Bruce Schneier, a prominent expert in cryptography and other areas of security, regularly provides interesting commentary, sometimes technical in nature and sometimes philosophical or sociological. In his blog post of 2013/07/09, Another Perspective on the Value of Privacy, Schneier merely provides a short quote from and link to an opinion piece at the website of … [Read more…]
Let me recount some of the ways in which we modern Christians are confused: We are still trying to apply categorical reasoning to creatures and relationships in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. We have no way, even in principle, of saying which of our ancestors was the first creature to fall into the … [Read more…]
Most human beings alive in this year of our Lord 2013 freely and fully accept the evidence that the human race wasn’t a special creation by God. Our ancestors were knuckle-draggers who rose from that position to one we consider, with some prejudice perhaps, to be more noble. Remarkably, many who have accepted our biological … [Read more…]
This is the third and final part of this essay. The first part dealt with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of … [Read more…]
This is the second part of an essay in three parts. The first part dealt with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment … [Read more…]
The book for this month is the oldest of my existing novels, A Man For Every Purpose, which is a tale of a man who fragments when he is not able to deal with some of the problems in his life. It is told from the point of view of that character. One of my … [Read more…]
I’ll be publishing this essay in three parts. This first part will deal with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the … [Read more…]
The anthropologist John Hawks has published a short discussion, Crazy evolution movies, which is really about wrongful understandings of evolutionary processes. He states: To be fair, this scenario [of the evolution of intelligent apes in Planet of the Apes within 2 or 3 millenia] is quite consistent with some people’s models of human evolution, in … [Read more…]
In this short essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarchism, Mike Rappaport tries to shift the focus in a debate about anarchism vs. classical liberalism. He quotes Robert Higgs, an advocate of anarchism: My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a … [Read more…]
I’ve just finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly and considered it a perversely entertaining read about a disedifying aspect of much of human history—the sheer stubborn stupidity of many political leaders. After quick discussions of Jeroboam, son and successor of King Solomon, and the legend of the Trojan Horse—which likely had some historical … [Read more…]