[Draft as of 2016/10/03. Hoping for publication on Internet before end of 2016.] Is a man a unity or is he a collection of warring fragments? Or is something else true, perhaps an intermediate view, or—my favorite—some sort of complex being not describable in current terms of discourse? I should qualify my statement of the … [Read more…]
Over the past few centuries or more, Western Christians have retreated from a proper engagement with God’s Creation. Many modern scientists and philosophers now work actively to sequester religious beliefs in the most general sense. Sometimes this is as crude and as juvenile as claiming that the success of the equations of modern physics prove … [Read more…]
For years, I’ve been doing what might be called “deep analysis” about the decay of the Western Mind, an inseparable part of the decay of Western Civilization, that is—Western Christian Civilization. Along with this, at times inseparable from this, I’ve been doing “deeper analysis” of Creation and its relationship to the Creator. Much of what … [Read more…]
I’ve claimed that “Created Being is Created Being is Created Being” some number of times, but there it’s a little more complicated than that. Those who’ve read some of my metaphysical writings might have some ideas on the topic. “Some ideas” is really all that I have. The basic situation is this: As a Christian, … [Read more…]
It’s not even clear to me that any of my readers want to comment on my posts or to connect to any of them with a pingback, but… I shut off comments and pingbacks because I didn’t have the time to check all the comments including the very few labeled spam which were legitimate comments. … [Read more…]
It’s not plausible that morally well-ordered communities will be composed of a population containing a high percentage of morally ill-ordered individuals. One problem is that a morally well-ordered community with even a substantial minority of morally ill-ordered individuals would be a flock of sheep with the wolves living in the flock. But it seems plausible … [Read more…]
A radically secularized society will make it tough to engage in any sort of religious practices. This happens in a particularly intense way if the majority of parents simply turn their children over to the school systems or to modern American culture as a whole. And so it is that I’ll retreat from philosophical or … [Read more…]
In reviewing A war for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars by Andrew Hartman, Seth Bartee writes: In A War for the Soul of America Hartman argues that the late 20th century’s cultural conflicts were born out of the tumultuous 1960s. To most observers this might not seem a particularly provocative … [Read more…]
Recently, I read The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley. In early chapters, Bradley describes the American role as junior member of Great Britain’s Opium Trade in China. The Americans were freeloaders of a sort, relying upon the British Navy and Army to prevent the Chinese government from … [Read more…]
Even without a Christian civilization, Christianity remains a holy thing, but it would be a little thing. Partly because of a bad bargain that various Christian traditions made in coming to the United States, dominated after the War Between the States, by a liberal, non-Creedal form of Protestantism, Catholics and Orthodox and Lutherans and other … [Read more…]