Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“One pulse of enjoyment follows another, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call the soul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from its predecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy the…
“I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.” –Arthur C. Clarke I recently listened to another great interview with theologian/philosopher, LeRon Shults. Every time I listen to LeRon he challenges me and gets me thinking. I really appreciate this about him. Reflecting back, though, every time I hear LeRon talk about his…
“No matter how politically successful either the left or the right becomes, our democracy will always have some version of the other side.” –Steve McIntosh I’ve been reading a lot of lengthy, in-depth write-ups lately claiming to have diagnosed the Trump phenomenon. Two of the better ones I’ve read were written by Amanda Taub, at Vox,…
“One of Nietzsche’s objections to Christianity was, he said, that Christianity depends on the notion that Nature has brought forth this sick creature of which it (Christianity) is the cure; and I think psychoanalysis sounds like that. It’s brought forth something sick, something “lacking” of which it (psychoanalysis) is the cure. “Lack” is the absence…
“It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration.” –Whitehead … “It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is…
“Art makes sense of the world through a material process – some thing is the end result of the artistic act. Whether a story, a painting, a song, a rock sculpted to create a new form – there are not neat, easily delineated distinctions argued within discreet sections and paragraphs – a process of dissection…
“Henry Nelson Wieman’s greatest contribution, in my opinion, is his empirical demonstration that the process of creative transformation is one that can be empirically described and that this description shows that, although it can be facilitated and served, it cannot be managed or controlled by human beings. On the other hand, I concluded that Wieman’s…
“My view is that the whole of Western Philosophy has assumed that the basic way in which we know the World, and anything outside of ourselves, is through vision. I know there were blind poets but I don’t think there were ever any blind philosophers, and I think that’s a great loss…the Bible is not…
“[Universalism]…is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you…
I listened to a great podcast with Peter Cave recently that dealt with philosophical paradoxes. A paradox, for those who don’t know, is a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd, but in reality expresses a possible truth. One example that they used in the cast caught my attention. It is called the Paradox…