The Human Question

All living things seek "to be inter-active" and for animals the preeminent form of interaction is cooperation; and for humans the preeminent form of interaction is... liturgy.

non-living things seek equilibrium; living seek what would be disequilibrium for a non-living thing, but is for them an increase in useful energy (think ATP molecules); for a living thing to achieve the sort of equilibrium sought by a non-living thing would be death.

Freedom is the ability to act for transcendent reasons.

What would happen to our society's mores if its members very suddenly lost the ability to contracept? How would that society manage  fertility, love and sexual desire?  What practices would it praise, allow, condemn?  What would it come to regard as vice? As virtue? One thing is certain: it would no longer condemn the call to self-control oppressive or repressive. And if inhabitants of this society suddenly found themselves in one where sexual technology allowed for contraception, would the old virtues become obsolete?  Or would they still be needed?

I am not really sure of who it was, but I recall (or rather I seem to recall) reading about an Islamic philosopher who so denied secondary causality that it would seem that the whole world is annihilated and recreated from moment to moment (quantum unit of time? :) ).  Let's say it was Al-ghazali. In any case, if one wants to do physics while regarding human agency as an illusion, then the basic concepts of physics would be metaphors based upon illusions: not the sort of foundation that would encourage one who seeks to understand reality better. In such a case, even "force" would be too metaphysical.  So that all that science could deliver to us would be predictions about what appears when and where.  No information whatsoever about causality.  In such a case, nature, as so conceived, would be indistinguishable from nature as conceived by Al-ghazali--the only difference might be that the former offers a grid of Cartesian coordinates as a template for looking a...

You can still recognize that God wants you to believe.  For it's not because we believe in scripture that we believe in Jesus but vice versa.  So your question when you read or listen to scripture should be, what does God want to tell me via this writing?  Am I not better at getting the message when I taking the story at face value rather than when I am reading it skeptically?  Yes, I am. /

Imagine that you are on a life raft that was sinking, and you could save the lives of all by removing one of the members of the raft.  Other passengers include a bonobo monkey that is famous for using signs to communicate and a mentally handicapped person who is less able to think and communicate than then monkey.  Question:  who would you push off the raft.  1. The monkey; 2. the mentally handicapped person. If you are a nominalist & utilitarian, you will think that you are at least as entitled to push of the mentally handicapped human. The same perspective comes into play when one objects to the Church's position about contraception and homosexuality.  The contemporary listener often thinks of the "thou shalt not" aspect of Catholic morality through utilitarian and nominalist lenses.  The result is that this listener equates sexual relations between partners of the same sex with relations had by two sterile partners of the opposite sex. This ana...