We’re drawn, all of us are drawn, to weddings. Why? The most obvious reason is that we love a love story. Another reason, though, is that we’re drawn to a picture of completion. Of a union that is complete and not temporary like what we experience here and now. We come to witness a new […]
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Erosion of Freedom
What Government Is At the founding of this country, a foundational idea was what conservatives refer to as limited government. I won’t quote the Declaration of Independence to you, but I’ll state the principle as being that people are to be left alone as far as can be, and that the government exists only to […]
Read more...Manchester by the Sea
I try to comment on books or movies I read or see that seem to have some depth to them, or if they provide an insight that I think might be helpful. I watched Manchester by the Sea after having seen some good reviews. I wondered what the fuss was about but didn’t want to […]
Read more...Life Force
In the research and writing I do I generally stay away from evolution, mainly because it is so widely accepted that I feel like I need to understand it better before I reject it out of hand. Is it possible these proponents of it understand something I don’t? But more importantly, it’s not central to […]
Read more...Zeitgeist
Two weeks ago I posted on the subject of materialism, and what it means to the concept of love. See Love, Materialist Style. It occurs to me that an explanation of that word, “materialism,” is in order. Not just to define it, but to explain its place in the thesis. “Materialism” in this context is […]
Read more...Love, Materialist Style
Unfulfilled Passion In two recent posts, Imagine a Boy, and Yearning, I embarked on a query about what love is, and what it might tell us about the big question: God, or purposeless, mechanistic randomness in the universe? These were posts in more of a story-telling format, than, say, analytic philosophy. Each has its place. […]
Read more...Emancipation Day
Happy Emancipation Day. I heard on the radio that this holiday is the reason the due date for your taxes is extended. I thought that was the most ironic thing I’d every heard, so I checked to be sure it’s real, and it is. April 16th is apparently the anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, […]
Read more...Wester
Easter In last year’s Easter post I talked about the origin of that word, “Easter.” It is a reference to the direction, east, where the morning sun rises as a metaphor for the resurrection to come. In the early days of Christianity, new believers understood they were embracing the God of the Jews, and the […]
Read more...If No God
No Third Way People who reject religion think “religion is not true” but often don’t think about what is true if the idea of God is removed. To say idea X is false is just a negation of X. It’s not a statement of what idea is true in its place. Most (not all) people […]
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Love In Imagine a Boy, we considered the love between a father and son, illustrating how it stems at least from a feeling of unity; of oneness; something deeper than mere kinship. What the boy and his father desire is not mere proximity. Not merely comfortable companionship. Not just mutually entertaining company. Rather, they experience […]
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