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Category Archives: Metaphysics
Honesty about Religion
I know that people are supposed to “show respect” to religious belief–that that’s a widely held position. But I don’t have any respect for it. I have precisely the opposite. It seems to me breathtakingly ironic that religions make claims … Continue reading →
Things I Worry About: How Alternative Fact Worldviews Enable Fascism
George Santayana, in Reason in Religion, makes the argument that religion serves the same sort of purposes that poetry does and that, while not literally true,* is nonetheless elevating. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, makes a pragmatic argument … Continue reading →
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Posted in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Trump (Don the Con)
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Why Is Christianity So Weird?
Imagine for a moment that you have never heard of Christianity. Seriously. Try this. A little thought experiment. A missionary comes to you and says, “Here’s the deal. There’s this all-powerful guy in the sky, and he created everything, including the … Continue reading →
A Brief Explanation of Everything. You’re Welcome.
NB: The following is a story. It is not fact. It is based in facts, yes, but it is entirely speculative. This was an exercise I set myself to create a myth that is completely consistent with current scientific understandings. … Continue reading →
Posted in Epistemology, Existentialism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Religion, Short Stories
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Using Derrida, from Notes to Krystalina
This is from a book-length work that I’ve been working on for many years. 2.1 Every actor has had The Actor’s Nightmare. You find yourself on stage, with a set and properties and another actor, but you haven’t any memory … Continue reading →
A Solution to the Fermi Paradox
The current NASA estimate is that there are 19,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe that are Class G stars like ours AND that have at least one planet similar to Earth. That’s at least 19 SEXTILLION Earthlike planets, folks. No, … Continue reading →
Posted in Existentialism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Uncategorized
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Existentialism in Five Minutes | Bob Shepherd
“This was back in the days Of the folk music craze. . . . [and] parties to pay for the rent. We all wanted to be existentialists. None of us knew what that meant.” –Michael Smith, “The Ballad of Elizabeth … Continue reading →
The Theology of Materialism
In 1996, the Catholic Church finally officially admitted that it had made a mistake in trying and convicting Galileo. It only took them 363 years to do so. It’s difficult for people to make adjustments in their theologies. In the … Continue reading →
The Initiation, or What Dana Did on Her Summer Vacation | A Short Story
The following is a short story I wrote about the Eleusinian Mysteries–a nine-day festival and initiation into the cult of the Earth goddess, Demeter. What happened during the initiation was the best-kept secret of ancient Greece. People were forbidden, under … Continue reading →
Three Meanings of “Meaning”
I just saw a dumb article in Quartz claiming that as science has revealed to us a mechanistic universe (and a view of the human brain as mechanism), we’ve come to face a new kind of “existential crisis” as we … Continue reading →
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