Some Christians think that God being all-good and all-powerful and all-knowing could have created a world without evil. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be our world. It wouldn’t be the story of the incarnate Son of God sacrificing Himself to the Father. From that main theme, we can consider salvation of the individual and salvation within … [Read more…]
Those who have enough sense not to watch modern movies might not realize that: Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise’s main antagonist. Scarcely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet’s operations are almost exclusively performed by war-machines, cyborgs (usually … [Read more…]
We’re born with certain physical characteristics, some good and some bad, some allowing us to excel and some limiting our possible accomplishments. Modern psychologists have shown that the physician Galen was largely right in his general principles which he taught nearly 2,000 years ago. We are born with relatively well-defined temperaments and with other relatively … [Read more…]
Those who have been following the Obamacare mandate mess will know of the prayers of American-Catholics, led by their bishops, for religious liberty. Apparently, the religious liberty, even the very lives, of Syrian Christians is of little interest, nor were the liberties and lives of the Christians living in other ancient communities which have been … [Read more…]
I’ve written in the past that we can think, with proper qualifications and definitions, of physical matter including our bodies as being frozen soul: see Frozen Soul and Other Delicacies for a recent essay discussing that claim. This language of “frozen soul” is another way of thinking about the spectrum of created being: God manifested … [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…]
Recently, I wrote still another post, prophesying into a vacuum of sorts, in which I explored some of the dangers of assuming that Christians, or any others with strong moral beliefs, can enter fully into shared medical insurance programs or even basic medical systems with those who hold differing moral beliefs. That essay, Through the … [Read more…]
I’m trying to tighten the focus of some of my own ideas in the area of religion and society, religion and government, religion and any other form of human community. There are probably many things to be said about the conflict between religion and various sorts of religious societies, and some also cover conflicts involving … [Read more…]
The bishops of the American Catholic Church are upset with President Obama’s mandate that all participants in regulated health-care programs should have coverage for contraceptives, abortions, and perhaps some other services and products considered immoral by Catholics and many others. But this Catholic layman has a question: What right have the bishops to object in … [Read more…]
In an essay I recently posted to this blog, Let’s Hear It for Amateurs, That Is, for Lovers, I used a quote from The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, to argue along a slightly different line than Professor Minogue had intended. This is the quote from The Liberal Mind which was the beginning of my … [Read more…]