OMNES ENIM VIVUNT EI
-Imagine I offend my wife and give her flowers whose acquisition cost me nothing at all. By “cost nothing” I mean that someone walks up to me, unprompted, and hands me flowers right before I talk to her. Moreover, since part of the cost of getting flowers is the emotional pain that motivated me to […]
(Told in first person) God spoke to me. Let me give one caveat before I tell you what he said: I’ve tried repeatedly in writing this to get his actual words just right, but every rewrite sounds less and less like what I heard. I can give the sense of what he said all right, […]
The universe is so big, it must certainly contain more________ a.) Cephalopods b.) Intelligent life c.) Mexican Revolutions Why is (b) experienced as plausible while (a) and (c) are a joke? One option, I guess, is to bite the bullet and say that (a)- (c) all have extraterrestrial instances. Perhaps we make a Lucretian argument […]
In explaining abstraction from matter, Thomas gives an analogy to sensation: Just as the eyes see the color of the apple without the taste, the human intellect sees the intelligible form of a sense object without the matter. For a long time, I understood this to mean that intellectual abstraction leaves something behind, or that […]
Taking the universe as I find it, I find a.) Some of my actions are free, and b.) All of my actions arise from (at least one) antecedent agent. I could pit the truth of (b) against (a) and deny free will out of some sense of determinism, or pit the truth of (a) against […]
And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name. Gen 2:19 Of all the activities God could have us do, why was this the first one? The animals are made from the ground, that is, from what on the one hand is beneath us, and on the…
-To what extent can one divide the historical event from what it developed into? -History differs from journalism or analysis of current events as an attempt to reconstruct an event starting from (one of?) the future(s) of that event. Or is this accidental, meaning that the historian is nothing but someone’s attempt to role-play at […]
Following Thomas, anxiety is sorrow caused by an evil one judges impossible to escape. All paths forward seem to lead to doom and there is no option for joy or even hope. The Gospels frequently just call this fear. The consistent witness of the gospels is that anxiety is weakness or deficiency in faith. If […]
In response to an attempt to save him from the passion, Christ tells Peter Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so? Mt. 26: 52-53 On the one […]
One benefit of at-fault divorce is that the public gets reasons for why a marriage failed. There are public records attesting to cruelty or adultery or emotional abuse or whatever, and the records are compiled after careful investigation, from sworn testimony, delivered in a forum allowing for cross-examination. The public gets as close as it […]