This is a short follow-up post to the essay I published yesterday: Prosperity that Never Ends…Oops. Besides a few unexplored aspects of this situation, I also left hanging the question which is the title of this post: Why Are the Parasites Killing the Host? Indeed, why? Wouldn’t they be better in the long run to … [Read more…]
Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect. I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in … [Read more…]
Cosmologists study the universe at a level where records vanish, as we learn in this article: Best Time to Study the Cosmos Was More Than 13 Billion Years Ago. The physical world, with its stars and galaxies and background radiation fields, doesn’t leave us some sort of permanent record to study at our leisure. Information … [Read more…]
I have uploaded a small sampler of sorts, a collection of essays from my weblog writings. This small collection deals with the subject of our need to accept empirical reality as the source of even those concepts which seem to be absolute truths. The short book can be downloaded at Making Peace with Empirical Reality.
Lust is a deformed version of the virtue of love, the binding force in a number of human relationships including those involving God. Moreover, the passions and more quiet feelings we know as love are those which evolved amongst social mammals. It’s quite a plausible speculation that our ancient four-legged ancestors first began to melt … [Read more…]
Many modern Christians can’t understand why a distinguished man of letters, Vladimir Nabokov, would have written a novel about a man attracted to girls just before adolescence or perhaps just entering that ripening of sexual nature. The answer is as clear as the glorification of Mel Gibson’s gory movie, The Passion of the Christ. We … [Read more…]
I’m still contemplating a few issues raised or brought back to memory by my recent reading of The Meaning of Truth by William James. The ideas of William James put pressure upon my own ideas, a form of updated Thomism, just because he knew how to respect empirical reality without being a reductionist but also, … [Read more…]
Respect for empirical knowledge doesn’t determine if one believes or disbelieves in God, though it has generally forced any believers, pagan and pantheist and Christians and others, to see a God of reason. After all, the very term `empirical knowledge’ is meaningful only if it refers to something, some realm of being subject to perception … [Read more…]
Many thinkers in history, philosophers and others, have imagined they could deal with moral issues by conjecturing a small set of sharply formed assumptions, perhaps a set of virtues which were said to be the building blocks of human moral character. Christians should have known better because the fundamental doctrine of moderate realism, similar to … [Read more…]
What do you do with a frozen soul? You could lick it because, speaking in general terms, a Popsicle is as much a piece of frozen soul as a human being is. And so are rattlesnakes and monkeys and rocks hurtling through space. You can also saw frozen soul, beginning the process of making a … [Read more…]