There is something describable by the term `human nature’ and something else describable by the term `human personhood’. We’ve confused the two greatly in our modern world, so intellectually challenged in nearly all fields of thought but science and technology and so morally challenged in all fields including science and technology. To orthodox Trinitarian Christians, … [Read more…]
On 2019/02/24, Roman Catholics who attended the Mass for Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C) heard St Paul telling the Corinthians: It is written, `The first man, Adam, became a living being,’ the last Adam a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual was not first: rather the natural and then the spiritual. The first man … [Read more…]
There are writers on the Internet, some maybe just scribblers but many are thinkers of some capacity, who criticize other peoples, including most Latin Americans, for being too dumb to handle complex, American-style economic and political systems. To be sure, many of these criticisms are quite true, though we should realize that current immigration patterns … [Read more…]
Liberals lie. And I include libertarians among liberals. Perhaps they lie first to themselves, but they lie. All liberals, from Hobbes to Locke to Jefferson to von Mises to Nozick and on to the collectivist enablers or advocates of a `liberal’ and totalitarian order. The biggest part of their lie is the one which claims … [Read more…]
The basic idea is simple. For decades, geneticists have been able to chemically separate and analyze genes. This made possible a fruitless search for the magic gene which `causes’ schizophrenia or depression or intelligence or other human qualities or disorders of human being. A lot was learned, perhaps most importantly—there are no such magic genes. … [Read more…]
The West has broken down into a gangster-land of sorts, with the realms of centralized governments and money-center banking collapsing into moral chaos. I’ve written often about this. But… If the West is so disordered, morally and politically and so on—`morally’ actually covers all human social possibilities, why don’t the gangsters just take over in … [Read more…]
In my last post, What is the Totality of a Human Life?: Individual and Communal Intent, I proposed that `intent’ in the sense used by Thomas Aquinas and by biologists and lawyers is a way to help us understand human being in its totality, encompassing individual and communal manifestations of human being—and probably divine human … [Read more…]
In my previous post, What is the Totality of a Human Life?: Individuals and Communities, I explored some issues related to meaningfulness, using terms which might allow a slightly more disciplined discourse and thought than what is currently used by knowledgeable and insightful thinkers as well as many others. I think it necessary to delve … [Read more…]
A life is made up of moments and events but it’s not merely the sum of the moments and events in the way that a universe isn’t just the sum of the matter and energy and other specific things it contains and a community isn’t just the sum of its members and their individual to … [Read more…]
In the essay, When Does Human Life Begin?, Brook Stanton makes a clear and forceful statement, with highly summarized arguments which are really—and he admits so—references to well-established facts and theories of modern biology: human life begins at conception. He doesn’t show awareness that there is some, if not total, truth in the claim that … [Read more…]