I started college as a philosophy major. While my friends were agonizing their way through calculus and organic chemistry, I was happily holed up in the library stacks with musty volumes by Nietzsche, Socrates, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, et. al., or in the Student Union having deep conversations with cute girls. All was bliss until it dawned on me that I might someday graduate and have to earn a living, and the only career path open to a philosophy major was teaching philosophy to bored undergrads.

So I got into computers, but I never lost my love for Socrates and the joys of pondering difficult questions.

What I often do here is play at being Socrates. I ask questions, sometimes hard questions, hoping they will help me discover God's truth and my errors. And not my errors only, but the errors of moral judgment, political philosophy and homegrown wisdom that our culture embraces as truth.

I work from several fundamental assumptions: 1) God exists; 2) God is the ultimate arbiter of truth and error; 3) God is relational in character and has revealed himself in history; and 4) God has made it possible for us to gain limited insight into his nature and truth.

There are a number of corollaries to these beliefs, such as "There is only one God, and I am not Him," and "Truth exists, but I am often clueless." I believe each of us has a duty to be inquisitive about who God is and what he wants from us. Too many of us drift through life without examining our deepest beliefs. We're quick to say what we think about the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but about God and the great moral questions of our times we can be strangely, and foolishly, incurious.

I recently stirred up a hornets' nest by comparing the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's participation in the German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. I managed to offend equally both the left and the right, so I don't feel too bad.

It was an example of asking questions to discover what I really believe, and to try to discover God's truth. If I ask a lousy question, I muddy the waters. If I ask an unsettling question, I may give offense. I may have done both.

Abortion is a grave sin that robs history of a human life. Any just and moral political philosophy must guard the rights of the weakest members of society, because a majority can tyrannize a minority — slavery and Jim Crow laws being two infamous examples.

If human life is intrinsically deserving of dignity and respect, every assault on human dignity is wrong, including the senseless murder of a child by a gang, the murder of an abortion doctor, euthanasia, capital punishment, genocide, torture, imprisonment on trumped-up charges, pushing mentally ill people out of hospitals and onto the streets, etc., etc.

In my essay, I was trying to find the limits, if any, to a philosophical idea known as utilitarianism, aka "the end justifies the means."

We had a beautiful sunset this afternoon. I took these two photos within a couple of minutes of each other, as the sun was sinking lower and the sky was darkening. The plant is a yucca.

When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe. — John Gall, Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail, 1975.

"I truly believe Metro is a safe system." — DC Metro General Manager John B Catoe, Jr., quoted in the Washington Post.

A "fail-safe" automatic traffic control system designed to make it impossible for DC Metro trains to get too close to each other has failed more than once, this time resulting in 9 deaths. An ultra-modern Air France Airbus, guided by a fail-safe "fly-by-wire" piloting system, experienced multiple, simultaneous failures and fell from the sky into the Atlantic, killing all aboard.

When you consider the millions of passenger-miles safely traveled each year, these incidents really are anomalies. But that's cold comfort to the victims and those who loved them.

Human life is precious, so the impossible goal of these modern technologies is perfection — no deaths, no injuries, no close calls.

Yet, even while standing perfectly still, we are at risk in ways we can hardly imagine. E coli in ground beef and cookie dough. Salmonella in peanuts and pistachios. Melamine in powdered milk.

International trade creates convoluted supply chains with a patchwork of safety standards, leaving the consumer to guess whether the products he uses are safe or dangerous. In a new study by IBM, only 20% of respondents say they trust food safety.

And yet, we have not given up eating.

Life is risky, and technology can't change that. Computerized control systems may eliminate operator errors, but what about the errors made by computer programmers, systems designers and maintenance personnel. Does technology only trade one sort of risk for another?

We hope these systems are safe. Like John Catoe, we want to believe they are safe. But what do we actually know?

It's astounding, and ironic, how much blind faith is required to live in the modern world. Like it or not, technology forces us to put our complete trust in things we do not, and cannot, understand.

We must live by faith or live in paralysis.

After years spent openly opposing Adolf Hitler and encouraging Germans to turn against his regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a Christian minister, theologian, pacifist and German citizen — made a deliberate turn from civil disobedience to secret participation in a cabal whose aim was to assassinate the Fuhrer. Bonhoeffer laid aside his Christian pacifism when he woke up to the fact that Hitler was engaging in genocide. This outraged Bonhoeffer, who held the deep religious conviction that the Jews were a people precious to God and deserving of protection, whatever the personal cost.

