I’ve pondered a problem for years. How is it that premodern thinkers, such as the 4 A’s: Aristocles (`Plato’ is a nickname which might mean `Chubby’) and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, produced so many true insights into the nature of reality, the nature of contingent being and even of the empirical and concrete realms … [Read more…]
The answer is: communities are real entities, just as real and just as strange as the abstract forms of being, quantum wavefunctions, from which concrete being is shaped. But no more real nor more strange. To see the reality of communities (and some other `abstract’ entities), we can return to my basic claim about being, … [Read more…]
Basic relationships and not complex things or ideas are the true Platonic Reals in the sense of being the basis of created being. So to write. So to speak, if I were discussing these matters with a like-interested friend over some good whiskey or stout or port. If we were to try to imagine a … [Read more…]
Our delusions about the world being subject to understanding by an out-of-the-box human mind and our allied delusions about human control over that world lead us into various specific errors. We ignore what doesn’t fit into our favorite schemes, that is, we are blind and deaf to what doesn’t fit into our delusionary schemes of … [Read more…]
We modern human beings have illusions of control; as a consequence, even our ways of approaching human freedom look not so much different from the ways of implementing systems of hierarchical control, even totalitarianism. We think to have some sort of great power over reality, if only in ways of thought and attitude. On the … [Read more…]
Razib Khan, is a geneticist who is an atheist but not a naively anthropocentric atheist nor one blind to the reasons why others hold or seek a faith he doesn’t hold and doesn’t desire. He has published an essay, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist?, in which he says: In the culture of … [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…]
Based on greatly expanded knowledge about human being, individual and communal, even Christian churches which have passed through periods of excessive claims to authority have come around to acknowledge there are many realms of a complete and perfect human life which lie beyond their institutional understanding and authority. I’ve discussed this in various places in … [Read more…]
Matter, your own living flesh and blood or the bread and wine brought to the altar, is an essential element of any Christian Sacrament. More than that, it’s the most concrete part of a sacramental world. Even non-sacramental Christians accept baptism as a Sacrament though perhaps refusing to use the term, but I’m going to … [Read more…]
We think ourselves now so sophisticated because we know the world isn’t designed, at least not in the way of a human engineer. But there are patterns and the ways of thought which provide some serious understandings of those patterns arising from states of seeming disorder are difficult and are certainly not yet part of … [Read more…]