Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

What a great idea. The ARF is sponsoring a blog [ Engagement By Engagement ] to capture the goings on at their upcoming Consumer Engagement conferences.

I recently heard the presentation that Sam Harris made at PopTech in 2006. I haven't read his book "The End of Faith" but I think I got the gist of it from his speech. Basically religious belief is fantasy, those who practice it are stupid and ignorant, and worse yet religion is dangerous [to the point where Harris actually advocates making religon socially and morally wrong] because it's fantasies undermine logical scientific reasoning and ultimately lead to [are basically the cause of] war, poverty, environmental disaster, etc. On the other hand, the Christain Science Monitor pointed out that German philosopher and secularist Jürgen Habermas wrote this in 2004 in his essay "A Time of Transition" Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Ever...

The United States Inequality and the American Dream Economist.com For a modest little British "newspaper" as they love to call themselves, The Economist has uncanny insight into the American psyche. They've hit the nail squarely on the head once again with their June 17th focus on "Inequality and the American Dream." As though The Economist was really the World's conscience [as perhaps it is] they set out three conditions that must be met in order for inequality to not be inherently wrong as many on the left have argued: "...first, society as a whole is getting richer; second, there is a safety net for the very poor; and third, everybody, regardless of class, race, creed or sex, has an opportunity to climb up through the system." To me they have omitted the most important condition that makes America unique. That is, the strong sense of right and wrong derived from our Judeo-Christian heritage, and the moral principles which guided the formation...

I had the pleasure of hearing Thomas Friedman speak yesterday. He described the concepts in his excellent new book "The World Is Flat" and made the case for his notion that we are currently experiencing a significant turning point in the history of mankind. When I first read Friedman's book earlier this year it seemed to me I'd heard some of it before. The first writer I know that made a similar case was Douglas S. Robertson in his 1998 book "The New Renaissance" and later in 2003 with "Phase Change." Robertson's reasoning was more scientific and computer-oriented with less of the political implications of Friedman's book, but the underlying notion of a "phase change" right now was clearly the same.

ED-AE268_3redta_20060510202025 Originally uploaded by dross46 . The Wall Street Journal ran this graphic today. The number of regulators has grown at a CAGR of 5.5% over the past six years. If we let this continue for the next 30 years by then we'll have 1.6 million regulators [one for about every 400 American people] and the federal register will have a staggering 200,000 pages? This is insane.

For those who are interested in the religion versus science debate, this wonderful book by Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett is a must read. The book offers a survey of the broad history of the subject from; Darwinism and the later day neo-Darwinian idological inferences of materialist philosophy, to diesim, creationism, intelligent design and finally to "Theistic Evolution." The authors come down firmly on the side of Theistic Evolution which is basically a realistic "reconciliation of Christian Faith and evolutionary biology." They place various points of view about Theistic Evolution on a continuium via an analysis of how each deals with five defining questions; Deep Time, Natural Selection, Common Descent, Divine Action and Theodicy. And they conclude with a bold and "constructive proposal" for a "future-oriented theology of creation and its concomitant understanding of the human being as God's created co-creator."

MediaPost Publications - Americans Get More Channels, Watch Fewer Of Them, Especially Broadcast - 03/13/2006 Ironically, Barry Schwartz spoke at PC Forum last night about the Paradox of Choice, and what did I wake up to this morning. Another possible example of too much choice in the channels people have to choose from on television. I wonder whether the "a la carte" crowd has thought about this problem. I'll have to ask Prof. Schwartz about that today.