It has been observed that if you want to be an emperor, it is better by far to be one at the beginning of the empire than at the end, when the whole enterprise is collapsing. If so, this is as good a season as any to start thinking about how to get there. Empires have been out of fashion for several generations, but history moves in cycles, and the day of the empire is returning. Read on…
My wife challenged me to answer an essay by Alvin Plantinga, a professor of philosophy, attempting to justify religious belief through logic. My response: LOL.
For millennia, religious apologists have advanced innumerable supposed logical arguments. It’s a fool’s errand. Read on…
I recently attended a talk by Austin Dacey, of New York’s Center For Inquiry. He has a Doctorate in Applied Ethics and Social Philosophy. His book, The Secular Conscience – Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, was published in 2008 and has received wide attention. Dacey began with a Bible reading: the story of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham prepared to obey. Isaac was saved in the nick of time by an angel who said, “Never … Read on…
On Christmas day the west opened their presents under pine trees and celebrated over large family meals an occasion which has been celebrated for thousands of years, far back into the first societies in Europe. However, for the Christians of Nigeria it was a time of fear and violence. Thirty died as a bomb went off near the Nigerian capital of Abuja in just one of many attacks across the country on the Christian holy day. The attacks come only … Read on…
All my life I’ve been fascinated by unfamiliar lands and peoples; the mosaic of human cultures for me is the most fascinating subject in the universe. I have spent half my life abroad and almost all of it dealing in one way or another with what works in different cultural environments, and what happens when cultures collide. I’ve gotten to know my subject the way Mark Twain’s riverboat pilot got to know the Mississippi. Recently I have become involved with … Read on…
I stumbled across an online article in eSkeptic about Antony Flew. I thought readers might be interested; so here’s the gist of the piece, authored by Kenneth Grubbs. Read on…
In spring, 1968, a shot rang out, and a bullet passed through the face of a man who’s voice we all recognise today. He fell, his spinal cord severed, and breathed his last breaths. Martin Luther King Jr., champion of black rights, had been shot dead by a white man even as the ugly face of segregation marched to its grave in the United States. Read on…
I remember once asking my late son William, “What is the purpose of life?” William, a schizophrenic, was babbling nonsense, but he stopped and in a moment of clarity gave me a quirky smile and replied: “The purpose of life is to relieve God’s boredom”. Read on…
Gene pools interned,
mutations stamped alien.
Chromosomes perfected
along posterity’s belt. Read on…
Frequent commenter Lee recently pointed me to a blog essay by philosopher Michael Lynch, “Reasons for Reason.”
He says current American divisions are rooted in fundamental differences about what makes a belief believable. Lynch sees a problem of circularity in validating reason by using reason, with all beliefs thus ultimately premised on something arbitrary. Read on…