The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infin...
My birthday is coming up. I was born on March 5th, 1982. Humans have come a long way since then—nearly 30 years, if my math is good. And my math better be good, because if my math’s no good, what’s that leave? I mean aside from English, art, sc...
But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and c...
This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down...
Harry Potter is one boy in a long line of mythical heroes who have reminded the human race that we are so much more than we think we are, so much more powerful than we seem to know. Jesus said that we would someday do even greater works than He; shou...
Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is no...
The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.” A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value o...
If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social ar...
A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do." Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive...
How big a war?" "A worse one than the one fifty years ago, I expect," said Cheery. "I don't recall people talking about that one," said Vimes. "Most humans didn't know about it," said Cheery. "It mostly took place underground. Undermining passages an...
The battle of Iwo Jima would quickly turn into a primitive contest of gladiators: Japanese gladiators fighting from caves and tunnels like the catacombs of the Colosseum, and American gladiators aboveground, exposed on all sides, using liquid gasolin...
There is a gathering storm before us. The technological bedrock on which we are building the future of humanity is deeply unstable and like a house of cards can come crashing down at any moment. It’s time to build greater resiliency into our global...
Charity is salt in the wound. It is painful. The state gives charity with the bitter hatred of a victim to his blackmailer. The receiver of free money is subjected to harassment, insult, and profound humiliation. Newspapers are enlisted to heap scorn...
I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so...
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all t...
The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantas...
Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, compo...
The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us wh...
Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of ...
BASIC LIFE ATTRIBUTES Four purusharthas or goals of the life be, So very crystal clear in life undisputedly; 1 Artha getting useful wealth and prosperity, Finding the meaning for living herein truly; 2 Kama fulfilling desires, acting repeatedly, It t...
We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are mere...