As a pacifist, Bonhoeffer had quietly refused to join the military. With his newfound commitment to Hitler's murder he changed direction and joined the German Abwehr, the wartime intelligence agency headed by Admiral Wilheim Canaris. Canaris was secretly opposed to Hitler and was using Abwehr to launch a variety of plots against the Reich, including assassination attempts. Bonhoeffer never participated directly in such plots — they had to be carried out by the military, because officers were the only ones who could get close enough to the Fuhrer to kill him. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer aided and encouraged these plots from his post inside the Abwehr. Pretending to be a loyal servant of Hitler's Reich, Bonhoeffer was in fact a double agent working towards Hitler's forcible overthrow.

The July 20 Plot on Hitler's life is retold in Tom Cruise's recent film Valkyrie, the plot's code name. It came very close to succeeding but nevertheless failed, enraging Hitler and setting off a ruthless hunt for the conspirators.

Bonhoeffer never claimed that God was "on his side" in this effort. On the contrary, he wrote that his decision to work for Hitler's assassination would make him guilty of breaking God's law. His conviction was that he had to follow the dictates of his conscience, even though he felt certain that he would be judged guilty by God should he cause Hitler's death. His only moral hope, he believed, was that he might find grace to cover his sin through his faith in Christ.

His position seems at first glance to be a tortured ethical contradiction. What drove Bonhoeffer to discard his pacifism in this instance was the realization that in a world broken by sin and suffused by evil, certain horrors simply could not be tolerated, and could only be stopped through violence.

Bonhoeffer saw himself obeying the call of Christ to lay down his life for others. He in effect sacrificed his own moral convictions in the hope of saving Jews from the death camps.

The question I would pose is this: Is it legitimate to suggest that there is a moral equivalency between Dietrich Bonhoeffer's violent opposition to Adolf Hitler and the recent cold-blooded assassination of doctor George Tiller, the unapologetic abortionist? I believe there is.

Put another way, was Bonhoeffer wrong to attempt to save Jewish lives through assassination? Is violence intrinsically evil, as many in these post-modern times believe, or is it possible that violence is morally neutral, neither good nor bad apart from the circumstances in which it is wielded?

May 26 is National Sorry Day in Australia, a national attempt to heal the wounds of the century-long practice of forcibly removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers. This government policy, which was carried out for about 100 years from 1860 to modern times, is known to have separated more than 100,000 children from their birth families and placed them in government-run institutions. Children brought into such facilities as the Moore River Native Settlement were required to give up their native language and beliefs in an attempt to bring out their allegedly superior white genetic capabilities.

As Australia became more heavily colonized and white Australians pushed the Aborigines away from white settlements, the state governments created programs for the management of the Aboriginal peoples. Frequent contact between the two populations resulted in mixed-race children, some of whom were rejected by Aboriginal communities.

This led to a diverse set of policies in which such "half-caste" children were identified and taken from their families, often with no attempt to document where the children came from. They became popularly-known as the stolen generation, a term that is still quite controversial in Australia, as many hold to the belief that these children were being rescued from dire circumstances.

These government polices, however, were being driven by the social theories of the time, many of which held that whites were intrinsically superior to blacks, and that the Aboriginal communities would eventually die out completely because of their inability to adapt to modernity.

Stealing mixed-race children, therefore, came to be seen as an act of enlightened compassion by white society.

Nations are capable of horrific sin. America's national acceptance of slavery, followed by more than 100 years of institutional racial segregation, is at least as great a sin as Australia's actions towards its Aborigines, or Germany's Holocaust, or the modern-day genocide still taking place in Darfur.

This same false compassion that justified Australians as they ripped families apart is our favorite American justification for the forcible removal of living fetuses from their mothers' wombs. Under the guise of global compassion, our present administration is exporting this sin around the world, euphemistically calling it family planning. It is ironic that a black president would be a champion of this blatantly racist program to reduce the size of families in Africa, and in America's inner cities.

Perhaps America, too, will one day be moved to contrition for the tens of millions of children who were never allowed to marvel at the sunrise or find their rightful place in God's creation. We are presently in the vice-like grip of a national refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of life. I fear it will be a long, long time before America recognizes the callous and sinful arrogance we have practiced towards the unborn.

Photo credit: Benjamin John Doman