John Hawks, prominent anthropologist and leader of the Neandertal Anti-defamation League, made some interesting comments in reviewing the article Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(Early online) by Marina Bedny, et al. See John Hawks Weblog for his review, Language bootstrapping the … [Read more…]
I’m about 2 years late in writing a follow-up to So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution? published on 2009/05/05. For those who don’t follow the link to that earlier article, I’ll quote the first paragraph: Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, … [Read more…]
In an article included in On the Bible, Martin Buber states that a knowledge of the language and culture of ancient Hebrews tells us that the meaning of the “good and evil” related to the tree of knowledge in Eden is “adequate awareness of the opposites latent in creation.” Apparently, the phrase “good and evil” … [Read more…]
All reason is from God and of God. There is no immaterial reasoning agency part of or attached to the human creature. There is no mind or soul as many imagine, nor can we directly access even the manifested truths underlying Creation, let alone any transcendental truths which exist beyond this particular Creation. All reason … [Read more…]
Relationships of a more abstract sort, such as those in politics and economics, are not so much different from concrete relationships as we might think. Not so much different as we’ve led ourselves to believe. Those concrete entities which are more complex, such as a man or a rhinoceros, are made of substances which have … [Read more…]
Analogies can be taken too far and too literally, yet I wonder if we can apply to the human social organism, ultimately the Body of Christ, the example of a long-ago and primitive immune system ‘spinning off’ a neurological system. As I understand this particular line of speculation in evolutionary biology, and it was years … [Read more…]
We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his … [Read more…]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [Read more…]
In one of his novels about the American Empire, Gore Vidal quotes the American-English novelist Henry James as claiming, circa 1900, that it was the United States which was corrupting political systems around the world. The Irish political scientist, William E.H. Lecky, wrote in the 1890s of the great divide in American morality, the citizens … [Read more…]
I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of … [Read more…]