Marat

For an example of what I mean by a non-religious form of conscience which makes claim to objective validity but which does not regard any given fable, story, dogma, belief, or superstition as its source, consider Kant's derivation of morality. We can only speak of praise and blame if we assume that people are free so that they can deserve praise or blame. But we know that science says that everything in the physical world is causally determined. So to escape causality and ensure that our actions can deserve praise or blame we have to act according to conceptual commands we give ourselves which transcend our selfish interests to ensure that they do not just arise from the causal promptings of material appetites, desires, and selfishness. The best way to ensure that these commands are not selfish and causally determined is to fashion these commands so that they respect the equal freedom of other people, since this will restrict our doing what we naturally want to do, which will lift us above our causal conditioning, especially since our actions will be determined by the ideal concept of respect for human equality and freedom, rather than by the causal, material drive to satisfy our own needs. So we become moral and free in the same single step by respecting the equal freedom of all other people. Now because this argument is an appeal to the rationality of everyone, it is objective in the sense of making an intersubjective appeal. The Kantian is not saying here that this is just what I believe, but is instead arguing that logic shows that this is what you should believe as well, because it is valid for everyone. But the Kantian is also not saying that I believe this because I worship Kant who told me to believe this. Rather, he is saying I believe this because it makes sense, and for that reason you should believe it as well. In short, to be objectively valid something doesn't have to be propped up by some thing -- whether imaginary or not -- which supports its existence in the real world. Something can be objectively valid simply by being based on an argument that makes sense.

I am also bothered by the juvenile nature of the entire proof of God supposedly offered to us by God. He tells us a fantastic story which is rather incoherent and makes little sense, and then, in anticipation of our objections to his tale, like a vaudeville stage magician, he says we have to believe it because he can pull a rabbit out of a hat -- i.e., Christ is resurrected after his death. It seems more consistent with the idea of God that He would be able to tell us such a brilliantly enlightened story about the meaning of human life, the universe, and our place in it, that the intelligence of the story itself would convince us of its divine origin, rather than trying to prove its validity externally by resorting to the irrational device of performing a circus trick.

Frankly, even as a middle-aged human I have reached a stage when I my store of memories is beginning to exceed my ability to process, handle, and endure their variety. I know from the way I sense and understand things today that I simply don't have the type of mind or existence that could deal with the infinite store of experience and memories that would come from never-ending life. In fact, the sheer weight of it would be painful beyond what the finite type of being I am could endure. This is one reason why the promise of everlasting life does not inspire me with much hope. Also, it seems rather childish to respond to the existential despair that humans experience in this life by saying, "Okay, don't worry, I'll solve that by giving you even more life later on!" How does more life repair everything that is wrong with the whole business of living? The final hollowness of the promise of infinite life is that everything that humans now do and experience is informed by a pressing sense of finitude. We get agitated when our plans are frustrated and we have to wait around doing nothing, because our whole sense of life is permeated by the background awareness of limited resources of time which makes it extremely painful to waste time. That is why having to live the dead time of a prison term is universally recognized as a severe punishment rather than merely a way to live at the state's expense. So since the person I now am is someone who is defined by his strong sense of having only finite time, if I were to die and live on as some infinite, non-time limited being in Heaven, I simply would not be myself. Instead of me dying and being given the gift of infinite life, it would be a case of me dying and being replaced by a different kind of being altogether who could not possibly be me or have anything to do with me, since he would be essentially defined by a sense of infinite time, while I am essentially defined by a sense of finite time. So what good could that do me?

In criminal charges, the positive burden of proof is on the prosecution to demonstrate that the defendant had the properly guilty mental state and committed the guilty act. If the Siamese twin simply says nothing, he can still win his case if the prosecution fails to prove that he was somehow complicit in both action and intention in his brother's crime. Negligence resulting in harm is usually just a tort law concept in which the guilty party has to pay for the damages he causes, but it only rises to the level of a crime in criminal negligence. Criminal negligence requires the violation of some prior duty which the person was obligated to fulfill, but here there is no prior duty to ensure that the brother did not harm someone. The law generally gives the state a right of preventative detention, which allows dangerous lunatics, people with serious communicable diseases, and similar persons not guilty of any crime but just a threat to public safety to be locked up. However, in this case, the innocent twin is not himself dangerous to society, but his brother is. A lawyer acting for the innocent twin could easily get him released on a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that the state was depriving him of liberty without having demonstrated that he had committed a crime or was a danger to the public. The twin pair was certainly a danger to the public, and the twins could not be separated without killing them, but the innocent twin per se was not a danger, though if he were free he would always be part of a danger caused by someone else. The Siamese twins really did exist in the 19th century, but it was never the case that either one of them committed murder. However, they did fight each other, so one of them could have been prosecuted for hitting the other, and they did violate the morality statutes of the time since they married sisters and cohabited with them in the same bed at the same time.

