Category Archives: Sunday Sermons
The loneliest number?
Sometimes being single gets old. The tragedy for some lonely is they told the world, “I want to be alone! Go away!” And the world shrugged, listened and did. But the lonely often hope someone sees them enough, and loves them enough, to cross the barrier. (Regrettably, sometimes those who do are drawn for the wrong reasons or are predatory — the lonely can be easy prey.)
This post is a buffer flush of things I’ve written over many years in those moments when the silence and emptiness marked itself. They go back, in some cases, decades. More recently, though, I’ve found the secret to my own happiness and don’t suffer from these feels much anymore!
And I’ve realized (and embraced) that I was always a hermit at heart.
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20 Comments | tags: loneliness, poetry | posted in Life, Sunday Sermons, Writing
I have posted many times about taking a parameter space view to avoid binary thinking (and the null or zero sense of being in the middle or on the fence). I’ve found the idea extremely helpful in understanding many aspects of life (hence all those posts).
It seems especially useful in these highly polarized and widely variegated times. (Even those who embrace “non-binary” ideas sometimes do so in a binary way.) But most real situations have many facets — many parameters. The space of human issues is big and cannot be well-characterized by two sides.
The parameter spaces metaphor provides a handle for visualizing such issues.
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10 Comments | tags: parameter space | posted in Society, Sunday Sermons
Everyone knows “Eskimos have 50 words for snow.” Everyone knows that’s an urban myth. Both statements are true for appropriate values of everyone. The truth, of course and as usual, lies in the middle and is both more elusive and more nuanced.
The frosting: as with many of life’s more vexing issues, there is also a definitional component, and things depend, at least somewhat, on perspective. What constitutes a word and how does the basic language structure introduce new concepts, with new words or phrases?
But no matter because this post isn’t about the 50 words for snow.
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15 Comments | tags: language, snow | posted in Opinion, Sunday Sermons
My dad and my dad’s dad were Lutheran ministers, and my dad’s brother taught theology at a Lutheran seminary. Lotta preachers on the paternal side of the tree. (Lotta teachers on the maternal side; mom and sis among them. I grew up with preachers and teachers.)
All of which gave me something of an insider view of religion and the organizational church. It also provided a cornerstone I’ve built on through much of my life: a reconciliation between the Yin of my science side and the Yang of my spiritual side.
One interesting place the two meet is Pascal’s Wager.
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41 Comments | tags: atheism, belief, deism, faith, God, Pascal's Wager, theism | posted in Sunday Sermons
The primary inspiration for this post, which I’ve been meaning to write since I started this blog, is a 1995 webpage titled The Art of Conversation. In fact, as I’ve done with this post, it could be called The Art of Debate, since debate over a topic — a dialectic — is what drives these (in fact ancient) ideas about discourse and rhetoric.
The page’s authors (Dean & Marshall VanDruff) give it other names: Conversational Cheap Shots! (on the site’s main page link) and Conversational Terrorism (on the page itself). The graphic, which I’ve shamelessly recreated here, calls it How Not To Talk.
Regardless, it’s about how to have an honest effective debate that actually goes somewhere. (Be that concordance or disagreement.)
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20 Comments | tags: debate, dialectic | posted in Sunday Sermons
Exactly a year ago I wrote about metaphor as a tool for understanding the world around us. Our metaphors are part of the intuitive window through which we view reality. I think it’s good to have as many windows as possible, both in real life and in metaphor (intellectual rigor and creative insight are the metaphorical equivalent of Windex).
For a very long time, one of my key metaphorical windows has been the notion of Yin-Yang and its implicit notion of balance. One of my first posts was about it. Since then I’ve revisited it in myriad ways (see this, this, this, or this).
Here, among other things, I want to link Yin-Yang to another useful metaphor.
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8 Comments | tags: parameter space, Science, scientism, Yin and Yang | posted in Sunday Sermons
I’ve mentioned quite often in posts, and in comments to posts, is that I’m quite bored by superhero movies. Somehow though I’ve never been moved to post about exactly why in detail. A few recent conversations about it made me realize it might make a good Sunday Sermons post.
The thing is that it does go beyond being just bored. There is a cultural aspect to it that’s gotten under my skin more and more. It has to do with the massive violence and destruction inherent in these movies and with a fundamental aspect of these comic book superhero stories.
They center on fighting, and I’ve never been a fan of it.
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20 Comments | tags: D.C. movies, fantasy, Marvel movies, movie violence, soma, Star Wars, superheroes, TV violence, violence | posted in Movies, Sunday Sermons
I’ve been thinking about an aspect of modern life that bothers me at least as much — if not more — than the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-thought, bias of our culture.
It’s bad when emotions are elevated above rational thinking, that what matters most is how one feels. It undermines our future when that is not guided by understanding and thoughtfulness. And all too often those feelings don’t involve compassion and acceptance, but fear, hate, and rage.
What’s worse, what makes we wonder if we’ll ever find a decent path again, is that we’ve become a culture of lies.
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20 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, lies, pi day, Service Today | posted in Rant, Religion, Sunday Sermons
When I started this blog back in 2011, it was always my intention to write about the Yin and Yang of our physical reality and a putative metaphysical one. Call it programming if you wish, but I have a life-long commitment to the perceived reality of the latter. I have a faith, deliberately irrational though it be.
I also have a life-long commitment to science and the physical world, and I’ve never had much trouble reconciling the two. That’s the thing I’ve been wanting to write about; how a spiritual life is not contrary or exclusive to a scientific one.
In fact, I believe they are the Yin-Yang of a complete person.
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9 Comments | tags: God, science and spirituality, science fiction, spirituality | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
It was never the plan for this blog, but I’ve found myself several times writing about morals (for example: here, here, and very recently here). In those posts I touched on what morality means and how we might define it. I make no claim to breaking new ground or having anything particularly insightful to say — just my 1/50th of a buck based on my own observations, thoughts, and experiences.
The last week or so a set of three thought threads wound through the loom of my mind and seemed to form an interesting fabric. They have to do with the nature of morals, the usefulness of reason, and our modern sense of otherness.
Today I’m going to try to make something out of that fabric.
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53 Comments | tags: alien contact, David Brin, Dogma of Otherness, dolphins, Ernest Hemingway, Immanuel Kant, intelligence, is and ought, mathematics, morality, morals, Otherness, rational thought, reason, Rebecca Goldstein, Rodin, Steven Pinker, The Thinker | posted in Philosophy, Sunday Sermons
Logos con carne 