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We have expectations about things. It’s kinda part of being human. Not that animals don’t have expectations. They learn, as well as they can, and understand cause and effect. But our grasp of expectations is rather more complex than what goes through my parents’ cat’s head when Mom claps her hands […] “Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s been enslaved?” The worst trap is the one you don’t realize you’re in. It’s a strange truth of my psyche that I realize I’ve fallen in a rut because everything starts getting on my nerves. It’s like a detector […] Emmanuel: God with us. It’s a name that’s gotten into our language, and a concept that has gotten into our heads. It’s in our culture and history. Things and people are named Immanuel/Emmanuel all the time. And by some quirk of the human psyche, we have got used to […] I like baking. I like the food that I bake, and I like the way my house smells when I’ve baked. But given that there are only two of us living here, we have a dilemma: what do I do with my baked goods? Give them away, of course. […] Those who know me know that my favorite book in the world is The Lord of the Rings. The odd thing, though, is that every time I read it, I notice something different. Yesterday I was reading the chapter “Mount Doom”, and half a paragraph struck me like never before. Those who’ve seen […] Prophecy is an interesting thing. It likes to show up in a lot of scripture and a lot of fiction. It catches our fancy. The idea that the future can be known tugs at our imagination, as we are caught in a life where only the past can be seen and understood – […] Back when I was a kid, I had a paper route. It wasn’t very large: seventy-some houses, fifty-five of which got the newspaper daily, all in our immediate neighborhood. Unusually for many jobs, there were no days off. Though the route took less than two hours on a bad day to get done, […] Awhile back, some poster on a Christian discussion forum who had a habit of teasing the Christians said something about how Christianity is a faith built on guilt and fear. And I read that, and my mouth kinda hung open for a moment. And I realized how diametrically opposed that is to the […] I’m wondering how long it will take before philosophy finally learns to separate how and why. I’m fully aware of the way why is used in English: it’s a substitution for “what makes it do that?” in both the mechanical and volitional sense. But I think it would do us all an enormous […] I don’t like to be weak. Who does? I mean, it’s hardwired into us, the drive to take control. To decide how things go. Not just to get our own food or choose our own clothes, but to have others listen to us and do what we desire, to order our […] |
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