Three Links Wednesday (vol. II)

Sometimes (ok, often) I wish that it was a quick and easy to post links to my blog as to post them to Facebook. In particular, I'd like to be able to post these quick links (with or without my commentary) and have them show up in a side-reader instead of the main blog. Perhaps that will be a feature which comes to the Nicene Guys blog when the upgraded version gets launched. Since the site has been up and down all week, I suspect that perhaps my friend and theoretical co-blogger there, Mr Andrew Elster, may be tweaking the site just a little. We'll see.

--I--

My friend Mr Nathan Kennedy has an interesting post about moral relativism and "objective" as opposed to "subjective" morality. It's not exactly the same direction as my other Nathan-named friend Mr Nathanael Blake has gone concerning morality (or truth), but it has given me something to think about. NB that I also have mentioned something similar in a past post, that there is Truth (and Goodness) and then there is our own interpretations of these, but this isn't necessarily the same understanding as either of my friends are putting forward.

--II--

Professor Edward Feser has a discussion about the concept of "perverted faculties" wrapped in a discuss about the morality of lying. He also outline seven points about lying, which he has examined in more depth elsewhere. The first three points more-or-less contain the others, and in particular he begins by noting that lying is always wrong, but not always gravely wrong.

--III--

On the National Catholic Register blogs, Mr Patrick Archbold writes about custody of the eyes--and how the men (or maybe "guys") of our society no longer practice this. For those who struggle with this, a step in the right direction would be to at least keep the dirty thoughts to yourself. It would be better still to not have such thoughts at all, but this may be a bit harder to master. One step at a time, though. Mr Archbold offers this advice to help, though: "I have a simple, yet effective rule of thumb for how men should act.  I would never look at a woman or say anything about a woman that I would not do or say in front of my wife.  To do otherwise would bring shame upon her and me."

--Bonus (RANT)--

While I disagree with the rhetoric of this article, it does say one good thing: that a playoff is apparently looming in college football. The SEC was gift-wrapped the BCS national championship this year (so claiming "we won six in a row" can't be done with anything but an asterisk, which I would have put on the statement before anyway), but the result is that change is coming. From a fan's perspective, playoffs are great: but I'd actually be quite content to go back to the old bowl system (and perhaps with a reduced number of bowl games), which at least did not put on the continual charade of pitting the supposed #1 vs #2 in the championship. Perhaps Alabama really is the best team; perhaps not; we'll never know how OSU (or, for that matter, Stanford or even Oregon, to say nothing of USC and BSU) would have fared against them. For that matter, how would Texas, USC, or Utah fared against Florida in 2008, or USC or WVU (assuming the coach had stuck around) or OU fared against LSU in 2007? I will give the SEC '06 and '09-'10, but of those only the '06 championship game was really that impressive.

On a related note, I suspect that if the top three teams from the PAC-12 played against the top 3 from the SEC, it would be a 2-1 split (and could go either way as to who wins 2), including a possible Oregon win in a rematch with LSU (after all, if Alabama can lose at home by 3 in overtime to LSU and then win by 21 on a neutral site a few months later, there' no reason to believe that Oregon couldn't have the same kind of turn-around)--though I suppose a 3-v-3 would look like Oregon v Alabama, USC v LSU (maybe next year?), and Stanford v Arkansas. I suspect that the same would be true for the Big-12, with OSU being a match for Alabama, KSU not so for LSU, and OU being more than a match for Arkansas.At leas tthe PAC-12 and B1G are planning something similar for the future.

I did, in any case, boycott watching the SEC West championship re-match, as did a number of other people, since the rating was down from last year (and was lower than 8 other "BCS Championship" games--it was third lowest rated all-time and lowest all-time for cable BCS games). As one friend put it, "I played Battlefield 3 instead. I guarantee I had way more fun than anyone who watched the game."