July 2009
12 posts
“We have no secret treasure by which we can avoid the tension of faith or blot...”
– K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p153
“Morality follows cosmology.”
– Richard Rohr
Your own personal politics
Complaints about the mixing of “religion and politics” or “religion and the state” are really only complaints that you’ve been mixing in the wrong religion. Because if you were mixing in my religion, I wouldn’t be complaining.
If it walks like a duck
Arguing for abortion smells alot like arguing for slavery.
They’re not people, so it’s ok
to change the laws would be inconvenient for the interested parties
it might be kind of bad, but a great deal of good comes from it, which makes it ok
the government doesn’t have a right to tell me what to do with my property/body
Another interesting parallel: The Supreme Court got...
“Any attempt to stretch the relation between concrete and temporal things to...”
– KB, The Epistle To The Romans, p135, on Romans 4:15
But, in the end, it's still you deciding to do
There are two types of lifehacks:
A power user hack, which accelerates an already existing workflow.
An attempted “self-workaround” where you are trying to trick yourself into doing something, or where you are removing all impediments to the needed action.
The decision to en-family someone usually happens way prior to their being consious of that fact.
Watch“The Scientific Method happens, fortuitiously for us, to grid perfectly on top of a narrative arc,” says Adam Savage, co-host of Mythbusters.
That narrative always being about curiosity.
Which makes me think: The scientific method without curiosity is merely technique.
Critical thinking
It’s better to learn
(1) what information you need and
(2) how to obtain that information
than learning the information in and of itself.
Don't Label Me, Brah.
Wanting to be an iconoclast, refusing to be “labeled” or categorized, is really just personal dishonesty. Labels are analogies, and a person is “like” something, regardless of the person.
As Ernest Becker would say, it is an assertion that one is sui generis.
Who are you to forgive me?
Neither the giving nor receiving of Forgiveness is an egalitarian notion.
Hypocrite!
Hypocrisy is a self-implicating accusation. One cannot accuse one of hypocrisy without being guilty of the same.
“You hypocrite! You did something other than what you espoused!” It’s an accusation of inconsistency, which is, at base, an accusation of being imperfect.
It is the only accusation available to someone ethically post-modern, however. It is, really, the only...