The Good Capitalist
I update the posts on here with precious infrequency. As always, the problem is not a lack of ideas, but rather too many, and too little mental effort on my part to string them together in a way that the reader might find palatable. I've been reading a good deal of philosophy as of late. Much of it lives up to its reputation (for better or worse) in that it is lofty-headed, uninterpretable long-windedness that...
Then and Now
For the fourth of July in 2018, I took a trip to Boulder, Colorado. I had the entire week off of work, had planned nothing, and I found that I could book a flight to Denver from San Franciso on short notice for a price that wasn't too excessive. I had no idea what I would do in Boulder, but it seemed like I should get out of my small Mountain View apartment and experience...
The Endless Struggle
In the summer of 2016 I turned down a software engineering job I was offered in Portland. I ended up refusing the job, after much deliberation, for a handful of reasons. When I went in for an interview I found myself among about a dozen men, being led by a couple of men in executive positions, in a small basement office across the Willamette from the city's core metropolis center. They took me out to...
On the Necessity of a Creation Myth
One of the accusations made against Socrates at the trial which ultimately condemned him to death was for heresy. He was said to have corrupted the youth into believing in and following gods that were not sanctioned by whatever governmental authority existed in Athens at that time. His response to this, in the Apology, was to concede that while he was almost certainly incapable of understanding deeper religious truths, he was better than his accusers,...
What the Founding Fathers Intended
As of late, I've started to become acquainted with politics, a sphere of which I have remained largely (and happily) ignorant of for most of my adult life. These are waters that one must cautiously wade into. There is one very common argument that I find is invoked by the right and the left, in order to decry an action taken by the opposing party: it goes against what the founding fathers intended. Call it...
On Good
There was a research study published in Nature a couple of weeks ago called "The Moral Machine". It discussed at some length the problem of how to make machines behave ethically when faced with dilemmas that involve the preservation or well-being of human beings. This is the Trolley Problem writ technical. The ethical thought experiment asks a person to consider if it is ethical to do something that saves five human lives but kills one,...
On Evil
I had a roommate in college who was a devoted Satanist. When I say "Satanist", I mean the religion promulgated by Anton Szandor LaVey about half a century ago. My roommate told me that he had set out to write an article denouncing it for his high school newspaper, but upon studying it, he had found himself taken in, and the article he ended up writing bore a subtitle something like "the most misunderstood religion"....
Ineffectual Evangelicals
I had my first contact with the Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday morning. It was a quiet morning, I was packing boxes since I'm moving in the next week, and I was a little bored with the process. So, I'm not going to launch into a lengthy diatribe about how I don't like being bothered at home. I actually saw them mulling around my apartment complex before they showed up at my door, and I willed them...
Hello World
If I ever were to write my own biography, an exercise that would be little more than vanity for someone of my own import, I'd open it in the style of Dickens and talk about where I came from. A Stoic named Epictetus, whose wisdom in his Discourses I have been absorbing as of late, once asked the question of the Greek people of his own day: "Why say 'I am Athenian'? Why not identify...
The Story of God
This is what all of us are looking for, really: a convincing story. This is precisely what I started to look for a few years ago, when I started to dig into various religions and the chronologies that surrounded their histories. How did we get to here and now? How did we get to the point where Christianity is a religion that has captured the minds of over a quarter of the world's population, in...