Religions are endlessly fracturing

August 3, 2017

One day, a number of years ago, I decided to try to diagram out all of the schisms and splits I could identify in the Abrahamic religions (which include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism). Click here for a high resolution version of this image. As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I'm sure i...

Distinguishing Evil and Insanity: The Role of Intentions in Ethics

July 29, 2009

(Note: this is an essay I wrote many years ago that I still mostly agree with. It probably was what led to me eventually coming up with the idea of Philosophical Disorders.) After a little reflection, it is clear that the morality of a person who carries out an action doesn't just depend on the action itself but rather depends on the state of mind of the person who performs it. This holds for pretty much every commonly used definition of morality. Suppose, for example, that I was tricke...