All about: religion

Review: Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Seven years after his The Better Angels of our Nature, the book in which he presented abundant statistics and reasons why violence has declined, Steven Pinker has published an even more ambitious tome defending the idea and ideals of Enlightenment. The controversy that arose from the 'cautiously optimist' view he presented in 2011 might have ...
Be careful
Be particularly careful about the following four words: sacrifice, eternity, purity, redemption. If you hear any of these, sound the alarm. And if you happen to live in a country whose leader routinely says things like 'Their sacrifice will redeem the purity of our eternal nation' – know that you are in deep trouble. – Yuval Noah Harari, 21 lessons
Starlight
last night, ancient starlight fell onto your arm it was billions of years old and had traveled the entire time only to smash into your barren wrinkled skin. there was a team of people who rushed in to help you wonder, and to make sure you understand the grandure, the sheer magnificence of it all. ...
Conversation and Correspondence
It has been said - I heard the physicist Freeman Dyson relating it - that the human urge to converse is akin to the termite's instinct to build castles. Perhaps the truth of this becomes most clear in the edge case of the hermit who converses or corresponds with an imaginary interlocutor. Henry David Thoreau ...
Clickbait: A thought about Jordan Peterson
Recently, I fell for the hype and listened to some interviews with the Canadian professor of psychology Jordan Peterson. I don't find him controversial and his appeal to a healthy debate bypassing the left-right dichotomy sounds healthy. In the videos I watched, he often stressed scientific and statistical rigor, and I like that. Jordan likes ...
Reading: Ships by Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) was an adventurous, I think people say 'avant-garde' poet from Slovenia. I like what I see (or could we say: read) because it is mysterious and our world feels sometimes like mystery has been painted over. Here's 'ships' in a translation by Brian Henry: Ships I’m religious. As religious as the wind ...
Tableau I
, in which we are all gummy bears competing with each other on the birthday table of a child who has yet to be diagnosed colorblind
Writing exercise #1: Deconstruction
Just for fun writing exercise, this time about a religious Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and what he had to say about Christopher Hitchens. His article can be found in crisis magazine. Please be candid with your comments and lay out to me where grammar and rhetoric are still lacking I would like to exercise and exorcise the vacuity ...
Two types of religion
A father can call the deepest motivation of his child the tentative and most fragile design of his heart morally reprehensible. So he summons the energy that will self-destroy his child. There are two types of religion In one, there is a Father and He shall forgive you In the other, you shall forgive the ...