Nihilism in the Movies
Sometimes learning involves the introduction of new facts. At other times, it is a matter of noticing what is already in front of your nose; a change…
Quantum Mechanics and Religion Revisited
At a 1932 conference on quantum mechanics it was suggested that physicists should not worry about what quantum mechanics indicates about the nature of reality and they…
Orthodoxy and the Mob
In Matthew 22:21, Jesus is quoted as saying “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” in response to…
Two Kinds of Sacrifice: René Girard’s Analysis of Scapegoating
Mimesis and Scapegoating Humans are intensely mimetic. We learn to talk, walk, and nearly everything else by imitation. But because we also imitate each other’s desires, other…
Are We All Selfish?
Many students imagine that every human being and every action is selfish. Immanuel Kant was rightly suspicious of the tendency to defer everything to the “dear self,”…
Aristotle and Ethics
Ethics and Metaphysics Aristotle’s conception of ethics is consistent with Plato, his teacher’s notion that moral virtue is essential to human happiness and offers some useful and…
Beauty, Truth, and the Creative Act
Knowledge, while hard to define, must have a connection with truth. Some truths are accessible only to a normally thinking, feeling, person. The truth of reciprocity is…
The Tragic Condition of Man
Berdyaev comments that the tragic condition of man results from our dual nature; the physical and divine. Being made in the image of God means participating in…
Kant the Fanatic
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the putative “Sage of Königsberg,” in a rare moment of lyricism states “Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever increasing admiration…
Is Life Worth Living?
Faith and Hope Discerning the nature of ultimate reality is a matter of intuition.[1] A religious experience, for instance, needs to be interpreted and understood by the…
Christopher Hitchens is Not Great
Self-Sealing Fallacy Some modern militant atheists like to claim things like “religion ruins everything.” Or that the planet would be so much better off without a belief…
AI and the Dehumanization of Man
Strong Artificial Intelligence is the idea that computers can one day be constructed that have the abilities of the human mind. The contrast is with narrow AI…
Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall
Materialism and the mechanistic world-view – the idea that the everything is a machine operating in terms of mindless, mechanical forces – has severe nihilistic implications. An…
Nikolai Berdyaev: the Primacy of Freedom
For the Russian philosopher Berdyaev, freedom is absolutely fundamental. And freedom is connected with subjectivity and Spirit, rather than the objective (measurable) external world. All attempts to…
Berdyaev: Why God and the Person Must be the Highest Ideal
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) is a Russian religious existential philosopher who devoted much of his writing to the topics of spirit and freedom. Berdyaev recognizes that freedom is…