Our delusions about the world being subject to understanding by an out-of-the-box human mind and our allied delusions about human control over that world lead us into various specific errors. We ignore what doesn’t fit into our favorite schemes, that is, we are blind and deaf to what doesn’t fit into our delusionary schemes of … [Read more…]
We modern human beings have illusions of control; as a consequence, even our ways of approaching human freedom look not so much different from the ways of implementing systems of hierarchical control, even totalitarianism. We think to have some sort of great power over reality, if only in ways of thought and attitude. On the … [Read more…]
Razib Khan, is a geneticist who is an atheist but not a naively anthropocentric atheist nor one blind to the reasons why others hold or seek a faith he doesn’t hold and doesn’t desire. He has published an essay, Can a Religious Person be a Good Scientist?, in which he says: In the culture of … [Read more…]
Psalm 24 tells us rightly: “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples.” It’s God who creates from nothingness and God who brings order to the raw stuff He first creates. This isn’t to deny that we human beings, in fact—all things and living creatures and all of created … [Read more…]
In my previous posted essay, Elitism and Americans, I responded to an article by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought.. I largely agreed with Wasserman but went further in maintaining that higher literary pursuits make sense only in light of a greater … [Read more…]
Based on greatly expanded knowledge about human being, individual and communal, even Christian churches which have passed through periods of excessive claims to authority have come around to acknowledge there are many realms of a complete and perfect human life which lie beyond their institutional understanding and authority. I’ve discussed this in various places in … [Read more…]
The modern man of the West knows in his bones that he is an individual, born an individual, a clearly defined entity which stands in some sense above not only the confusing and often chaotic world around us but also above our bodies, our organisms which are also confusing and chaotic at times. An individual … [Read more…]
Albert Jay Nock wrote of a friend of his who had spent some years in the United States and was returning to Europe. This friend spoke of his admiration of many American characteristics, but said he was disturbed on realizing that Americans are the first people in history to pass directly from barbarism to decadence … [Read more…]
We think ourselves now so sophisticated because we know the world isn’t designed, at least not in the way of a human engineer. But there are patterns and the ways of thought which provide some serious understandings of those patterns arising from states of seeming disorder are difficult and are certainly not yet part of … [Read more…]
Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being … [Read more…]