Admit something:
Everyone you see you say
“Love me!”
Of course, you don’t say this out loud
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
This great pull to connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye,
Who is always telling in that sweet moon language
What every other eye in this world
Is dying
To hear.
-Hafiz
In human relationships, as mutual love deepens there comes a time when the two friend convey their sentiments without words. They can sit in silence sharing an experience or simply enjoying each other’s presence without saying anything. Holding hands or a single word from time to time can maintain this deep communication.
Suddenly we find ourselves surrounded by people saying, “Teach us to pray.” And suddenly we become aware that we are being asked to show the way through a region that we do not know ourselves. The crisis of our prayer life is that our mind may be filled with ideas of God while our heart remains far from him. Real prayer comes from the heart. It is about this prayer of the heart that the Desert Fathers teach us.
Preface to the Happiness We have talked a few times about getting along with individuals at work and a passage that meant a lot to me a couple of years ago came to mind. I came across this during that period in my life when I was just beginning to make the transition from a [more …]
–snip– When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is to ask, as someone once asked me: “why did God make a creature of such rotten stuff that it went wrong?” The better stuff a creature is made of – the cleverer and stronger and freer it is – then [more …]
Over the centuries the Church has done enough to make any critical person want to leave it. Its history of violent crusades, pogroms, power struggles, oppression, excommunications, executions, manipulation of people and ideas, and constantly recurring divisions is there for everyone to see and be appalled by. Can we believe that this is the same [more …]
Logical positivism’s position is that the only thing philosophy can concern itself with is propositions. As such, it cuts itself off from the possibility of any encounter with Christ. This type of philosophy deals with “religion” through a method that reduces religion to propositions such as, “God exists” and “X is immoral.” This is how [more …]
Here is the Atom + Eve website, with links to video and transcripts: http://atompluseve.com/conferences/the-origin-of-the-universe/ Dr. Barr also writes for First Things. His article on Hawking (which he discussed in his lecture at the conference) can be found here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/much-ado-about-ldquonothingrdquo-stephen-hawking-and-the-self-creating-universe In Dr. Barr’s presentation, and in this article, he pointed out that a younger Hawking stands [more …]
I believe that scientists like Sagan, Feynman, Hawking and others who have adopted a positivist outlook on the world make a mistake when they reduce Christianity to a mere philosophy and analyze it purely in that way – which is to say, from the outside (as an idea, merely) – from the position of having [more …]
And so in her uncertainties, she decided that she would go with science. In this way, her opinions would be based on facts, on knowledge, and not superstition. And so, with a thorough skepticism, she searched her heart for its existing superstitions so she could root them out and replace them with knowledge. She compiled [more …]
This debate actually happened to me. It went on for a long time, but here is the heart of it… Me: Some people mistake desire for greed, arguing that desire is bad; others mistake greed for desire and argue that greed is good. Both groups of people make the same mistake in the inverse direction. [more …]
The number of galaxies in the observable universe = 10^12 10000000000000 The number of grains of sand to fill an average office = 5×10^13 50000000000000 Meters from the earth to the edge of the observable universe = 4.3×10^26 (46 billion light years ) 4300000000000000000000000000 Meters in the observable universe = 8.8×10^26 (92 billion light years) [more …]
“Normal adults don’t stop to think about such concepts as space and time. These are things children ask about. My secret is I remained a child. I always ask the simplest questions. I ask them still.” — Einstein
That quote comes to my mind especially today, reading the headline: “Discovery of New Particle Could Redefine World”
So let us be like children now, just for a moment, and take time to think a bit about time, and space, and everything…
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts… Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. The Academy of Dijon posed the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” Rousseau’s answer to this [more …]
We always talk of matter as if it only had passing relation to electrical effects. Yet if we look in detail into the nature of matter, we find physical substances, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of positive and negative electric charge. Matter is not electrical? No, quite the opposite: electric charge is the major component of all atoms. Therefore matter is *made out of cancelled electric charge.* If we cancel out some opposite charge by placing positive charge together with negative charge, do we get NOTHING? No, instead we get material substance. Positive protons plus negative electrons equals neutral atoms. Physical objects normally have no charge? Wrong. The physical objects *are* the charge.
