Fight for Your Mind:
The Age of Critical Thinking

What is Critical Thinking and why is it increasingly important for us as individuals and as a society?

This is a topic I've been interested in for the last four years. I've tried to examine it from every angle, ranging from international history to its application in our personal lives. Click below to experience an interactive presentation on Critical Thinking. (A new window will open.)

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Cultivating Truth Conference

I was recently one of two keynote speakers at an ABS conference in Philadelphia. Find out more here: www.absmidatlantic.org

Navigating the Borders of
Science, Religion, and Superstition

I gave a talk in Cambridge at the National Association of Baha'i Studies in August, and you can see some info here.

Our NonViolent Future

My newest obsession is with nonviolence. I've been absorbing Gandhi's writings at a furious rate. I've read many things over many years, but this guy pretty much seems right about everything. I believe we are moving into a future where all conflicts will be solved nonviolently. If that sounds absurd, just remember that countless conflicts were solved thus in the twentieth century. If Milosevic, the Raj, Jim Crow, and the whole honkin' Soviet Union can be toppled through civil disobedience and the power of the people, what can't? In less than 50 years, I expect killing people will be so abhorrent that the world's citizens will cry out whenever a country does it. Even war in Iraq forced the U.S. to try more than ever to spare Iraqi lives and use more accurate and non-lethal force - not out of the goodness of our hearts of course, not yet, but just to assuage world opinion. I'm hoping to write about all this soon. Meanwhile, check out a PBS special feature called A Force More Powerful.

Also, be sure to visit my photos from our recent day in NYC, protesting the war in Iraq. War is NOT peace.

Pro-Life & Pro-Choice

I am toying with the idea of calling myself both of those terms above just to demonstrate that this is not a straightforward issue. In my opinion, most issues can not be boiled down to two points and any attempt to do so politicizes and polarizes a complex subject for personal rhetorical gains.

So here's my view on abortion:

I am pro-life, which is strange since I am very liberal on most every other issue. I long believed, due to my religion, that their is a human soul and that it enters this world at conception rather than birth. Recently I incorporated this with Gandhi's views of the preservation of all life after reading his works extensively. So killing a fetus is equivalent to killing a person born. If I ever had to make this choice personally (which, as a man, I wouldn't ever exclusively), I could not recommend getting an abortion.

But here's the weird part: Our pro-life goal becomes to reduce the total number of abortions (naturally excluding extreme cases in which the mother was raped or when her health is seriously endangered by carrying the baby to term). It's been shown that the total number of abortions has significantly and steadily dropped in the past 30 years since abortion became legal. So legalizing abortion ironically reduces the number of abortions. And we must never forget that the lives of the potential mothers are eually important to save, and legal abortion improves the procedures to reduce the injuries and casualties among women. So I support legal abortion.

This might seem like strange doublethink. It is kind of utilitarian, and creates some ethical problems, but it works for now for me.

And of course, I hope it goes without saying that education programs and birth control should always be supported. They have no negative side effects, and are our only consistently proven weapons in combating many sexual health problems worldwide. Uganda, for example, has had great success in reducing its total number of AIDS cases thanks to extensive modern sexual education programs that teach both abstinence and condom use. It is this program that Bush is hoping to duplicate in other African nations.

Here's a link to a good pro-choice organization that my friend March works for: Naral: Pro-Choice America.

What are your opinions? E-mail me.