Best Thing of the Month

http://www.freerice.com

Its legit (I found a BBC article about it). And amazing. Just click the link.

Religious Freedom

The event that prompts this post is, I'll admit, a bit outdated. Remember that raid on the Fundamentalist Mormon sect (known as FLDS)? Let me recap for a second in case you forgot. A teenage girl called an anonymous tipline to say that she had been abused on the ranch (Yearning for Zion, I believe it is called, if you'd like to wikipedia it). Alright, so that was good, right? She worked up the courage to call out whomever this asshole who abused her was, and hopefully he will be thrown in jail.
But no. Instead, the next day, the powers that be invade the ranch, and take over 400 children away from their families! Because of a phone call?
Think about a regular community, like Traer, or in Ohio like Berea. A girl is abused and calls the proper authorities. Would the police raid every home in the town and take away all legal minors? Hell no!

What I am saying is that I am with the FLDS on that case--apparently the Supreme Court of the state of Texas was, too. One phone call does not warrant taking hundreds of children away from their home. It was, clearly, an issue of religious discrimination. People think the FLDS is bizarre (which it is), and maybe even barbaric, because they allow polygamy, and they pretty openly think men are better than women. Not to mention, they tried to go off and live on their own! How dare they!
Well listen, the fact is, just like freedom of speech, when you have a country with freedom of religion, you have to let the weirdos in.
The state claimed their right to take away the children, because they feared them being 'socialized' to become abusive. The courts rejected this as too broad.

Ok, so thats my opinion on that case. But it brings up some interesting questions about freedom of religion that I just don't know the answer to.
Freedom of speech laws have had many famous court cases to sort how far it goes. Basically anything that isn't obscene (as defined by the Law) is free. But what about freedom of religion? It seems intuitive that we would want a vast range of freedom of religion--but then cases like the FLDS weaken those intuitions. Religious pacifists don't have to fight in wars; this seems fair. Can a religion be openly racist? I would say that should probably be allowed, for similar reasons as freedom of speech. Where do we set the limits? Any suggestions? We can play it safe up in abstract theory land to simplify things.

The second question I have is about organized religions vs. non-organized religions. If the law is willing to grant religious people exceptions from obligations, which they ought to, why can't irreligious people have the same perks? Ok yes, you shouldn't get to avoid draft because its inconvenient, but that isn't exactly what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that, I don't belong to any religious group. But I have ethical standards I take just as seriously as devoutly religious people. Why should I be legally obliged to do something I consider unethical, if religious people don't? And how many members does a church need to have before their beliefs are accepted?
Certainly we can imagine strange religions which would bring serious problems--like a religion which had a compulsory communion of LSD or another illegal substance. The government has let this type of thing go with certain Native American religions; why couldn't a new start-up religion be just as valid?
I'm not asking these questions in order to cheat the system--I'm just trying to consider a principled way to give equal rights to all religious and non-religious people, regardless of their particular faith's popularity, normality, or age. And this question is proving more difficult than I thought it would be. Any takers?

Counterfactuals

(I get the idea that, generally speaking, the layperson tends to believe philosophy as an active practice is dead. Philosophy, they believe, is merely the study of the history of thought. And it certainly is. A huge chunk of philosophy is interpretation and study of what other great thinkers thought. But there is actual philosophizing going on today, believe it or not.)

My big project for late this summer and into the fall semester has to do with counterfactuals. What is a counterfactual? Well, let's review some related concepts:
A counterfactual is a type of conditional, of which there are many.
First there is the 'Indicative Conditional':
"If the moon is made out of cheese, then Sally would like some cheese." What makes an indicative conditional true? Well, it is certainly controversial. The common-sense interpretation is that the antecedent (what comes after 'if') must cause the consequent (what comes after the 'then'). When conditionals are interpreted in this way, they are called 'causal conditionals'.
The problem with causal conditionals is that 'cause' is an extremely mysterious concept in any philosophical conversation, and a lot of people think it invokes implicit counterfactuals. This is a problem, as we shall see later.
So for simplicity's sake, most basic, non-modal systems of logic interpret "If the moon is made out of cheese, then Sally would like some cheese," as being logically equivalent to "Either the moon is NOT made out of cheese, or Sally would like some cheese." Logical equivalence means that the truth-value of the first statement must always be the same as the truth-value of the second statement.
Ok, think about this--it takes a moment to grasp.
Now this way of interpreting conditionals works a lot--the only counterintuitive result is that any conditional with a false antecedent is automatically true as a whole. For example-- "If the moon is made of cheese, 2+2=74" is true, because it is logically equivalent to "Either the moon is NOT made of cheese, or 2+2=74," which is true.
There is another way of interpreting conditionals, called 'strict conditional'. This interpretation attempted to alleviate the problem just mentioned by saying only a conditional with a true antecedent AND a true consequent could be true.

Alright, finally to counterfactual conditionals, or subjunctive conditionals (they both refer to the same thing from different literature).
When someone uses a counterfactual conditional, they realize that the antecedent is false, but are trying to say what would be the case if it weren't. For example:
"If Bush had been a veteran, his approval ratings would be higher."
This statement makes sense to all of us, regardless of whether we agree with it or not. But it isn't trivially true or trivially false. So here is the problem--how can we declare its truth-value? We can certainly try to show evidence for or against it--but what evidence is even relevant?
The Bush/veteran case seems to be rationally resolvable, but it seems there are much more difficult cases, such as "If George Bush had been named 'Jeb', the president of the United States in 2003 would not have invaded Iraq." What makes this counterfactual true? If George was named Jeb, it seems our world would be different in ways we can't imagine. Is the speaker saying someone named 'Jeb' wouldn't have invaded Iraq? Or are they saying a 'Jeb' couldn't have won, and Gore wouldn't have invaded? Or Gore would have prevented Sept. 11? There are so many circumstances which we are ignorant of, it isn't clear how the truth value can be determined.
Its also entirely plausible that we just can't talk about situations that bizarre and expect to come up with a decent answer.

But the point and the question in all of this that I am trying to answer is as follows: What is the formal (logical) definition of a counterfactual? Do we interpret them like causal conditionals? Do we consider a world in which all facts are the same besides the explicitly stated antecedent?

This is all very confusing, and I probably haven't explained it well. For that I apologize.

"Freedom is the freedom to say '2+2=4'. If that is grounded, all else follows."