One of the blogs I pay pretty close attention to is Rod Dreher’s. On December 17th, one of his topics was porn. You may have intuited there must be a connection between porn and sexual dysfunction and perversion of various kinds; that it might not be an innocuous activity, even putting moral considerations aside. […]
Read more...Category: Morality
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...Conscience
I wrote on postmodernism in Epidemic Irrationality and since then wrote (in Illiberalism) on one feature of the rise of postmodernism, a descent into battles that do not preserve or protect individual freedom, but instead squabble over just how much individual power to disgorge in favor of the collective. Foundationalism and Coherency Theory A key […]
Read more...Abundant Living
In Time Horizon, we contrasted eternal and temporal perspectives on the events of one’s lifetime. Now we consider a sky-high Biblical perspective on the matter. I once became fed up with my lack of understanding of the old testament. Why do we lug that thing around, when only the new testament seems relevant? I’m confessing […]
Read more...Time Horizon
In Morality and Time, we discussed the individual subjective “time horizon” which is a consequence of our living inside a time-bound perspective, rather than in eternity. Now we incorporate that eternal perspective. Long and Short Time Horizons If our time horizon is very short, then our life is in a sense not a life at […]
Read more...Morality and Time
Let’s consider the subjective sense of time that we each have. I don’t mean the sense that time flies or “I can’t believe it’s already August,” or that kind of thing. I mean the way we think of our lives as a whole. We all know we’re going to die, and yet in our daily […]
Read more...Simple Determinism
A central tenet of theist and especially Christian beliefs is that people have agency; that is, moral choice and therefore moral responsibility, based on a moral Authority outside themselves. The modern view of reality, however, is that there is nothing beyond matter in motion governed by laws of physics, and therefore no God, and therefore no […]
Read more...Morality and Freedom
Let’s think for a moment about freedom. Christian and Atheist Quests for Freedom Christians read from their book that “the truth will set you free,” meaning of course the truth of Christ’s redemption of us before a just God. We aspire to the good as we aspire to communion with the One who is good. […]
Read more...Moralizing Gods
Probably no one who observes long-term trends with any reasonable historical sense would dispute that religion holds less sway in this country than in previous times. It would seem to be hard to dispute that in the law and the culture, there is a default way of thinking that avoids any mention or consideration of God. Despite that fact, […]
Read more...Ashby
The official plot summary for this movie is: “High-school student Ed Wallis enters into a friendship with his neighbor, Ashby, a retired CIA assassin who only has a few months left to live.” The ex-CIA set-up is kind of worn out, but that element really isn’t necessary to what the movie is about. You can […]
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