I really love the times (some expert tell me how many) Watterson had Susie & Calvin playing house and he let out his artistic talent to its fullest extent. First time I saw one, I thought the newspaper had made a mistake and substituted a different strip for C&H, until the last panel. At this point, Watterson could probably charge a million dollars for a new, single Sunday-style C&H strip in large size and framed, and get it. Or sell prints at $10K a pop.
@bfrg1513If you ever come back to this page, I’m pretty sure your missing person is Isaac Newton. The woman in the 2nd row I’m not convinced is Anne Frank. The first person I thought of when seeing her is Anne Bradstreet, relatively obscure compared to the others, but the Colonial style collar is what suggested it to me. That one I won’t swear to.
These days the only popular guys have less hair on their chests than Italian mothers have on their upper lips. Add the adenoidal singing and the baby face and these guys have all the masculinity of a 12 year old girl.
You weren’t saying you “should” be evil, you weren’t saying anything at all. Your comment is essentially meaningless. You haven’t defined “good”, “evil”, “moral”, or anything else. Explain exactly how my analysis of your dictum would bar Ted Bundy from claiming he was abiding by your system. He examined his values (dead people deserve to be dead), he lived up to them (he killed people), and he was responsible for them (he was eventually caught, confessed, imprisoned, and put to death). Must be a good thing, at least according to your system.
“What’s wrong with that? Examining your values, living up to them, and, ultimately, being responsible for them is a good (sic ;^) thing.” What’s wrong with that is then no system of morality is binding. By your reasoning, Ted Bundy’s system of morality was as equally valid as Mother Theresa’s, as long as he stuck to it.
It’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t jive with reality. Children who grow up in a state of nature have zero morality, rather like chimpanzees. “Goodness” must be imposed from without, by parents, educators, siblings, peers, and civilization in general. Whether that goodness comes from a fear of the retribution from humans or from a vengeful deity is immaterial, it’s the fear of retribution that makes goodness possible. Once internalized so that making the good choice becomes automatic, we can call that person good, but we must never be lulled into thinking that people are naturally that way. Calling it a rational choice is post-hoc rationalization.
Having been a fundamental Baptist and now an atheist, I have to disagree, lacking an invisible man in the sky (or some other version of an omnipotent being setting standards of morality), there can be NO absolutes regarding good and bad, only one person’s, community’s, nation’s, or culture’s opinion. The Aztecs didn’t even consider cannibalism bad, the Mayans practiced child sacrifice. By what standard are you going to judge either “bad” without some eternal lawgiver saying so? It’s just your culture and upbringing saying so, so how can you say you are right and they were wrong? I went atheist after trying to prove God’s existence logically and ended up proving to myself that God (at least our Western version) could not possibly exist, but I am still of the opinion that without a God, morality is a compass without a magnetic north, it just points where you think it should.
I really love the times (some expert tell me how many) Watterson had Susie & Calvin playing house and he let out his artistic talent to its fullest extent. First time I saw one, I thought the newspaper had made a mistake and substituted a different strip for C&H, until the last panel. At this point, Watterson could probably charge a million dollars for a new, single Sunday-style C&H strip in large size and framed, and get it. Or sell prints at $10K a pop.