The Old Testament shows us a very jealous God, who insists that no one shall worship any other gods than Him. But what most believers today fail to appreciate is that to believe in the Bible's stories they have to become idolaters, in that they worship historiography by giving it magical powers which it cannot have and then setting it up as the source of their religious beliefs. The idolatry comes from the fact that historiography as a science recognizes that at this historical distance, it is simply impossible for us to determine the fine grain of historical reality in a period 2000 years ago, when written record keeping was poor, when many records were lost, and when truth was freely intermixed with fantasy even in the most serious reporting of events. For these reasons, no modern historian would seriously assert that we can today know for certain exactly when the rock in front of Christ's tomb was moved so that we can know for sure whether the resurrection really happened. To be able to assert that we can believe that, we have to become idolaters of historiography, falling down on our knees to worship an imaginary capacity to know distant historical events in a way that is perfectly omnipotent and miraculous. Now surely the jealous God who despises idolatry in the Old Testament would not suddenly turn around in the New Testament and require us to become historiographic idolaters in order to have a chance of salvation by believing in Christ as the son of God, so the entire doctrinal system collapses in a mass of contradictions.

Needimprovement adopts the view of most modern Christians, which is that parts of the Bible are purely allegorical, like the Deluge, while parts are literally true, like the resurrection of Christ. But the problem with switching back and forth between construing some parts of a document full of magic and miracles as purely metaphorical while other parts are taken as factual reports is that the fantastic quality of the document fails to indicate which elements are meant literally and which are meant only figuratively. So while a scientific text on evolution might say, "If someone shows me a single skeleton and calls it the 'missing link,' then I'll be a monkey's uncle," it is obvious that the phrase, "I'll be a monkey's uncle" is meant only figuratively, since it clearly stands apart from the sober, fact-based, inductive inference-based character of the rest of the document. But in the case of the Bible, the resurrection of Christ is just as mystical as the Flood, so what criteria do we have which are internal to the document to show us which statement to construe as metaphorical and which as literal? Without that, Biblical exegesis becomes entirely arbitrary, since each historical period will just assign elements of it to the metaphorical or literal categories according to what that interpretive era finds doctrinally unpalatable or acceptable, which says more about the interpretive culture believes than it does about what the document itself means.

No, since I said my own 'reasoning,' not my own 'arational whim,' determines my conscience, my position does not amount to moral relativism. When I reach a conclusion which guides my conscience it is always based on objective facts or logical inferences which I believe I could explain or justify to other people, since I believe that moral values necessarily make claims to objective validity. A judgment of taste, such as that ice cream is 'better' than salad, admits from the outset that it is entirely subjective: in making that statement, I don't expect that anyone else should agree with me. But if I say that my own conscience, when rationally examined according to my own values, tells me that murder is wrong, I am not stating a subjective judgment of taste, but an objective judgment of value.

Dr. Rhine's psychology lab at Duke University tested those sorts of psychic abilities more than 40 years ago. What was found was that people who reported having psychic abilities could more accurately guess the outcome of random number draws than those who did not. However, after repeated testing, the psychic abilities of those uniquely talented individuals attenuated until they were eventually guessing the right number less often than purely random guessing would have. So over time, no net psychic abilities were demonstrated, although over short intervals there seemed to be clear evidence of special intuitive capacities. What mechanism underlies those results is difficult to image.

It's always difficult to translate the terms of one legal system into those of another, and this becomes especially tricky when the translation is being made from civil law systems, such as Sweden has, and the legal system most of us are familiar with, the common law. It appears that 'legal grounds for arrest' as the notion is being used in the Swedish legal system amounts to something more like 'legal grounds for detention and questioning' in common law, which involves a much lower standard than the grounds for arrest. Sweden only wanted to confront Mr. Wikileaks with evidence, not charge and imprison him pending trial, as they seemed to explain their grounds for 'arrest in absentia.' But from the fact of the charge and its quick withdrawal I would guess that the back story is both dramatic and amusing, involving a lot of diplomatic arm-twisting from the U.S. to get Sweden to act as its attack dog to teach people not to play fast and loose with American secrets. Once Sweden regained its composure and sense of national pride after caving into the first phase of American pressure, it reasserted its principles of legal fairness and withdrew the charges. Sexual molestation may just amount to the crime of sexual touching, which includes any unwanted touching in an intimate area. An airport security guard would commit this crime hundreds of times a day during pat-down searches if the people patted down did not consent first.

