Call it traditionalism or conservatism if you wish — though I refer to an attitude and a body of thought far from the comic-book views of the mass-media commentators and the ideologues they serve. What is it? One of my favorite, perhaps overused, quotations is from the historian Carroll Quigley: The truth unfolds in time … [Read more…]
Here’s an article about hunting for your ancestry by way of genetic analysis: Ancestry testing goes for pinpoint accuracy . The article warns that interpreting the results of genetic tests can be difficult. Apparently, some of the testing companies have not only advanced equipment and well-trained technicians but also reputable academic researchers as advisers. That … [Read more…]
Since 2006, I’ve been writing books and essays, nearly all of which are available for free downloading on the Internet. My main theme is simply the need to see our world as being the universe in light of God’s purposes for this concrete realm of Creation, which includes the need to see the entirety of … [Read more…]
The economist William Baumol warned us about one of the problems which human beings create under conditions of prosperity, Baumol’s cost disease: Baumol’s cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that … [Read more…]
I’ve often claimed that more particular, more concrete forms of being are shaped from more abstract forms of being, themselves tracing back after some number of stages to the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation. In the spirit of meta-physics as properly conceived, in my opinion, by Aristotle and some of his … [Read more…]
This is a short follow-up post to the essay I published yesterday: Prosperity that Never Ends…Oops. Besides a few unexplored aspects of this situation, I also left hanging the question which is the title of this post: Why Are the Parasites Killing the Host? Indeed, why? Wouldn’t they be better in the long run to … [Read more…]
Historians have noted that approaching crises typically take longer to arrive than the more prescient of the victims-to-be would expect. And then they are typically far worse than the more pessimistic of the victims-to-be would expect. I fear the truth that might lie in the above claims because we of the West, and many in … [Read more…]
Cosmologists study the universe at a level where records vanish, as we learn in this article: Best Time to Study the Cosmos Was More Than 13 Billion Years Ago. The physical world, with its stars and galaxies and background radiation fields, doesn’t leave us some sort of permanent record to study at our leisure. Information … [Read more…]
I have uploaded a small sampler of sorts, a collection of essays from my weblog writings. This small collection deals with the subject of our need to accept empirical reality as the source of even those concepts which seem to be absolute truths. The short book can be downloaded at Making Peace with Empirical Reality.
Lust is a deformed version of the virtue of love, the binding force in a number of human relationships including those involving God. Moreover, the passions and more quiet feelings we know as love are those which evolved amongst social mammals. It’s quite a plausible speculation that our ancient four-legged ancestors first began to melt … [Read more…]