Category Archives: 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
“Space is big. Really big.”
When I started blogging here, one of the first bloggers I followed was Robin, of Witless Dating After Fifty. Over the years, she’s several times mentioned a great question her dad often posed when discussing religion with someone: “How big is your god?”
Last week my buddy and I were having our weekly beer- and gab-fest and our (typically very meandering) conversation came to touch on the problems with young Earth creationism — the Christian fundamentalist idea that the universe is only thousands of years old.
In fact, there’s a pair of real whopper problems involved!
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46 Comments | tags: atheism, creationism, deism, galaxy, God, science and spirituality, solar system, spirituality, stars, Sun, theism, universe, young Earth creationism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Two things collided. I saw Leon Wieseltier on The Colbert Report and was enthralled by his view of modern social life. That moved a friend of mine to look for other YouTube videos of Wieseltier. She posted a good one that then moved me to look at more. Bottom line, I ended up watching a fair bit of the man last week. Still enthralled.
Meanwhile, after my last post about religion and atheism, a reader commented that she found the article so balanced she couldn’t tell on which side I stood. As an agnostic, that’s the goal. Yet, in one of the videos, Wieseltier expresses an idea that really grabbed me.
It has to do with on which side of what line I stand.
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57 Comments | tags: Dualism, Leon Wieseltier, materialism, Monism, Philosophical materialism, physicalism, reality, spirituality, teleology, The Colbert Report, virtual reality | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Despite the title, this post isn’t as strongly related to the previous three as the naming convention suggests. I don’t really have much to say about religious predestination. If anything, my views on spirituality are key to a belief in free will and choice. The religion I was raised in seems (at least to my eye) quite clear that we are allowed to choose our actions.
The connection to those other posts lies in picking up the thread of physical determinism — normally a necessarily atheist point of view — and doing a riff on religion, spirituality and atheism. This is the post I started to write last Sunday when my mind took off in a completely different direction.
This time I’m going to try sticking to the subject!
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66 Comments | tags: atheism, atheists, beliefs, Dawkins Scale, deism, Dogma (movie), God, Grand Canyon (movie), ideas and beliefs, materialism, physicalism, science and spirituality, Spinoza, spirituality, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
I was going to write about something completely different. Specifically: religion, spirituality, atheism, morality and ethics, faith and unbelief… that sort of thing. I like one day of the week to be different from the rest — a Sabbath, so to speak. For cultural and personal reasons (and pragmatic reasons — many businesses take today off) Sunday seems an appropriate day. I’ve got Sci-Fi Saturday; I suppose you could call it Sermon Sunday or something.
But when I sat down to write, something else came out. I thought I’d better grab it and stick it onto the blog wall before it ran away and, due to its youth and naiveté, ran afoul of Unpleasant Business. The thing about letting your mind drift is that you can never be sure where it’ll come ashore. In this case, mental notes about a possible future post morphed into… Well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.
And, yes, you have to look below the fold — no cheating!
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11 Comments | tags: blank verse, candy, female, free verse, global, local, male, men, poetry, Sabbath, Sunday, women | posted in Music, Sunday Sermons, Writing
Logos con carne 