Don't get me wrong--I'm very happy about the election results. I'm not much of a democrat, but this administration needed to be slapped and slapped hard by the American voter, and they were.

Of course, now I'm starting to see their path out of this mess. It is as simple as "stay the course". George W. Bush took it upon himself to sum up the ( Read more... )

So, I just finished reading War and the Soul: Healing our Nation's Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder by Edward Tick, Ph.D. I bought the book from Tick directly after a discussion on PTSD at the local library. Both himself and Jimmy Massey, who is one of the founders of Iraq Veterans Against the War, gave an incredible talk about the ( Read more... )

In conjunction with my previous entry, I wanted to keep relating my very extremely true and factual story.

I just finished Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which led me to a very quick skim of Plato's Phaedrus, and then a review of the beginning of Plato's Timaeus, which I had read because of one of jeffrock's posts concerning Plato's ( Read more... )

The following is a true story.

The other night I was watching a nice DVD called In America. It's a story that tugs at your heart, about a family (the Sullivan's) of four Irish immigrants to NYC who have no money and are simultaneously dealing with making a new life in this new city and mourning the death of their 5-year old boy named Franky who ( Read more... )

So, tonight my wife goes to a peace vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan. I would have gone with her, but I wanted to spend some more time with my son as I was away from him last night on a business outing. She actually got interviewed by the local news and she was one of about 4 people out of a fairly large crowd that made the cut from an interview ( Read more... )

So, I just saw this movie last night.

( Semi-spoiler behind cut, just in case you haven't seen it yet. )

From Philosophy in the Flesh, The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by Lakoff and Johnson:

"A person takes a sentence as 'true' of a situation if what he or she understands the sentence as expressing accords with what he or she understands the situation to be."I love this definition. Notice the fundamental parts of this ( Read more... )

Below is part of what I said to someone who is considering joining the military for various reasons--the reasons are not all that important to the overall discussion, and they vary from person to person. I post it here because my answer surprised me ( Read more... )

I love God too much to wish immortality on Her.

She should derive just as much (and more) meaning as I do from death. Without death, what is life?

(anosognosia said something along these lines much more eloquently than I can.)

After several posts in a row in philosophy on intelligent design and similar subjects, I wanted to propose something I've been thinking about in this regard. As I see it, the critical problem in the debate over ID (and almost all theological questions) is one of sloppy definitions. In this case the prime culprit is "intelligence ( Read more... )