Daniel Martin Klein

"A fundamental problem with arguments from analogy is the assumption that, because some aspects of A are similar to B, other aspects of A are similar to B. It ain’t necessarily so."

"There are complications. The first is, how can we be sure what God really thinks? Fundamentalists have that one covered: Scripture says so. But how did the people in Scripture know the signals they were getting were really from God? Abraham thought he was called by God to sacrifice his son on the altar. Abraham figures, “If God says so, I’d better do it.” Our first philosophical query to Abraham is, “What around you, nuts? You hear ‘God” tell you to do a crazy thing, and you don’t even ask for identification?”"

"Another problem with following Divine Law is interpretation. What exactly qualifies as honoring thy father and mother?"

"The agnostic is one step short of an atheist, who considers the case against the existence of God closed. If both of them came across a burning bush saying, “I am that I am,” the agnostic would start looking for the hidden tape recorder, but the atheist would just shrug and reach for his marshmallows."

"In theology, schisms have opened over such pressing issues as, “Does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son?” The layperson clearly needs a simple guide to theological differences and, thank God, the comedians are always willing to oblige."

"Another way to differentiate denominations is according to what behavior qualifies someone for a divine dressing-down. For Catholics, it’s missing Mass. For Baptists, it’s dancing. For Episcopalians, it’s eating your salad with your dessert fork."

"The bottom line is that the values we think are timeless and absolute are really in constant historical flux relative to who has power and how it gets used."

"Many of these fallacies, formal and informal, were identified by Aristotle nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. Has that stopped politicians from using them? On the contrary, they’ve treated them as formal and informal strategies!"

"Any political commentator worthy of having his own program on Fox News knows that when it comes to hiding the truth, burial is a nifty option. Why risk a blatant, in-your-face fib when a questionable assumption buried in a seemingly logical argument might slip right by the listener?"

"A perennial favorite hidden assumption is that something is morally right because it is “natural,” the way Mother Nature intended it."

"It is often said that all of life is high school—over and over again. But we beg to differ, at least when it comes to political rhetoric, where a good part of life is grade school."

"The excuse of “God made me do it”—as both a principle of action and an excuse for it—declined after Genghis, replaced by “the devil made me do it.” In both cases, personal moral responsibility was nullified, so it was just a hop, skip, and jump to “My unconscious drives made me do it,” a.k.a. the insanity defense. What is striking about all three Über-motivators is that they almost exclusively make us do criminal acts. As one comedian quipped, “Have you ever heard anyone cry, ‘God made me trim the hedges!’”"

"Cum hoc and post hoc arguments so much of their appeal to our fanciful/poetic sides, which, from a strict philosopher’s point of view, are our pudding-headed sides."

"The clear implication of the term is that this self-evidence is evident to everyone who is paying attention. But you don’t need to be an epistemologist to realize that one person’s “self evident” is another person’s “huh??” Our local shaman finds it self-evident that there are multicolored pixies fluttering around our heads. We are willing to accept that said pixies are evident to his self; they just don’t happen to be evident to ours."

"How does conventional wisdom become conventional? As Stewart informs us, it usually starts with talking points. Party A decides how it wants us to think about the candidates of Party B and then sets out to get their unflattering labels repeated so often in the media that they stick in our minds. The media cooperate because it gives them a hook for their stories. And we, the public, are only too glad to latch onto these labels, because they are so catchy. And more significantly, it’s way easier than thinking."

"One criterion to bear in mind when choosing a religion is where its particular afterlife is being held."

"The monitor confirmed cardiac arrest as an elderly man suddenly lost consciousness. After about twenty seconds of resuscitation, he came to. Explaining to him that his heart had momentarily stopped, the doctor asked if he remembered anything unusual during that time. “I saw a bright light,” he said, “and in front of me a man dressed in white. Excitedly, the doctor asked if he could describe the figure. “Sure, Doc,” he replied. “It was you.”"

"But in the 1870s, weirdness was in the air."

"Lost in discussions of séances is any consideration for the dead respondents. Why do they have to appear on demand? Might they not have busy schedules too? Aren’t they at least entitled to caller ID?"

"Now some philosophers, and I’m not mentioning any names—mostly because I can’t pronounce them—try to hide the fact that they feel their way to the Big Answers just like the rest of us do. They spin out all kinds of fancy, impersonal reasons for coming to their conclusions, but the way they really got there is they trusted their gut in the first place, just like the rest of us. But because they wanted an impressive philosophy that matched what they felt in their guts, they constructed it out of their heads. And here’s where they got a little sneaky, for my money: they kinda cherry-picked the universe for evidence that backed up what their gut told them to start with, and they ignored anything that didn’t jibe with it."