Depends on the jurisdiction.

I like dogs and cats but Robert De Niro said it best asking Gaylord Focker in Meet the Parents, "Do you prefer the company of a shallow animal?"

Maybe she was being held at knifepoint and you couldn't read between the lines. Do you know where she works?

Finding an absolute place to stand guarantees conflict because some will choose one side, and some another, and there will never be a winner because there is no authority on who is right. If two or more groups have inflexible absolutes in direct conflict, there will not be peaceful coexistence.

The two or more groups fail to realize that the others' absolute positions are no less valid than their own, so instead of taking this to mean that both equally valid absolutes in conflict must mean both are invalid and dropping them, they kill each other. When absolutes are abandoned all of sudden it's a lot easier get along with your neighbors and agree with a common perception of the real world, because everybody is working with the same information. Subscription to an authority dictating absolutes is the point where things begin to break down because there can be no winner other than elimination of the other viewpoint or avoidance of the point of contention altogether, i.e. isolationism.

Absolutely. Shades of gray simply means more than two and black and white means only two, and it is alarming to me how often it gets reduced to pedantics by through literal interpretion and suggestion they are mutually exclusive.


Ah, so when the means is wrong, but the end is good, was the means still wrong? Perhaps it depends on the person from whom something was taken. The fun of grays.... At least the diabetic isn't in shock.

By the way, I don't believe in absolute right and wrong.

I would argue that that recognizing shades of gray in the world allows one to consider all of the information for making informed decisions about where they stand. If you discard all but two colors, then yes, it is easier, but not necessarily better. Stop lights used to only have two colors. You knew when to go and when to stop, and that was it. That yellow light does leave some ambiguity of "should I hit the brakes or keep going?", and you have to think about where you stand, but I'll take it and be better off personally and as a citizen for it.

I think there are many angles and it is a virtue I can only wish to possess more often to perceive from more than one.

Black and white is no way for me to color a world filled with so many shades of gray.

Reminds me of an older headline from The Onion: "Area Man Accidentally Responds To Own 'M4M' Ad"

Often.


No.


Yes.


Yes, Jack.

I think you mean Old School!

Even a non-christian church?

I card all dates who appear under 35.

I have only one piece of advice: when the doctor asks if you need more narcotic painkillers, NEVER say no!

Sounds like a reasonable approach. If I had kids, I would rather, like anything else in life, have an approach of starting with nothing and searching for evidence of truth rather than the other way around, like Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller says in his This I Believe segment on NPR.

I think about this a lot. A friend of mine did this. I know what love is like, so I can see how somebody would do it when basking in the good feeling. Somebody could be more accepting of ideas otherwise incongruent with their thoughts if they were flooded with euphoria. I thought about this for the first time recently, how that could happen. But when one converts for love then the reason they did it seems to quickly evaporate or start to be ignored, minimizing attention to the big picture or all the original information.

I'm still trying to quit food.

What if it were really serious, with marriage a mutual goal, but the other person would not marry you unless you joined the religion? Does that still qualify as worth it?

Make sure she holds up a copy of today's paper, too.