God’s Creation can be described in terms of `mystery’ when we speak in certain modes, poetic or spiritual, but that’s not the truest way for a Christian to speak. It’s not the truest way because Christians, of all human beings, should be faithful to the Creator and open to what He’s telling us through this … [Read more…]
There’s a recently published essay, Sex After Christianity, which is interesting and insightful and tells a sketchy story of the loss of Christianity in the United States (probably the entire West), a story which might be sketchy but is more plausible than what you might gather from the way most Christians speak and far more … [Read more…]
I have uploaded A Modern Understanding of Human Being, a book about human being from a viewpoint of a Christian accepting and making some sense of modern empirical knowledge. In this book, I lay a foundation by advocating respect for empirical reality, the reality into which we are born and in which we develop. Moreover, … [Read more…]
I’m going to take a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals somewhat out of context: The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. [second essay, section 19 from the translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989] What is … [Read more…]
What happens when someone loses a body part or use of and feeling in that body part? How completely can a human being adapt to a prosthetic device? In a recent article, Human Brain Treats Prosthetic Devices as Part of the Body, we can read: People with spinal cord injuries show strong association of wheelchairs … [Read more…]
I’m going to slightly misuse a quote from Wittgenstein: Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt. [On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harper Torchbooks, 1972, page 68e] He was writing about knowledge inside of a `language game’, which I think to be something like the active use of a hypothetical dictionary and grammar of what … [Read more…]
I’ve claimed that we can see the world, at least after Jesus Christ’s ascension to His Father, as being the story of the growth and development of the Body of Christ, including the evolution and development of the organs of that Body. We can read the main purposes of God as Creator out of this … [Read more…]
There is a good possibility for interesting science in the field of astrophysics and the closely related field of physical cosmology. It seems that something exists that couldn’t possibly exist under current theories: a structure of quasars that extends to distances which seem far greater than possible under current understandings of the expansion of this … [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…]
In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out: [A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than … [Read more…]