Search results

Hi Thomas. Sorry for the delay in responding but I wanted to think about it. Try as I may I can't find a use for religion. It's not that I don't appreciate it's cultural importance, and indeed it's cultural inescapability and redundancy in the very social structure of things. I just can't...

Uhhhhhh....

I'll take your word for it Nick. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea of ego-less existence. I don't know how you would create without a sense of personal differentiation. Perhaps I'm not very enlightened. Chris

Hi Thomas! It's so very nice to converse with you again. Yes, yes. This is the ring-pass-not that confounds me: how to have a useful God concept without resorting to idolatry. It seems impossible. From my position there can only be the "graven image." I don't know how to get around that...

Ego is very useful, why not put it to work?

Hey Juan, have you read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond? It was also a miniseries on PBS I think. Highly recommended! Chris

GWB: George W. Bush, or Global Wrecking Ball

You'll have to define "good." I'm somewhat good but not terribly altruistic. I'm quite bad, but not diabolically. Society wants me to be good in ways that make me more controllable, predictable, and herd-able. I'm not sure that's good for me, though. Chris

Getting hurt is part of having fun: the last part. Chris

We aren't born with critical thinking skills. Even when we develop those skills we still probably can't unravel most of the programming that was put into us as children. This is why it's hard to say what is innate and what is learned. Chris

I like this:

How would you define spirituality? I used to say this a lot too. "I'm spiritual but not religious." But what exactly does that mean? Is spirituality an attempt to preserve the trinketry and magical thinking while abandoning the cultural specifism and institutional power structures of...

Oh, well, see...I can't just let that go. I'm all down with science, I'd just like to see a nuanced discussion. Like, as regards Islam, I don't think it's any more backwards assed than any other puddinhead intellectual pursuit. Certainly no more goofy than Jew dudes wearing little Torahs on...

Yes, and culture, even secular culture, still functions as an essentially religious endeavor in the way it creates and uses mythos. Science may observe, categorize, and enumerate these functions, but it is not itself the impetus or sustenance of such. Chris

OK, but here's the thing: Language essentially arises from the naming of accidental gods. Science arose from the superstitious flogging about of early humans as they tried to understand and name things and processes beyond their ability to comprehend. Science and philosophy could not have...

I like this. If everything is sacred, though, everything is mundane because nothing is more sacred than anything else. Toilet water and mud puddle water are still equally water. Chris

Well, it does help to fill out a slow summer news cycle. Chris