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue87/Philosophy_of_Mind_An_Overview
Bertrand Russell adopted Frege’s predicate logic as his primary philosophical method, a method he thought could expose the underlying structure of philosophical problems. For example, the English word “is” has three distinct meanings by predicate logic: For the sentence ‘the cat is asleep’, the is of predication means that “x is P” (denoted as P(x)) For the sentence ‘there is a cat’, [more …]
What amazed and upset him most of all was that the majority of people of his age and circle, who had replaced their former beliefs, as he had, with the same new beliefs as he had, did not see anything wrong with it and were perfectly calm and content. So that, besides the main question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Are these people sincere? Are they not pretending? Or do they not understand somehow differently, more clearly, than he the answers science gives to the questions that concerned him? And he diligently studied both the opinions of these people and the books that expressed these answers. …
“What was the point of a bachelor of arts degree? Was it to plumb the depths and origins of Western civilization, which had after all invented the university, and to develop the student spiritually and morally? Or was it to set the kid up for a cushy job?” http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/book-drove-them-crazy_634905.html?nopager=1 “The crisis of liberal education,” he [more …]
“Teenagers shouldn’t read “great” literature because it’s good for them, but because it’s like them. ” http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/why-teens-should-read-adult-fiction-and-vice-versa/article2371260/ But teenagers – at least the teenagers I knew and know, and the teenager I happened to be – are not so world-weary. They’re still trying to figure out this place, this land, and to assimilate all the sensations [more …]
Heidegger, of all the Existentialist philosophers, stands apart in his philosophy of Being, which turns out to be the Western Mind’s analogue of the Eastern Mind’s Zen. Zen is the practice of, or experience of, or awareness of, Heidegger’s Being. Like Zen, it is difficult to think of or state what Being is. For one, [more …]
Worldview Naturalism in a Nutshell If you don’t believe in anything supernatural – gods, ghosts, immaterial souls and spirits – then you subscribe to naturalism, the idea that nature is all there is. The reason you’re a naturalist is likely that, wanting not to be deceived, you put stock in empirical, evidence-based ways of justifying [more …]
Religion is the product of a love affair, it is not the love itself, rather, it is what has grown out of the love. Like a couple in love who walks hand in hand on the beach as the sun sets, we see this and so we set out to walk the beach ourselves, not understanding the original reason from which that walk was made special. It is not the beach, nor the setting sun, but the love that made the walk holy. So many are walking the beach, thinking that to walk is to love. No wonder so many give up!
I just posted this on a forum where they were talking about the sustained attention that is required of reading books and whether we are losing that ability, or whether it was always small minority who ever had it. Some comments included the value of reading fiction vs non-fiction and one commentator mentioned reading “The [more …]
Sagan Part 1: The Frontier is Everywhere Sagan Part 2: Life Looks for Life Sagan Part 3: A Reassuring Fable Richard Feynman on Beauty and Belief
Cameras in cellphones do not have a mechanical ‘shutter’ as in conventional cameras, but scan an image line-by-line as is typical in video cameras. When shooting a moving or rotating object, the shutter scan interferes with the subject’s motion and results in some odd images — very much like the “backwards wagon wheels” you see in old movies and TV westerns.
Check out this rubber propeller, caused by the action of the shutter against the motion of the airplane engine
“What we have in this thought-experiment is a place to start thinking about our instinctive moral responses (what philosophers call our ‘moral intuitions’) and the way that these intuitions may or may not cohere together or be capable of any kind of rational justification.”
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue86/How_To_Get_Off_Our_Trolleys
An excerpt from Pope Benedict’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth”from a chapter where Benedict writes of the third temptation of Christ and how it manifests to us today. I transcribed it from audio. I have tried not to make any errors.
Less mind, more judgment. With regard to the intellectual faculties, the postulant need not have talents so brilliant as to make him a great mind; but he should have a sound, practical judgment, that is, common sense. “Moins d’esprit, plus de jugement – Less mind, more judgment,” as the French say.
Neither great talents for some certain branches of science, nor piety and the spirit of devotion can make up for deficiency of judgment or common sense. Subjects of medium talents, yet gifted with a sound, practical judgment are generally the best suited for Religious Communities, because they are humble and docile.