Sitting atop the ridge at dusk, thinking. In the untamed valley spread out before me are millions, or perhaps billions, of things, living and dead. No two of those things are the same, not down in the fine structure, or mainly even on the surface. Like snowflakes and fingerprints, each of the things that I see is an individual. Few of them are reasoning, not as we see it. Reminded then, in my mind, I look out into the world … Read on…
“Spirituality” is not my favorite word; it’s mushy, and connotes antithesis to rationality. But lacking a better word, it does capture something people experience, and seem to desire. We want to feed not just the mind but the soul (another problematic word; I use it metaphorically). We want to transcend the mundane; to apprehend something greater, something deeper. Religion scratches this itch, providing a dose of the ineffable. Its ceremonies do this very well –having evolved over centuries to exploit … Read on…
Today’s Story Hour
Tooth-fairy agnostics wear calluses
on atheist funny bones.
While the choir harmonizes
spare change with children at play,
the fence-sitting cracks up
a dumpy hump at Notre Dame. Read on…
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My welfare in mind, Grace declares that coffee today at The Compass Café is out. She hands me Steven Hawking’s The Universe In A Nutshell, then quietly leaves the bedroom. Ten to the power of 36 is big. Just how big I cannot fathom under normal circumstances, let alone when in the grip of the flu. The same goes for a thousand light years across the spindrift of the cosmos. I sink into reverie. When the effects of medication wear … Read on…
Depending on the believer’s particular philosophical bent, and upon the journey of the unbeliever to her philosophy, it may be that there is truly not much difference between the believer and the infidel. It is possible, but not likely, that the unbeliever’s world-view is very nearly the same as that of any given believer, except that she believes in one fewer god than does a true believer, to paraphrase the words of Stephen Roberts. The unbeliever may be more independent … Read on…
Cities’ Limits
Faith in death frees the worshipper
from consequence and result. Atheists
dance with rabbits feet and patches,
extending joyful relics ad nauseam.
Monks slobber around china, bumping
against one end of broad daylight
to the other, letting chain reactions
chug at the ends of their lines. Read on…
Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, taught me a lot about the world. In 1999, he authored The Great Disruption. This refers to the current, and third, major discontinuity in humanity’s way of life. The first was the emergence of agriculture; second, the Industrial Revolution; and now, transition to a more highly technological, “information society.” Each entails social disruption. Fukuyama sought to assess those consequences of our current civilizational upheaval. He recognizes a lot … Read on…
Climbing through grassy
meadows and up a switchback
trail, her calf muscles protested
as guilt waylaid her, locked her
into a time and place. Read on…
It is probably fair to say that unbelievers are not a very cohesive group. Independence is the nature of the beast; if it were not, the unbeliever would not have made the effort to develop a world-view that is so far from so many of his fellow human beings. Like them, rather, she would have accepted the “common wisdom,” agreed that there was a god that was the master of her fate, and bedded down with the sheep. Instead, the … Read on…