Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“We critique far too soon, we must first seek understanding.” – Marshal McLuhan I come from the art world. Critiquing is something I do often so I’m very familiar with the term. However, lately I’ve been reading a lot of theoretical, academic essays dealing with the “critique” of various theological/philosophical/sociological ideas and/or movements. I’m finding…
I’ve been really busy lately, mostly with being a Dad (as natural as walking on grass!), but Some of the stuff I’ve been doing is design related too. Hopefully I’ll be posting some of that work soon. Speaking of design, I’m even thinking of redesigning this site. So that will be cool. I’ve also been…
The rhetoric of Americans being the good guys and of all the bad guys being out there made me suspicious. I grew suspicious, not only by the irony of Christian calls to war, but by studying. Studying sociology, I learned of the startling Zimbardo prison experiment at Stanford, wherin a dozen students, prescreened for mental…
This was originally published on Matthew Barlow’s blog on December 27, 2012. … Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary I’ve had a few back and forth duels on facebook about gun control, mostly sparked over a few things that I posted. I didn’t necessarily mean for these posts to be inflammatory or controversial, it…
“The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is…
Broadly defined, the government intervenes economically by regulating the economic interactions among and between enterprises and individuals. It does this by taxing their activities (earning income, owning wealth, spending money, and so on) and by making rules governing those activities. However, the real contents and effects of government regulations depend on the interests that govern their design and implementation….
I watched the above video recently, and I have to be honest, It creeps me out a little bit. OK, a lot. The religious rituals, the secrecy, the knocking, the passwords, the spacey outfits, totally bizarre to me. And this is coming from someone who is not unfamiliar to Amish and Mennonite culture! A couple…
Currently I believe in Christ because of the aesthetics of the Christ event. That is, the who Christ was and is — the life that Jesus led as recorded in the Gospels, the things he taught, and ultimately his death that brought and end to all primitive religious sacrifice — is so compellingly beautiful that…
Part of the problem with the current economic crisis is that economics is based on an odd sort of faith, expressed tongue in cheek by the term “money-theism,” which has been popularized by comedian Stephen Colbert. There are a few big faith claims, like the ideas that economic deregulation always promotes growth, that tax cuts for powerful corporations…
So what’s left to us is the task of interpretation. Or, to frame it as a question, Can I reject the Bible’s metaphysics without rejecting its message? That’s a bridge too far for many of your fellow atheists (although they have no problem accepting Plato’s wisdom while rejecting platonic metaphysics). But it’s not a bridge…