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Girl Claims Price Scanner Gave Her Tourette's Syndrome
Attorneys for Dominica Juliano claim that she was burned and developed psychological problems after a store clerk aimed a hand-held price scanner at her face. Store attorneys say their scanners uses a harmless LED light and that the girl had serious health problems before she was scanned. From the article: "Dominica Juliano was 12 when she and her grandmother entered the Country Fair store in Erie in June 2004. A clerk allegedly called the girl 'grumpy' before flashing his hand-held bar code scanner over her face and telling her to smile. Attorneys for Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl was sensitive to light and burned, and later developed post-traumatic stress and Tourette's syndrome."
Everytime I hear Sarah Palin gives me tourette's. Can I sue Fox "News"?
So much better to believe in a universe that created itself, that all of our ethics should be learned by watching the Nature Channel, and that none of us actually exist.
>>The most logical conclusion from these two bits of information is that ethics is a mixture of nature and nuture, and that we impose our ethics on shaping religion, and choosing the parts of the religion that we wish to believe in based on our ethics. Rather than the other way round.
Given that Dawkins (and Hitchens) has very little understanding of religion, for all his writings on the subject, it's best to not believe in his strawmen and use them to draw conclusions. There's a reason why even the most fundamentalist Christians don't stone people (Hint: the answer is in the New Testament).
Kreeft had a better take on the issue - given that ethics of religions everywhere are kinda sorta the same (they're not, actually), and also given that secular societies also have codes of ethics, you can actually see the difference of the elevation of ethics in the one society over the other, as if believing in God results in a higher level of ethics. This is summarizing it very very briefly, but essentially his argument is that anyone can be ethical when it is in their self interest to do so (I won't hit you because I don't want you to hit me; I won't steal your car because I don't want to go to jail), but only through religion do you see the higher levels of ethical behavior, using the example of giving the jacket off your back to a thief that just robbed you (which were documented cases from both a Catholic church in the middle ages, and a Hindu guy writing around the same time).
If you look at modern society, for all the avaunted Atheist claims of being just as moral as the next guy, they give tremendously less of their time and money to helping others, even though they typically tend to be much better off than the average Christian.