On responsibility for self and others: If I say something about being responsible for myself, that certainly doesn't mean that I have no sense of responsibility for others. When I talk about ham that doesn't mean that I don't know about eggs. But getting a bit more serious about the interesting ethical problems which arise when weighing one's responsibilities to self and others, I'm reminded of the story of the little girl who returned from Sunday School one day and said to her mother, "I think I understand that the reason I am here is to help others, but what are the others here for?" Well, that doesn't shine much light on the problem.

Socrates chose to die. And (if we can believe Plato) he considered the fact that he had lived a long life. He was thus weighing consequences. He was offered the opportunity to escape from prison. If he made that choice he would have a few more years of life in exile. But he considered his legacy too. Escaping would, he thought, be untrue to the principles he had been encouraging his students to learn, and the effect upon their lives, he thought, would be an unfair price to pay for a brief extension of his own life.

I guess I brought bears into this discussion. Perhaps it was watching the movie "Spirit Bear" that is responsible. There's a story about some explorers camped on the ice on Spitzbergen or some other arctic island. A mother polar bear and two cubs were seen nearby, and one of the party shot the two cubs. The mother bear tried and tried to get the dead cubs to follow her away and expressed her grief with heart rending vocalizations when the little bears could not get up. When I think about this story I feel painfully sad for the bears and miserably angry at the shooter.

Jesus is reported to have said that we should love others as we love ourselves. Perhaps one implication of this is the importance of loving ourselves. In a sense, in order to be faithful to Jesus's admonition we should take care of ourselves first so that we can then properly take care of others. He also admonished us to make sure that we saw a problem clearly before trying to advise others.

I have no perfect formula for deciding difficult moral and ethical dilemmas. I think we each have to do the best we can when we are faced with problems of this sort. It seems to me that the more we know about the world the greater the likelihood that we will make good decisions. It is tempting to make laws to solve such problems. At my research laboratory there was a safety rule against the use of double sockets. I was building a lot of electronic equipment which I had designed myself. I used a double socket every day to plug in my oscilloscope and volt-ohm meter and soldering gun and the circuits I was working on. The safety officer came and confiscated my double socket. I went across the street and bought another one.

I criticized Ann Coulter's remark about conservatives believing in God but liberals believing that they were God. You said,

"I think you pick and choose from a pile of positive and negative actions by religious people/institutions, and you only seem to pick out the negatives."

And Ann Coulter no doubt had a pile of positive and negative things she could have said about conservatives and liberals, but she picked a positive (a putative positive at any rate) about conservatives and a negative about liberals. News agencies pick bad things to report. You pick out parts of my post that you disagree with. I make no apology for directing attention to problems. I am proud of my willingness to do so. I admire your willingness to criticize what I write!

I heartily agree about squirrels and many many other clever animals. I would make a terrible squirrel!

I do not assume that "all religious people must believe it God's responsiblity to provide their medical needs and comforts." I observe that some religious people some of the time fail to think responsibly aboaut some problems because they believe that God will take care of those problems. I have heard sermons preached about this religious pitfall, and I'll bet you have too!

You ask why human life is considered sacred. My answer is that the evaluation of human lives and of human life is a very very difficult task fraught with many seemingly hopeless confusions and contradictions. My father had an answer for me when I posed difficult questions. For example, I would ask, "What happened before the beginning of time?" He would reply, "I classify that as imponderable." One way to forgive oneself for not having a clear, logically consistent, empirically supported answer to a difficult question is to put the question into a special category. The word "sacred" is, in this view, such a category. It's like my Dad's "imponderable".