Paradigm Setting I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Cain and Abel. It’s obviously a very important story, being one of the stories in the first part of Genesis that sets the paradigm for our understanding of reality, as with Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. To our ears […]
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Station Eleven
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel What I liked: the writing. The writing, the writing, the writing. So this book was especially meaningful to me, because I write, too. She jumps back and forth through time but you don’t have to work at it to keep up. You know, there’s some art to misdirection; […]
Read more...Good Sites
I commend to you a process I stumbled into, for selecting websites. Maybe in doing so I’ll be stating the obvious, but maybe not. I found it to be a great boon to be able to enter my email address at various blog sites for my interests, in philosophy, politics, literature, and humor. At first I […]
Read more...All-Seeing Eye
I wrote about Jordan Peterson in Psychological Avatar, in particular his understanding of God. Or “God,” as he might say. The question is whether there is a “God Who is There,” in Francis Schaeffer’s phrasing, or whether “God” is only a representation of ultimate human aspiration, an avatar for the ground-up Darwinian psychological development to […]
Read more...Empress of Blandings
I just finished reading P.G. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, one of the Blandings Castle books. As usual for Wodehouse it’s a romantic comedy with the emphasis on comedy, especially of the eye-rolling ironic kind. How can you go wrong with a story in which the plot tension rests on a pig-napping of the porcine pride of […]
Read more...Psychological Avatar
I’m going to say something about Jordan Peterson, who has risen to fame in a way that is quite gratifying to see: through the power of his words and reasoning, without stooping to least-common-denominator, ear-tickling moral exhibitionism. His popularity has grown organically. His willingness to take a stand against postmodernist absurdity has endeared him to a […]
Read more...Thoughtland
A review of Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott I’m an amateur painter, and one of the things I learned early on is that it’s a real challenge trying to render in only two dimensions what we see in three. If it’s this difficult for me to create something worthwhile in two frozen space dimensions, how […]
Read more...Looking Down
A Review of The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck This was a great read so as I went along I tried to make mental notes about what the author was trying to do and why I found the book so engaging. The story is the lifetime from early adulthood to old age of a Chinese […]
Read more...Christian Violence
I am so weary of this worn-out old canard that Christian religion is responsible for violence and wars, and therefore the sooner we abandon it, the better. This is put forward relentlessly and Joseph-Goebbels-like: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” All the wars and violence of history that are attributed to religion […]
Read more...Religion’s Persistence
An unusually lucid discussion of public accommodation of religion is made by Micahel Ignatieff, in Making Room for God, an article in The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018). Ignatieff is actually reviewing three books together, in his article, but in the course of doing so he provides a smart way of thinking […]
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