Author: Tim

• Two Parties Will Inevitably Refine Their Split

  Assume you are a conservative political operative…it’s this simple:   start at the extreme right wing (however you define it) and proceed leftward till you get to 50.00009% of the electorate.  Stop.  Go no further, because you will give up on your right flank what you gain on your left.  Look back. The ground you…

• Some Other Thing With A Toe

  We know we evolved the ability to run because, well, we can run.  We have structures which allow us to run because we run. We know we de-evolved the tree-climbing structures because, well, we don’t have them.  And other creatures have them. So it must be true that we used to have them, because other…

• Ontological rank is the limit on knowing.

  There never was a nothing.   First there was God, then there was a something. Since the effect cannot be greater than the cause, the some-thing is less than the God thing.  Because it is second and therefore less, and since comprehension is just a form of circumscription. logically the second thing cannot comprehend the first…

• Occam’s Razor: the data set decides the game

  That explanation of the universe which best explains all the DATA using the least number of entities is the one to be preferred. Most atheists simply do not believe an extra entity, called “god”, is necessary to explain the DATA. What changes for some of them as they near death is not that they perceive…

• Shadowlands: the movie

  Lewis’ religion was reduced to the only level Hollywood can muster:  vague ramblings about “faith” and “God” and “another realm”.     And since there was little actual Christianity, there was little intellectual content to Lewis’ character, and so the screenwriters had no raw material for the fierce friendly swordplay we associate with the Inklings. Take…

• Athens, Jerusalem, and Mecca

  There was an Aristotelian thread and a Platonist thread in Christian thought from early on. Aristotle himself was lost to the West for a while — not because of some mythical “stranglehold”  the church had on larger society, but because of the cultural disaster called the fall of Rome, which took centuries to recover from.…

• On Untimely Death

  To see children suffer and die will tatter your faith. Rightly so. Because in a good universe there would be no such things. So, in some ways, at some moments, our universe is not good. Not God’s idea of a universe. There’s nothing puzzling about this if you believe the Genesis picture. Natural forces act…

• To a friend who is tired of the churches

  Forget all the theology you’ve ever heard and all the churches you’ve ever been in. Get a copy of the gospels that has no chapter and verse divisions so you’ll forget it is supposed to be sacred. Read the 4 books like you’d read any biography: to touch the essence of the person. Try to…

• Speaking Of The Dead

  The unique thing about flesh-and-blood people (as opposed to people in, say, political discourse) is that they are simultaneously good and bad.  An artist might paint brilliant dogs yet kick his actual dog.   One might serve soup to the homeless by day yet be unfaithful to the spouse by night.   There are men…

• Gnostics, Gnostics, Everywhere

  “”Gnosticism” actually is capable of a specific enough meaning to be useful,  and was useful in the first few centuries of the church.  As the Greek term gnosis implies, it describes any salvation from a cognitive secret. “Before you knew this thing x,  you were lost, but now that you have received the secret,  you are “saved”.”…