Word: arguments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Harrington avoids sensationalistic corporate conspiracy theories; his argument is far more subtle. Corporations, with the endorsement of conservative and liberal theorists alike, don't deliberately gang up on the poor--they don't have to. In fact, they ignore the poor, forgetting that the policies they advocate--the policies the government enacts--end up despoiling the underprivileged by increasing concentration of wealth, preventing full employment and decreasing social and economic mobility. The goals of corporate America, Harrington argues, undermine the American ideal they claim to uphold. Harrington understands that most Americans, even those hurt by corporate strategies (such as attacking...
...propaganda campaign, the words and terms used to describe incest are beginning to change. The phrase "child abuse" is distinguished from "consensual incest" involving a parent, and "abusive incest" is different from "positive incest." Some try to give the argument a bit of serious academic coloration, ransacking anthropological literature for a tribe or two that allows incest, or arguing that the incest taboo is dying of its own irrelevance. Rutgers Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen offers a simplified pseudohistorical argument: the taboo is a holdover of a primitive need to form personal alliances and trade agreements beyond the family. Since that...
...existing and leaving behind absolutely nothing. An "efficient cause" is needed to explain "the actual existence here and now of a merely possible cosmos," something that preserves it in being and prevents it from being replaced by nothingness. Color that cause God. Philosopher Ross contends that this interesting argument was stated more successfully in the 13th century by his hero, Duns Scotus. Adler does not think...
Other scholars use what could be called the cumulative argument: they contemplate the comparative plausibility of various arguments and evidences using Adler's favored standard of judgment, the jury's proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." This permits atheists to avoid having to disprove God absolutely, which is as hard to do as prove his existence, and lets theists cite human phenomena that strict empiricism used to rule out. In The Existence of God (Oxford; $37.50), Richard Swinburne of England's Keele University concludes: "The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what...
...raises the problem, as old as the Book of Job, of evil. The existence of evil is no "knockdown disproof of an omnipotent and wholly good God," he says, but it does make God , improbable. Plantinga renovates the theist's classic reply to this: the free will argument. Examining whether a semifictional, corrupt Boston mayor would have taken smaller bribes in other "possible worlds," he argues that even an all-powerful God cannot create a world in which mayors can choose to take bribes and that also contains no evil...