The Wit and Wisdom of Megan McArdle

From today's posts alone:

[I]f I did have a firm belief in God, I'd have a hard time reconciling the following two principles:

- There is an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity, and man's highest destiny is to fulfill His purpose;

- I routinely ignore what this deity says because my neighbors disagree.

...

The question of personhood is not definitionally religious, even if the only people interested in expanding society's definition of personhood are religious. Blacks are people, and those of us without any particular religious convictions are able to apprehend this, even if 150 years ago the only people much interested in prosecuting their claim to personhood were ministers and their flocks.

...

Slaveowners didn't need religion to motivate them to defend slavery; they had a powerful financial interest in doing so. Similarly, the pro-choice movement, at least in my experience, gets most of its activist energy from reproductive-aged women who have a strong interest in being able to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

By contrast, what self-interest was served by the abolitionist movement then, or the pro-life movement now? There's a legend among many pro-choicers that everyone in the pro-life movement is a patriarchal, selfish man who wants to force women to have babies in order to control them. In fact, women and men are roughly equally likely to be pro-life. The best that pro-lifers get out of their movement is--having to carry their own unwanted pregnancies to term.

Bonus: she provided a link to this, which I haven't digested yet, but seems pretty smart.

UPDATE: Having decided that Megan is the hottest girl over 6 feet that I'll ever disagree with, I've added her to the blogroll.