidentified' in 'UFO,' since just because people see something inexplicable in the sky doesn't necessarily have any implication of visits by beings from another planet. By far the most interesting story is in the Old Testament, in Ezekial 1:1-28, where a bronze age witness is quite obviously struggling to explain the motion of mechanical robots that come from the sky. This makes such an inept image and the description is so strained and clumsy that it sounds more as if someone is trying to give an accurate report of something seen rather than making up something, since fiction always flows more smoothly. Given what we know now of the great difficulty in traversing the vast distances of space to other interesting planets while still providing life support on board for astronauts, the fact that the author of that book of the Bible describes robots coming from space reinforces its impression of being an actual report of an alien probe.

Modern UFO sightings are often explained away as being just the result of contemporary fears of technology, science, atomic warfare, or government conspiracies transforming ambiguous but insignificant meteorological observations into supposed visions of alien spacecraft. Many contemporary sightings are also no doubt induced by an hysterical public observation bias resulting from other supposed alien spaceship sightings. But historical UFO sightings, of which there have been many, provide a way around some of these confounding variables to permit us to consider more carefully what is being seen. There was legislation in Paris in the 14th century punishing with a fine anyone who bothered the authorities with 'any further reports about ships flying in the sky,' so these sightings were obviously not produced by the same culturally induced misperceptions as are today operative, especially since these observers had no experience of even having seen aircraft. Some interesting material on this topic I found while doing research in the British Library comes from an anonymous, unpaginated work which appeared in 1632 with no specification of publisher or place of publication, entitled "Vision einer vornehmen und Gottseeligen Patrioten" (Vision of a Prominent and Pious Patriot). The passage, presented in the text as a factual report, which I have translated from the original German, might be interpreted as a report of a UFO sighting by someone living in the profoundly religious world of the time but lacking the vocabulary to describe the technology he witnessed: "I first saw the earth open up and a thick fog, smoke, and steam rise up, and over the princely city it became rather dark. Amidst the steam I saw a hellish black devil fly up together with many other devils. They had a large barrel of goods which they drove along with a strong wind above the city and over the municipal building, and then they knocked the bottom out of it. There next fell out of it all sorts of new-fangled clothing that could be imagined. Old and young, small and great, rich and poor, and even day laborers set to and took whatever seemed useful to them. But there were some ... who did not want to accept these extravagent things and instead looked on quite miserably. ... A lightning bolt struck and the earth shook where they sat, while a lovely child stepped in among those crying and held in his left hand a little cup in which he collected the tears from the old man and counted them, writing the number on the cup." A UFO enthusiast might want to interpret this as some kind of rocket blasting off (fog and smoke rising up), jet-propelled astronauts moving about (flying devils amidst steam), and a jet-propelled craft (barrel moved by a strong wind) dropping alien-fashioned clothing to attract the people below to where they could be observed. The child emerging and passing among the people could be an alien astronaut conducting investigations such as are today often described in so-called 'alien obduction' cases, and the collection of tears in a cup, with the tears then being numbered, is the scientific recording of the phenomena of human physiology by an alien scientist. I express no opinion on the passage, which could well just be an invented fable posing as the real report of an observed phenomenon, designed to teach people the evil of vanity in being attracted to fancy clothing. But the awkwardness of the tale as a fictional story, which fails to fit with so much of the conventional Christian story-telling of the age, seems to suggest that its author was actually struggling to find the proper words to describe something he saw, rather than fluenty and stereotypically recounting some conventional morality tale he had made up.

This issue has already arisen in the case of the defense of necessity. In law, you are allowed to commit a crime if committing that crime is the only way to avoid an even greater harm. The legal cases which have explored this issue have usually involved lifeboats on the open sea where resources of food and water were scarce and someone had to be killed to allow the rest sufficient nourishment to survive. (Cf. R. v. Dudley and Stephens; U.S. v. Holmes) Now that the defense of necessity has been well-developed, deliberately murdering someone to save yourself or to save several other people, if there were no other option, would generally be permitted. Interestingly, courts have ruled that the best method for selecting victims for sacrifice in such a case is at random, by lotterly, rather than on objective criteria, such as how close the person is to death, which was the reason why the cabin boy was murdered and eaten in R. v. Dudley and Stephens. A more recent example which was never prosecuted occured when the ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise, was sinking, and the passengers trying to climb up to safety via a rope ladder were blocked by someone who had frozen with fear and could not advance any further. One of the passengers killed him and people were able to climb up above the rising waters.