The doctrine of “free-will” and the similar doctrine positing an immaterial “mind” or “soul” seem to be an attempt to avoid the limitations and constraints of biology, of an organism in this world which is a highly particularized realm within Creation. We wish to rise above such mere physical processes as hormonal flows and—at a … [Read more…]
In my last post, What is the Totality of a Human Life?: Individual and Communal Intent, I proposed that `intent’ in the sense used by Thomas Aquinas and by biologists and lawyers is a way to help us understand human being in its totality, encompassing individual and communal manifestations of human being—and probably divine human … [Read more…]
Or… Are they? That is, are the roots really amoral? More appropriately, do we humans see wrongly when we separate moral order from other sorts of order, raising moral order to angelic, ethereal realms? Once upon a time, when the West was truly Christian, we Western men did that with human nature. By tying Christian … [Read more…]
Rod Dreher posted an interesting essay on March 23, 2016: Millennial Landslide. I’ll start with a snippet of a quote he provided from another source: The percentage of Americans who prayed or believed in God reached an all-time low in 2014, according to new research led by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. … [Read more…]
For some reason, isolation is seen as only `isolationism’: a total policy, an ideological hardening of sorts. Even highly intelligent commentators of realist leanings will write and speak as if we Americans can choose only between some sort of major involvement in international relationships or a permanent and total withdrawal. This hardly accounts for all … [Read more…]
[There are typos in the essay I’m responding to. I think they are probably due to the site’s archiving since the Scientific American website is generally well-edited. I’ve kept the typos and avoided using the “(sic)” notation—the reader can make the corrections in his or her head.] In this essay posted several years back, Look … [Read more…]
[I am reposting this essay because it shows how I’ve been dealing for more than five years with the problems of self-righteous blindness in Americans, beginning at least with the Puritan Fathers of New England. Puritanism—Calvinism in general—was one of the most important of the early ideologies infected with radical individualism. And, true to form, … [Read more…]
Wayne Allensworth has a frighteningly interesting commentary on virtual reality, an addictive abuse of technology which might generate still more problems than what we’re seeing from our better established abuses of technology (`ordinary’ video games, cellphones for 4 to 104, etc), Disconnected: Our Virtual Unreality, where he writes near the end: Alistair Charlton of the … [Read more…]
Psalm 24 tells us rightly: “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples.” It’s God who creates from nothingness and God who brings order to the raw stuff He first creates. This isn’t to deny that we human beings, in fact—all things and living creatures and all of created … [Read more…]
By “liberalism,” I mean a closely related set of systems of freedoms of a specific sort, those emphasizing and even `enforcing’ an individualism which in its moderate form is compatible with the traits of many northwestern Europeans and fewer other Europeans and—for the most part—far fewer others. [An example of enforcing individualism would be changes … [Read more…]