I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
Theology in general seems to me a substitution of human ingenuity for divine wisdom.
Dogs (like rats) are multitalented but they are also not very smart the way humans are. A recent book, devoted to the intelligence of dogs, is 250+ pages long (Stanley Coren, The Intelligence of Dogs: A Guide to the Thoughts, Emotions, and Inner Live...
Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but ...
Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. West's numerous connections to the mind control network illustrate how the network is maintained, not through any central conspiracy, but by an interlocking network of academic r...
For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ion...
The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relati...
It is a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, a cliché so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and ...
If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about th...
No successes we might have are guaranteed to last as long as industrial civilization stands. Conversely, most of our losses are effectively permanent. Extinct species cannot be resurrected. Overdrawn aquifers or clear-cut forests will not return to t...
But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated...
The border between personal and transpersonal experience is a complex region. It is a territory often filled with spiritual and religious views. Within psychology it was a significant preoccupation of William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and man...
Underneath my imagination there didn't seem to be anything solid except for the space where I shoved my pain and sadness. Besides that, there were only twisted steel threads of axiety, woven through my body and brain, wired into me like a constant wa...
[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the produc...
... primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to...
It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, h...
Parenting has nothing to do with perfection. Perfection isn’t even the goal, not for us, not for our children. Learning together to live well in an imperfect world, loving each other despite or even because of our imperfections, and growing as huma...
I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and t...