I’m writing this essay to set up my responses to Claes Ryn’s essay describing how the moral teachings and traditions of the West could re-establish some sort of peace in our world: The Moral Path to Peace. I’m planning for now to finish the set-up in this essay, following up on what I wrote in … [Read more…]
The world is what it is and we Christians, of all human beings, have to accept it and work with it. For example, against the various do-gooders including those who think themselves Christians, I believe the Body of Christ has to be built of the human material which is us, the material created by God … [Read more…]
Peter Frost has published a good essay in which he deals with human moral nature. The essay can be found at Does Natural Law Exist?. I vaguely anticipated this discussion in my previous essay, The Interior Richness Which Lies in a Civilized Man. Frost defines natural law as teaching: All people are born with a … [Read more…]
Peter Frost, dissident anthropologist, wrote about some issues in the matter I’ve considered in recent blog essays—the formation of complex societies. See Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible? and A Different Model of the Growth of Centralized States in History. Frost’s article, The Agricultural Revolution That Wasn’t, looks at the broader issue of … [Read more…]
I’ve written before of the modern tendency to use glossy pictures and even fast-moving images to teach, even to teach subjects requiring some concentration and some use of abstract reasoning. This is absurd. It’s been known since at least the work of the English psychologist, Richard Gregory, that the human brain—like the brains of monkeys … [Read more…]
Kimberly Noble, MD and PhD, pediatrician and neuroscientist, has written the article, Rich Man, Poor Man: Socioeconomic Adversity and Brain Development, which is posted at the website of The Dana Foundation, a foundation run by neuroscientists. There is good stuff in the article which has a properly optimistic tone to the idea that we can … [Read more…]
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…]
Larry Cahill, a distinguished brain-scientist, recently published an article in which he discusses the need for recognizing the differences between male and female brains by first discussing some bad medical results due to the assumption that there are no such differences and, thus, medicines will affect both the male and female brain in the same … [Read more…]
Is the invisible hand justly celebrated by Adam Smith really the hand of the pilgrim human community, of the Body of Christ forming—however imperfectly and incompletely—in this mortal realm? Yes, though the language is far from optimal and that language can lead to improper concepts regarding the Body of Christ and its relationships to human … [Read more…]
In an earlier essay, A Brain Shaped to Geometric Thought?, I responded to evidence that the brain does abstract from physical distance to derive, for example, an idea of emotional distance. This isn’t a matter fully understood, though the scientists seem to believe, as do I, that human beings have learned to unconsciously and consciously … [Read more…]