Tag Archives: philosophy
Pink Floyd and Thoreau
I was just listening to the Pink Floyd song “Time” the other day, when three lines of the song struck me: You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way … You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today … Hanging on in quiet desperation is the [...]
The Source
The theme, or motto, of this blog has its source in an essay of Plutarch entitled “On Listening to Lectures.” Here’s a translation of Plutarch’s actual words: The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards [...]
Love, Sympathy, and Value
The September 13 episode of the Philosopher’s Zone podcast really struck a chord with me. I spent most of the episode mumbling non-verbal cues of non-committal acquiescence, but by the end I was slapping the steering wheel, saying, “that’s fucking beautiful” with tears welling up in my eyes. Your mileage, of course, may vary. The [...]
Last of the Starry-Eyed Orientalists
Since Iran deteriorated into Islamic fundamentalism in 1979, and the Ayatollahs resurfaced to rid Iran of unclean things such as infidels, heretics, and homosexuals, we haven’t heard much from the starry-eyed orientalist; that scholar who tires of the daunting empiricism, formal scientific process, excessive prosperity, and agnostic materialism of the West, and turns to the [...]
Henry Thoreau’s Moral Universe
I’ve been a wilderness lover since the summer my brother David and I first rode our bicycles into the Sierra Nevada, but I never did think much of Henry David Thoreau, until I suddenly fell in love with him. To me, Thoreau was just some New England liberal garden-naturalist who might have liked to walk [...]
I Wanna Be Autonomy
Awe, come on! A little anarchy never hurt nobody! Be a devil! Give it a try, won’t you? Just this once. Anarchy in the NZ This here is your real scarlet letter. It stands for some pretty nasty ideas: anarchy, for starters. Likewise, we have atheism, the theological equivalent of anarchism. Then there’s that rarely-employed [...]
Embrace Your Inner Fish
I just finished the book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. Though I bought the book with a specific interest in learning just how much bony fish there is within us, I want to say at the outset that it has been an enjoyable read in general as a book about the joy of science. [...]
Release the Day
A book I’ve been reading, “Your Inner Fish”, just reminded me that Carl Sagan once said, and I don’t know if he was the first, that looking out at the stars is like looking into the past. It has occurred to me on a number of occasions that there is no qualitative difference between looking [...]
I am God, and so are you.
Agnostic Religion Only God exists; He is in all things, and all things are in Him. Sufi pantheism, as defined in a footnote to the Seven Valleys of Baha’u’llah We have previously considered that Islam’s strength is that it forbids idolatry, that is, associating partners with God, and that Islam’s weakness is that its object [...]
The Agnosticism Intrinsic to Monotheism
I recently wrote here about the strict monotheism of Muhammad. It occurred to me that the ultimate logical end of monotheism is free thought and tolerance; something of the sort that one might expect from a Unitarian congregation. In this sense, Islam is essentially a modern religion. Existentially, Islam seems quite primitive and barbaric, but [...]