I think that the flaw in that Christian view of conscience is that a few formulations of its definition put too much weight on its derivation from external authorities into which the mind of the subject has no insight, which the person cannot understand, but which the subject merely obeys. Obedience to an alien dictate whose reasons are not perfectly comprehensible, and which thus do not fully command the obedience of the person addressed by their rationally persuasive force is simply the abdication of reason. In contrast, true obedience to the dictates of conscience, to be meaningful, has to arise from the inner conviction of people who choose to obey because they are convinced of the moral validity of what they commit themselves to.

While science would now admit that things that were once unobservable, such as germs and viruses, always existed, it is contrary to the positivistic methodology of science to treat anything as even possibly existent unless there is already either good empirical evidence that it does exist, or the available empirical data can only be explained by assuming its existence. So in the case of the Deity, until there is either direct empirical evidence of his existence, or until ordinary objects we know exist are seen to be incomprehensible without assuming that a Deity exists, then that hypothesis is accorded no more weight than the hypothesis that the Bugs Bunny is fighting with Elmer Fudd. To say that you can't prove that the Deity does not exist accomplishes no more than saying you can't prove that Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd are not real. The answer, from the positivistic methodology of natural science, is that we don't have to prove that these things don't exist unless there are already good reasons for having to assume that they might be real. If we do have to worry seriously about whether these things might exist and seriously try to disprove them then we shall face an infinite regress of challenges which will paralyze thought, since all our inferences will be plagued with active doubts over whether the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman, Santa Claus, etc. was the real cause which explains lightning, chemical reactions, the precession of the equinox, the presence of dark matter in the universe, entropy, the gravitational constant, etc. This is what is meant by scientific economy of thought. We posit nothing, we entertain serious doubts about the existence of nothing, which ordinary empirical data do not require us to take seriously. If in explaining to someone how to open a door I had to take account of every imaginary entity which has ever been assigned an explanatory role by any belief system, I would never get past the first stage and so nothing would ever be explainable. Thus we have to draw the line as soon as these ungrounded, hypothetical entities start to appear, and this is the credo of positivism, which is also the basis of all scientific inference.

There are extensive written records confirming that 10,000 people in the Roman Colesseum saw the Emperor fly over the stadium one day. This has been investigated by historians of science who have offered various accounts of how this trick could have been staged. Since there were sailors manning an extensive system of ropes to extend or retract the awnings over the edges of the Colesseum, most historians believe that this rope network was used as the basis of the trick of making the Emperor seem to fly. But no one ever cites this extremely well-confirmed, well-recorded, and extensively witnessed event as a 'miracle,' simply because it does not play into any one of the surviving belief systems from Antiquity, even though most Roman Emperors at that time were regarded as divinities, especially in the Eastern part of the Empire. The whole idea that miracles associated with a religious doctrine could somehow repair all the internal flaws in an irrational, self-contradictory, phantasmogoric religious myth and make it true seems bizarre. It is as though someone were to come before an audience, deliver a self-contradictory lecture espousing an absurd system of ethics and cosmology, and then claim he could prove it was all true because he could pull a rabbit out of his hat, and his ability to perform this stage trick demonstrated that everything he said was right.

Part of Needimprovement's confusion seems to stem from two sources: First, his assumption that values must arise from beliefs rather than from rational reasons; and second, his assumption that the reasons for values must arise from their support by some underlying and distinct entity on which they depend, rather than from rational arguments based on the support they derive from their relation to other social values on the same level of reality. Reality exists all on one tier, with nothing mysterious underlying it and thus making some things sacred and other things evil for reasons we cannot access. Rather, all reasons are on the surface and pellucid to the intellect, so we value some actions and reject others because we are rationally persuaded by their relation to other values and facts that they are good or bad, not because we obey anything that simply tells us they are good or bad.

