I’ve written about evidence that we like to live and work with those similar to ourselves, though there is still some substantial uncertainty about the mixture of culture and genes in the understanding of “similar to ourselves.” I’ve also written of my strong belief that this world, our universe seen in light of God’s purposes, … [Read more…]
Math is hard, Barbie, and that goes for you too, Ken. It’s hard like tennis or basketball or baseball, requiring hours of hard work on basic skills when you really have little clue how those skills will really be used. When you have the basic skills of arithmetic or of fielding and throwing the ball, … [Read more…]
I realize there are a multitude of good books out there I’ll never so much as open but sometimes I feel an urge to re-read a particularly good book. So it is that I’ve picked up The House of Intellect copyrighted by Jacques Barzun in 1959. In the first essay, he makes a nice distinction … [Read more…]
I’m finishing up with that profound and profoundly frustrating work by William James, The Meaning of Truth. He claims: It is between the idea and the object that the truth-relation is to be sought and it involves both terms. [page 165] No, but, once again, his error carries more insight than the truest thoughts of … [Read more…]
I’ve written several times about my opinion that William James held back from the full implications of his teachings or, at least, held back from a viewpoint that would have led him to a plausible conjecture of some sort of fullness of knowledge, however impossible the complete realization of that full knowledge. James saw how … [Read more…]
In The End of the Twentieth Century, the Hungarian-American — and Catholic — historian John Lukacs points out: [A]t the end of the twentieth century, many people respect religion as well as science, together; but the respect is faint. (This has to do with the fact that we have descended to a stage lower than … [Read more…]
Recently, I wrote still another post, prophesying into a vacuum of sorts, in which I explored some of the dangers of assuming that Christians, or any others with strong moral beliefs, can enter fully into shared medical insurance programs or even basic medical systems with those who hold differing moral beliefs. That essay, Through the … [Read more…]
In The Meaning of Truth, William James makes the claim: The pragmatist view … of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The `workableness’ which ideas must have, in order to be true means particular workings, physical … [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…]