You may quote me on this: "If you can believe in astrology, you can believe in anything . That makes you dangerous." of course you could substitute any number of popular but truly crazy ideas for "astrology" such as We will hook up with our dead loved ones in paradise after we die We will go straight to paradise if we kill infidels by killing ourselves The universe is ruled by a loving God who has a reason for everything that happens Witches deserve to be burned to death If you are not a Catholic, you deserve to die If you are not a Protestent, you deserve to die If you are different you deserve to die Killing hundreds of thousands of civilians to advance US interests is not murder What makes you dangerous if you believe things like this is that you have shut down your critical faculties. You no longer feel it is important to test evidence or respect people who challenge your world view. You think that everyone is "entitled to their own opinion" and someho...

I met a guy in Second Life last night. He sent a message on a group chat, asking how he could hook up with a cute twenty - something gal for a "date".  Being a newbie, he had no idea what a pain it would be for  anybody  to accompany a total novice to a popular (i.e. laggy) sim for  any  reason, let alone romance. But his  main  problem was his blank profile. I asked him, what do  you  bring to the table? Why would anybody want to know  you.  The group was divided. Some tried to help, suggesting places for a date, places to meet girls etc. Others picked up on the central problem, which was a guy shopping for a mate like he was buying a car. Connecting in life is about what you can  offer , not what others have to offer  you . Every Christian child should learn this at his/her mother's knee (not many do). But it makes sense. If you live your life within the boundaries of what folks are willing to give you (much less than wh...

The following is  shamelessly  extracted from the excellent Wikipedia article on Ken Wilber Upper-Left  (UL) "I" Interior Individual Intentional e.g.  Freud Upper-Right  (UR) "It" Exterior Individual Behavioral e.g.  Skinner Lower-Left  (LL) "We" Interior Collective Cultural e.g.  Gadamer Lower-Right  (LR) "Its" Exterior Collective Social e.g.  Marx One can crudely categorize the perspectives taken on people and their  behavior  in different schools of thought: Individual interior accounts (upper-left quadrant)  include  Freudian   psychoanalysis , which interprets people's interior experiences and focuses on "I" Interior plural accounts (lower-left)  include  Gadamer 's philosophical  hermeneutics  which seeks to interpret the  collective consciousness  of a society, or plurality of people and focuses on "We" Exterior individual accounts (upper-right)  include  B. F. Skinn...

Parse this if u can. It's worth re-reading it until you get it: "Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local non-market relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing, rather than, as they often do, undermine and corrupt commercial ties." MacIntyre hates sentences shorter than 20 or 30 words without lots of parenthetical thoughts thrown in. It makes him very hard to read.  He's not a bumper sticker philosopher. However, as far as I know, he is the smartest philosopher of the 20th century, maybe any century. What he's doing here is tossing out the entire moral philosophy that underlies both capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith had it wrong. Karl Marx had it wrong. To "flourish" ( be human) we need to have certain virtues and exist within a network of mutual obligation. Commercial transactions make sense only when embedded in this larger human ...

"The World Before Her"  reminded me that the insanity of nationalism as a religion is still with us. There were many unsettling similarities between pre-war Germany and current-day India. The thought pattern is so familiar: You need an enemy, totally evil, requiring extermination (Jews/Muslims). You must preach that this enemy is a dire and current threat to all you hold sacred. You need unquestioning faith in the imagined past and superiority of your own culture and nation (Germany, India) You need to demonstrate your faith by head bashing and murder You need to form the faithful into quasi military units and impose military discipline All this brainwashing works best on the uneducated, economically depressed masses. Such folks are always in plentiful supply. I'm sure this toxic combination of Nationalism, fake history, militarism and paranoia   will keep flaring up in human history. Our task is simply to see it for what it is. We are still feeli...

I have been assured that the novel Ishmael  is a must-read for anyone who wants to seriously discuss the "big picture". It's easy to see why people would feel this way about it, since it touches on a long list of issues that the armchair philosopher might have otherwise missed. These include: The central importance of myth, including the fact that we are so immersed in the myths of our own culture that we are scarcely aware of it and the fact that such awareness can only come when we explore alternative mythology. The nature of evolution and natural history which is not a march toward perfection in the form of man and does not somehow culminate with the arrival of man. The tension between the Biblical view of man and that presented in other world-views, especially the role of man versus the environment. All this will appear as heady stuff for anyone who is otherwise uninformed about these issues. However, I'm reminded about what is often said about Freud: What is tru...