Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” — Isaiah 45:7 I’ve been listening and reading a lot about the Devil in relation to Christian theology lately. Yesterday I listened to the “Devilpalooza” episode of Homebrewed Christianity which featured Richard Beck talking about…
“Adults may feel that praising children for their inherent qualities helps combat low self-esteem, but it might convey to children that they are valued as a person only when they succeed. When children subsequently fail, they may infer they are unworthy.” – Eddie Brummelman I recently listened to an episode of Homebrewed Christianity in which…
1. Nature is mechanical. 2. Matter is unconscious. 3. Laws of nature are fixed. 4. Total amount of matter and energy are always the same. 5. Nature is purposeless. 6. Biological inheritance is material. 7. Memories are stored as material traces. 8. Mind is in the brain. 9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory….
“If a political party receives a tenth of all votes but no representation in government, can we claim the system is democratic and people’s voices are being heard? Should an international political body, bank or committee be able to decide the destiny of a country and its government? It is clear that democracy is struggling,…
“One of the problems with capitalism is that it produces mediocrity but also renders that mediocrity unsustainable: capitalism needs average workers, but capitalist ideology insists that only the exceptional deserve the rewards that would allow them to live a decent life. We see this in almost parodic form in Silicon Valley tech boosterism, where every…
“During the French Revolution, France developed a much more aggressive approach to church/state separation than other European countries. Instead of merely keeping religion out of state affairs, French secularism condemned religion’s influence on political culture in general as pernicious. Formal separation of church and state isn’t enough; you need to exclude religion from national identity…
“Shalom, therefore is not detached from the reality of everyday life in the world, nor is it in any sense super spiritual, utopian, or otherworldly…It is well-being that exists in the very midst of threats — from sword and drought and wild animals…Active and practical, shalom never avoids the realities of an imperfect world.” Last…
“According to this view the mind is best understood as a complex and dynamic system, always in process, always changing, growing, and becoming more diverse and differentiated. At the same time they grow in internal complexity, ecosystems also become more integrated and specialized, filling up their niches and fostering symbioses. Ecosystems are composed of a…
“There is, in other words, a common sense that inspires the best definition of culture: culture embodies the grand narrative that allows the merging of the conditions of possibility of individuation and of socialization. When a philosophical school demands renunciation of common sense, it undermines solidarity. When it doubts sense-perception, it puts a damper on…
“Goethe described his color theory as a “sensory-moral” account of natural phenomena such that the “physical laws” those phenomena “obey” are seen to emerge from out of one’s conscious perceptions themselves, rather than being imposed upon them from outside as in Newton’s mechanistic theories. Goethe’s scientific method “makes phenomena transparent to their own lawfulness,” as…