I’ve recently reread Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind and might be publishing some articles over the next few weeks on thoughts that book raised. For now, I’ve got to address the question in the title, “What is politics?” from the viewpoint of my effort to enrich and expand our understanding of the Body of Christ … [Read more…]
Paul Gottfried is a political scientist always worth reading, his books and his short writings on the Internet. In this article, What Drives the Religious Right , he made some good points about the nature of the religious right, predominately Evangelical Protestant though I know some Catholics who’ve taken up with their way of thought, … [Read more…]
This is just a short addendum to an earlier blog article: Freedom and Structure in Human Life — What is a Conspiracy?. At the time I wrote that earlier article, I was looking unsuccessfully on the Internet for some overview articles I’d read, articles written by Murray Rothbard, a good, thorough, and reliable scholar so … [Read more…]
The New American has published an interesting article written by Sam Blumenfeld and dealing with the American transistion into our current state of dumbness defined by just enough literacy to read advertisements and to struggle through textbooks written to the purposes of the leadership of the day — Looking Backward 123 Years Later I knew … [Read more…]
In The Liberal Mind, Kenneth Minogue speaks of misguided political and social reformers in the line of modern liberal thought: How many visionaries have unwittingly prepared a hell on earth because their gaze was stubbornly fixed on heaven? And when hell comes — well, there is always some ad hoc theory of sinister interests or … [Read more…]
Dear governments of the United States and other countries, I see by this article, Psychologists Say Well-Being Is More Than ‘Happiness’, that some of your academic helpers are hard at work figuring out how you can increase our well-being. I have a suggestion: Please go away and leave us alone. While there is truth underlying … [Read more…]
This article, How Do Neurons in the Retina Encode What We ‘See’?, points to the great effort our nervous system puts into the effort to make sense of perceptual input. One surprise is that the eyes don’t pick up some of the more complex patterns which change over time even though complex spatial patterns, say, … [Read more…]
Or rather, our moral disorder lies outside of us because we inhabit morally disordered human communities. But let me start from a ways back… Recently, I posted an article about some hormonal matters which work from our insides to shape our personality characteristics — The Resurrected Will Need to Be Flooded With Oxytocin and Vasopresin. … [Read more…]
I’m about 2 years late in writing a follow-up to So What if the Human Mind is a Product of Evolution? published on 2009/05/05. For those who don’t follow the link to that earlier article, I’ll quote the first paragraph: Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, … [Read more…]
The issue of mythology arises in this article about the responses of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), and some related thinkers, to neopaganism in modern times. The article tells us: In [the] judgment [of a philosopher supporting polytheism], man always needs myths, and the important thing is that these myths be numerous and open to … [Read more…]