A materialist in the broad sense suggested in the OP could be a person who adopts a positivistic view of the world, which requires that everything believed in either have direct empirical proof for its existence, be required as a necessary implication of the existence of something else grounded in direct empirical evidence, or be a value whose derivation can be traced to rational human interests which can be justified rather than merely accepted on faith. Such a 'materialist' would then not necessarily be a 'materialist' in the sense of valuing only money and trinkets, since he could also have a deep and abiding respect for the moral principles which ensure that everyone in a human community is treated with equal concern and respect. I would submit that a person who believes that all value is derived from the assumed existence of some supernatural being and from what that being requires of us is himself a materialist in the first sense. This is because instead of respecting moral values because he understands their importance in preserving the dignity of real humans around him, he lets the purported existence of some given thing, a deity, impose all his beliefs on him. Worshipping this thing, making it the font of all value, simply for its actual existence rather than because the values it endorses make rational moral sense, is materialistic, since the whole value system would disappear were it not for the reality of this object. The atheist, in contrast, believes in his morality because of its own intrinsic value, not needing some object outside of it to support it, so he is less materialistic than the theist.

From a position external to the Christian view, one might ask whether love is itself such an unambiguously positive force? Buddhists might say that love draws you excessively into specific attachments to the things of the world, which can only lead to possessiveness, loss, hurt, disappointment, and grief. There is also the expression, 'Killing someone with kindness,' which points to a possibly negative, suffocating, smothering, autonomy-denying, invasive, aggressive aspect of love, and this too would make it a poor candidate for being the foundation of all morality. In favor of the Golden Rule, however, we might note that Kant's highly rational deduction of human morality from a secure philosophical foundation came to the same conclusion as stated in the New Testament, that loving one's neighbor as oneself was the essence of the moral attitude.

Something like what you describe has already happened in the Iranian kidney market, where potential vendors with rare blood types or with the right HLA-groups for a good immunological match for a particular purchaser have been offered additional payment under the table. This is why the best solution would be for the government to control every aspect of the market, say by purchasing all organs itself according to a fair price schedule and then distributing them strictly according to medical need. As things are now, about 15% of dialysis patients ultimately die because a vascular access can no longer be established to connect them to a dialysis machine, so these patients would be at the top of the distribution list in a rational market.

The general common law rule is that you require both a criminal act and a criminal intent before anyone can be convicted of a crime. Many jurisdictions have the type of 'criminal enterprise' statutes to which you refer, but they have to hang the guilt of each member of the group on some guilty mental state, which is usually their having participated in the common planning of the crime or their knowledge that one of the members of the gang had a potentially lethal weapon for the plot intended in common. In the Siamese twin case, it seems that the innocent brother would be more accurately described as an innocent by-stander or even a kind of hostage, since the common law doesn't impose an affirmative duty on an ordinary citizen to prevent crime, even if he knows it is about to happen and could prevent it.

Needimprovement's most recent answer makes two points, the first implicitly, the second explicitly. He initially lists a number of not easily observed facts, such as the existence of germs to explain certain diseases, and says that we 'believe' in those, so the implication is why can't we also believe in an invisible Deity. But the problem is that the first kind of facts are ultimately testable by sophisticated experiments or required as unavoidable hypotheses to explain other observed phenomena, so they are unlike the Deity, who is not a necessary implication of any data observations or required to be assumed to account for experimental results. Needimprovement also cites some values in which we all believe, and implicitly asks why, if we can believe in these values, we cannot also believe in a Deity. But we can rationally argue for those values in terms of their role in sustaining a viable society of cooperative but autonomous beings, while we have no similar reasons supporting belief in the Deity. Finally, Needimprovement asserts that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the Deity, so implicitly belief in it is as rational as disbelief. But all rationality is ultimately based on economy of thought. If you asked me to explain to you how flicking on the light switch causes light to appear in the room, and if I replied by listing a nearly infinite regress of imaginary entities which transmitted the flicking action of my finger to the appearance of the light, all rationality would gradually come to a halt from this lack of economy of explanation. We explain only by reference to what we can actually see or test to be causing the phenomena to be accounted for, or by reference to necessary assumptions we are strictly forced by the phenomena to make. Occam's Razor says that we must not needlessly multiply theoretical entities in explaining anything, so if my account of the light going on has to involve reference to invisible electrons, then I should not also feel free to add that the electrons are carried by invisible fairies, which in turn are carried by the spirits of deparated ancestors, which in turn are supported by the Deity. Electrons suffice because they are the minimum required by the data and no more. Right now I firmly believe that a new Ice Age has not suddenly set in in India, even though I cannot see India from where I sit and I have not read the weather or news reports today. I believe this because rationality requires economy of thought, and unless I have a positive reason for believing something, I don't clutter my mind with the possibility of it. For me to believe something extraordinary like the sudden appearance of a new Ice Age in India, I would need equally extraordinary evidence to induce me to believe it. The same is true with the Deity hypothesis. In the absence of absolutely extraordinary evidence proving its existence, the economy of thought requires that I not believe in it. The person asserting the possibility that something exists has the burden of establishing that that is a real possibility, so the balance is not equal between belief and disbelief. If we had to believe in the real possibility of everything everyone posited, simply because we could not disprove it at the moment, all rationality would collapse, because we would live in a Medieval world of potential goblins, fairies, ghosts, unlucky places, sacred streams, magic stones, miraculous wise women, and secret spells everywhere, and amidst this clutter how would we ever find a path clear to determinate, clear, rational explanations of anything?

