Due to some volunteer projects followed by a sinus infection, I’ve been writing little for publication. My energies have been devoted to early drafts of a couple of novels as well as reading background material to the next stage of understanding the world from a traditional Christian viewpoint—where `traditional’ should be taken in the dynamic … [Read more…]
In a typically erudite book review, The barbarism of reason: John Gray on the Notebooks of Leopardi , Gray tells us: With astonishing prescience, [the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)] diagnosed the sickness of our time: a dangerous intoxication with the knowledge and power given by science, mixed with an inability to accept the humanly … [Read more…]
What is a male? Is any human being with XY genes a male—the `Y’ chromosome being the carrier of genes which mostly lead to male development and the maintenance of male characteristics? (There is a recent discovery that the `X’ female chromosome actually can play a role in the development of males; this might greatly … [Read more…]
In the recent article, ‘Networked Minds’ Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics, we learn that scientists have discovered the existence of “networked minds”, a concept overlapping my concept of “communal minds”. Jacques Barzun covered some important regions of this territory in the 1950s with his book, The House of Intellect and others were very tentatively … [Read more…]
Eric Michael Johnson posted an essay on empathy at the Scientific American website: We Contain Multitudes: Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin, and the Song of Empathy. In this essay, he notes the confusion which followed the publication of On the Origin of Species when “critics claimed that Darwin’s theory divided moral sentiments from divinity and pitted … [Read more…]
Let me recount some of the ways in which we modern Christians are confused: We are still trying to apply categorical reasoning to creatures and relationships in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. We have no way, even in principle, of saying which of our ancestors was the first creature to fall into the … [Read more…]
Most human beings alive in this year of our Lord 2013 freely and fully accept the evidence that the human race wasn’t a special creation by God. Our ancestors were knuckle-draggers who rose from that position to one we consider, with some prejudice perhaps, to be more noble. Remarkably, many who have accepted our biological … [Read more…]
In this short essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarchism, Mike Rappaport tries to shift the focus in a debate about anarchism vs. classical liberalism. He quotes Robert Higgs, an advocate of anarchism: My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a … [Read more…]
This article, The Invisible Hand Illusion, deals with a laboratory testing trick by which psychologists can make people feel as if they have an invisible hand. Ed Yong writes: Hold your hand up in front of your face. It is patently obvious that the five-fingered thing in front of you is your hand, and the … [Read more…]
In this preview of a Scientific American article, Urban Living Raises the Risk of Emotional Disorders , the question is raised: [U]rban migration represents one of the most dramatic environmental shifts human beings have ever undertaken. So one might be tempted to ask: How are we adapting to our new digs? Part of the answer … [Read more…]