In the article, The Cognitive Dissonance of Spying, subtitled It’s Always Illegal and Often Immoral, Philip Giraldi, who has served as an officer of the CIA and also of the DIA (military intelligence), tells us: It is being reported that the attempt by Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan to steer the CIA away from … [Read more…]
My previous post, We Need All Sorts of Mavericks in This Dynamic Creation, argued the need for certain sorts of flexible and creative thinkers to respond to new opportunities and to deal with problems which have developed in our understanding of Creation or any significant part of it, such as the understanding of human origins … [Read more…]
Scientists have succeeded in creating false memories in lab mice, though it’s not at all true they created memories from scratch. Rather did they expose the mice to a bad experience in one location and then manipulated activity levels of brain-cells so that the mice associated that bad experience with another location where they’d not … [Read more…]
I’m trying to tighten the focus of some of my own ideas in the area of religion and society, religion and government, religion and any other form of human community. There are probably many things to be said about the conflict between religion and various sorts of religious societies, and some also cover conflicts involving … [Read more…]
By most standards, I have a funny definition of creativity. We shape our minds, our entire persons, by responding actively and properly to what lies around us, below us, above us, and in us, where all prepositions — `around’, `below’, `above’, and `in’ — should be understood in both spatial-temporal terms and also metaphysical terms. … [Read more…]
One of the worst things one generation can do is trap future generations in one specific way of life or one way of solving problems. There is perhaps more than some think to the witticism by someone whose name I can’t recall: “I refused to be a radical when I was young because I didn’t … [Read more…]
I’m coming to the end of this scattered series of essays inspired by Kenneth Minogue’s profound book on modern politics, The Liberal Mind. My thoughts have developed so that my understanding of liberalism has taken on a surprising form, but no form of liberalism seems to me plausible or rational. I’ve taken a position that … [Read more…]
I’m still dealing with the intellectual aftermath of Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind. In that book, he tells us: War is habit-forming, and peace is confusing to many people who cannot deal with conflicting standards and feelings of guilt. [page 111] I’m aware of others who made comments about the eerie and morally disedifying attractiveness … [Read more…]
I’ve used a chunk of this quote in an earlier posting ( The Liberal Mind: What is politics?): Now what makes liberal individualism so plausible is that the individual is the only self-conscious entity whose limits appear to correspond to a physiological creature; and also that the thoughts and feelings which constitute institutions such as … [Read more…]
In a faraway region of spacetime, I asked the question: Is this evidence against free-will?, where I start by noting: Over the past decade or more, neuroscientists have found strong evidence that we start to act before we’re consciously aware of our own actions. This is a problem to those who believe in free-will in … [Read more…]