Suppose one of the Siamese twins, without the cooperation of the other, murdered someone in a jurisdiction where the punishment for murder was life imprisonment. Since there is no way to imprison just the guilty twin without also imprisoning the innocent one (since they were medically inseparable when they lived, in the 19th century,) it would seem that the state would have a legal problem in trying to impose a just sentence. Since the requirement that the murderer be imprisoned for life is only based on a statutory authority, while the rule that no innocent person can be imprisoned is a sacred constitutional right ultimately deriving from habeas corpus, I guess the solution has to be to let both of the twins go free. If the state were to try to imprison the guilty twin, a writ of habeas corpus could always get the innocent one out of prison again, taking the guilty one with him. Even building a special prison which was a hotel room on one side for the innocent twin and a prison cell on the other for the guilty twin would not solve the problem, since the freedom of association of the innocent twin would be unconstitutionally restricted. Perhaps a lesser punishment could be inflicted on the guilty twin, such as flogging, but even then, since both of the Siamese twins shared a liver, the injuries to one could have negative side-effects on the other, which would amount again to an unconstitutional use of state power. But since the twins did fight each other on occasion, throwing punches, this suggests that they at least regarded physical harms as not flowing from one to the other. Their major intersection of the law was their marriage to two sisters, which violated the then very strict laws against fornication and the cohabitation of non-married people, since all four slept together and they could not help but have sex in the presence of the others. But since everyone has a right to marriage and procreation, could the state have constitutionally imposed the penalty on them of forbidding those activities because they would violate a statute? Presumably not. Any suggestions for escaping these dilemmas?

For those who want to prohibit the mosque from being built near ground zero, how would you prevent it? The principles of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state in the Bill of Rights prevent any state actor from acting on the basis of religious bias to deny any group the right to erect a house of worship where it chooses, even though zoning laws can restrict where churches can be built as long as the reasons given have nothing to do with religion. In this case, however, the religious motivation for denying zoning permission would be obvious, so permission could not be denied. The municipal zoning commission could hunt for ways to disguise its religious bias behind other, apparently objective and neutral reasons, saying that the mosque could not be built there because the ground was too unstable to support it or something similar. But any excuse offered at this point would be inspected so closely and struck down so readily if the least trace of religious motivation were found in it that this would be a highly ineffective device to use to keep the mosque from being built. A final strategy would be to argue that it was legitimate to deny permission to build the mosque there on the ground that locating it there was like shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, since its provocative presence would be likely to induce a riot. But the U.S. Supreme Court has always insisted that before the danger of exercising any important freedom can justify its restriction, the danger must be clear and immediate, not speculative, and prior to its construction, any effect that the mosque might have there is simply too speculative to permit a limitation to the free speech and religious freedom rights of the mosque-builders.

The ethical issue will be different with every organ traded, since they each carry their own risks and benefits. I suppose a heart transplant would be excluded, since life with an artificial Jarvik-7 heart is short and dreadful, though on the other hand, so is that of someone in need of a heart transplant. There is a case of a father who is serving a very long prison sentence who has already donated one kidney to save his child, but now that the kidney has been rejected, another is needed, and the father wants to give his last kidney for transplantation to his daughter. This has ethicists concerned, since the father would make himself a dialysis-dependent patient in order to get his daughter off dialysis, which is a gain in terms of what both parties want, but not a net gain in health for the two parties considered as a pair, since the father's donated kidney will fail as a transplanted kidney after around 20 years, but it would have lasted another 50 years had it not been transplanted. This then raises the interesting question of whether there should be a kidney draft, in which the government would order enough healthy young persons a year to provide a kidney for all those who needed a renal transplant, perhaps in return for free medical care for life plus expenses. This would produce a utilitarian gain, since people who would have died without a kidney transplant will now live, at no more cost than the burden of enduring an unnecessary operation for the forced donors, plus some very small increase in health risks. But in terms of autonomy rights it would represent a huge cost, since the government would force people to lose a kidney against their will. But doesn't the government already claim the right to force people to risk and perhaps lose a limb, an organ, or life itself after being drafted to fight in a war fought often for less tangible benefits than saving the lives of dying kidney patients?

