Advances in artificial intelligence are of interest because of what they may say about consciousness. If a machine can acquire human-like sentience, does that mean consciousness is entirely an emergent property of brain functioning? If so, it would arguably eliminate human consciousness as a phenomenon that proves God’s existence. All the more reason, then, that we […]
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Fascista
A professor at King’s College New York, Joseph Loconte, recently wrote on the origins of fascism in a way that is illuminating to the position we are in today. Before introducing his article, I’d like to back up to something I wrote (in Illiberalism) on this subject a year or so ago: On the far right, […]
Read more...Friendship
From time to time I’ve asked rhetorically whether there might be a link between the loss of faith and the rise of despair. For example, in a memoir I wrote: We sometimes say people “lose hope” and become despondent, perhaps to the point of despair or even suicide, but what does that phrase really mean? […]
Read more...Active God
I’ve long been interested in how to think about the ongoing presence of God in our day-to-day lives. I could be oversimplifying, but it seems to me there are two ways of thinking of God. Either He is the aloof God of Deism, the uncaused-cause necessary to explain physical reality, but nothing more, or He […]
Read more...Etiolated Language
I have written before about how language is debased such that Christian concepts are built into secularism in a confusing way. It is unfortunate not just because precision is lost. It is also unfortunate because it serves to obscure the naturalism endemic to modern secularism. The operating assumption you’re routinely expected to embrace is that […]
Read more...Agony and Hope
Agony and Hope Every so often a young-ish person wrings the hands in print about the difficulty of finding a marriageable mate in this culture. It’s a brave thing to do, really, because if done badly it can subject the writer to ridicule. In fact, done well it can subject the writer to ridicule, because […]
Read more...Thoughtcrime
Fairy Tales I commend to you a consideration of fairy tale and myth as bringers of truth, in an article by Kris Yee in the Imaginative Conservative, here. An excerpt: In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R Tolkien defends a certain type of escape, posing the reader with the question: “Why should a man be scorned if, […]
Read more...Hound of Heaven
For some reason I was thinking of this phrase “hound of heaven,” and then on the radio a couple of days ago happened to hear it mentioned. I’ve heard it before as a metaphor for God in His pursuit of us, but didn’t know that it was explicitly the name of a poem, one written […]
Read more...The Serpent
A quote from Christ the Tiger, by Thomas Howard: Our situation is directly analogous to that of men in Death Row. We fill in the time somehow, but we shall not get out. The inevitable event makes the intervening activities look absurd. * * * We are all sitting in Death Row. One fine day the […]
Read more...Subjective Time
I was thinking about the nature of time because I was invited to listen to and comment on a podcast about hell. That occasioned a consideration of time because it was necessary to evaluate the thesis that those who die without Christ don’t live eternally in torment; rather, their suffering is finite, and then they […]
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