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Are right and wrong hard-coded into you?According to some, the answer is yes.

Who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong? Yet that essential knowledge, generally assumed to come from parental teaching or religious or legal instruction, could turn out to have a quite different origin… [P]eople are born with a moral grammar wired into their neural circuits by evolution… [T]he grammar generates instant moral judgments which, in part because of the quick decisions that must be made in life-or-death situations, are inaccessible to the conscious mind.

(The aricle, by the way, is titled An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong, which is highly misleading. Namely, no successful predictions have been made yet using this set of ideas and as such it is still only a hypothesis.)

Recently I’ve been thinking about the logic of morality. In a recent Wired article, and atheist philosopher expressed concerns about the necessity of a god or some sort of theology in order to create moral guidance. While I disagree with him — I’m of the belief that morality can generally be come to via logical conclusion — to say that the subject is simple is an outright lie, and to say that it is difficult is a still major understatement.

Nevertheless, this article is rather interesting in that it points to another realm of morality: primordial, as opposed to logical or imposed.

“Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” [Dawkins] says. “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying” … Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.

“How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?” Dawkins asks. “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”

It’s nice to see atheists have militant nut-job fundies, too.

I was sent this yesterday by Matt, an author and old friend of mine. It’s pretty interesting (and funny) if you’re into theology/philosophy: definitely something to think about. Read it over and tell me, what do you think?

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Alright, too much car talk, as was recently pointed out by a reader. Time for another edition of Le Linkage to move things in another direction! (Actually it was moving in another direction anyway, and there are another couple of car posts coming up. My sister’s car was just stolen, so I’m helping her find a car. Not that I’ll be discussing that, but I have a few more bits of info I think would be helpful for people looking to buy a used car. Now I’ll shut up and start this episode of Le Linkage.)

Searching for Free Music with Google: Using this page, look for any artist or any song and with the help of a special a Google search query, this site may well just find it for you. Heck, I even found stuff by Sun Yan Zi, which is almost impossible to come by in this side of the world.

Strangest grammatically correct English sentence: Really, if you’re into grammar and the weirdness of the English language then you’ll love this short article on the strangest grammatically correct sentence in English. After reading that, I thought of my own: “Dogs dogs dog dog dogs dogs dog,” which translates to “Dogs other dogs chase, chase dogs other dogs chase.” Can you come up with others?

Drivers! Glorious Windows Drivers!: There’s nothing I hate more about software than having to find drivers. The problem is especially bad if you’re using Windows, since the OS is pretty much useless unless you have the drivers needed for it to work properly with your computer. (In Linux this isn’t much of a problem.) Anyway, if you’re stuck for drivers, this site may just have what you need.

Hope, Despair and Memory: An essay by Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel discusses why for him, hope without memory is like memory without hope. “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” This essay is especially powerful given recent world events.

Ubuntu System on a Memory Drive: The coolest thing about CD-based Linux distributions is the fact that you can have your Linux distro just about anywhere. The bad part is that with those distros, you really can’t save anything so you’re pretty much relegated to single session computing. Sure, you can set up printers, have programs load up at lightning speed, and even download stuff off the Web. But if you’re the type to tote your OS around on a CD for use in different places, you’re also probably the type that likes to customize his environment, and that’s where the problem is: one reboot and it’s all over. Well now, if you use Ubuntu, you can save your system settings (and other items) on a memory drive! Just plug this baby in and you have YOUR computer with YOUR stuff back, with just a CD and a memory card. How cool is that?!

Alan Watts MP3’s and Podcasts: If you enjoy eastern philosophy, but don’t have the time to read a bunch of texts, then the downloadable Alan Watts lessons are definitely for you. If you know who Watts is you’ll know the value of these recordings. If you’ve never heard of the guy, click on one of the links and find out a bit about him.

Online Game: Proximity: This game’s pretty simple: Place your pieces in such a way as to make most of the board yours. What gets complicated is the strategy involved in order to make it happen. Very addicting, fun game.

Tonight, as I exercised in the gym, a rather frightening and humbling thought came to me:

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