One of the old questions of philosophy is whether it is better to be a deliriously happy pig or a somewhat morose and cynical Socrates? Obviously it is better to be Socrates, since what we most seek as humans is a life that has value, not just one that is happy at any price in our human dignity or intellectual sophistication. If all we want is happiness at any price, why not just remain intoxicated through drugs, alcohol, or reassuring self-delusions all the time? Atheism urges people to move out of their theistic self-delusions because even though such an evolution may not make them any happier, it will certainly make them more sophisticated entities, able to confront with stark honesty the greatest and most real problems of human life, such as how do we give our finite existence meaning knowing that we face inevitable extinction? or how do generate our own values in a universe which gives us none? Only by wrestling with ultimate questions such as those can people truly become human. If they assume that some imaginary being from legend just solves these challenging, existential issues by his mere existence then they have lost the vitally important opportunity for personal development that comes from facing these questions as real problems to be thought through and answered for themselves. Since atheists would rather share the planet with existentially sophisticated beings rather than people anesthetized through fairy tales, we actively promote our atheistic attitude for others to adopt.

I think that secularism as you define it has to be viewed as a subset of secularization. Once we get out of the habit of explaining incidents of spontaneous combustion by reference to the unpredictable ire of Vulcan, the fire god, then it is a natural generalization of that attitude that we also dismiss an over-arching Deity as the gurantor that all social values and meanings are valid. The modern, securalist view of the world accepts the difference between values and facts, but also recognizes that both values and facts can be valid, though the former derive their validity from their role in sustaining social morality, while the latter dervice their validity by being empirically testable givens of our everyday experience. The mistake of the religious view of life, in contrast, is to assume that both facts and values require the same type of support in their correspondence to some thing outside themselves which makes them real. Facts certainly require such support, but values derive their support from the importance of their role in supporting the moral cohesion of society, not in the fact that some thing outside them, like a given Deity, confirms them and makes them real. It would be absurd to think that we couldn't believe that murder was wrong, for example, unless we also believed in the superstition that a three-headed cat on Mars with infinite powers who had also created the universe told us it was wrong! The evil of murder is clear from the role that that act plays in the violation of our value system. But the value system doesn't have to be propped up by a three-headed cat confirming its value, but by the fact that murder involves violating our essential social commitment, required for the existence of a peaceful society in which all can flourish, not to infringe the vital personal autonomy of others for our own interests.

Although many countries have 'anti-hate speech' laws which protect the majority of citizens from being offended by the expressed views of some irritating minority, the United States grants no one any right against offensive public statements of any sort, even if they are manifested by the building of a structure laden with offensive implications. Your right is just freely to practice or not practice the religion or conviction of your choice, not to be insulated from anyone else's practice next door. Of course there are criminal laws which can limit certain rights, such as laws against polygamy or the use of certain drugs in religious ceremonies. But the balance between these laws and those protected religious rights is carefully calibrated by the 'levels of scrutiny' tests derived informally over the years from the 14th Amendment. These tests allowed Roman Catholics to continue using communion wine despite prohibition laws during the 1920s, but didn't permit Mormons to have plural marriages, and still keep Moslem men from having more than one wife, since the balance is drawn differently in different situations, depending on the public interests at stake. If there were any attempt to use municipal zoning laws to restrict the building of Islamic centers near the site of the 9/11 tragedy on the grounds of a purely religious distinction, it would never pass constitutional muster. Even an attempt to find some religiously neutral reason for zoning such institutions out of the Ground Zero area would probably be interpreted by a reviewing court as a disguised attempt by the state to deny religious liberty and would be struck down.

Pathological states in humans suggest some interesting connections between sleep and nutrition. Patients with Kleine-Levin Syndrome, for example, can sleep up to 16 or 18 hours a day, but when they wake up, they often go into an eating frenzy which is disproportionate to the amount of time they have been without food. Renal patients who develop neurological damage preventing them from sleeping more than a few hours at a time have little or no appetite (though there are also other factors involved in this loss of appetite).