℞ for creeping cynicism

Rx for gloomy defeatism re climate, Ukraine, population, etc., etc.

Filed under: Belief, Faith | 7 Comments

Since the Big Bang, the cosmos has had a linear direction toward amalgamation and association such that matter has been transforming into mind. Mind resides within the relationship between objects. At the subatomic “particle” level, matter itself exists as a relational matrix in which everything alters everything else. On Earth, as amino acids amalgamated into …

Read More
So What;s the Book Aboutbelief in justice

Belief in Justice

Filed under: Belief, Faith, Justice

The proposal in this book that I am most adamant about is that justice is a collective human instinct (in addition to our individual ape instincts to dominate). Justice is not just something we dreamed up as Yuval Harari would have us believe in his book, Sapiens. Justice has been naturally selected over millions of …

Read More

Michael Tomasello and Collective Consciousness

Filed under: Belief, cognitive capacities, Evolution of Emotion, Evolution of human motivation, Justice | 2 Comments

Psychologist Michael Tomasello recognizes that, because all the minds of our ancestral species have gone extinct, the only way we can scientifically approach how the mind of apes evolved into our own is to comparatively study the minds of apes and developing children to ascertain what is exclusively human in human nature. In Becoming Human: …

Read More
Anti-Trump for Dummies

Anti-Trumpitude for Dummies

Filed under: Ancient human migration, Belief, Evolution of Emotion, Justice, Self domestication

. . . Justice is The Human Instinct Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has been a pioneer in documenting in nomadic hunter-gatherers their “deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males including ridicule, shunning, and even killing those with persistently selfish dominance behavior,” giving detailed examples from tribes on every continent. Why …

Read More
The Meaning of Belief

The Meaning of Belief

Filed under: Belief, Enlightenment Narrative, Human Nature | 2 Comments

The term “belief” originally referred exclusively to one’s loyalty and affinity, such as when people say that they believe in a sports team, which clearly carries an emotional and competitive connotation. William Cantwell Smith points out in his Belief and History (1977) that it has only been since the Enlightenment, when knowledge became more theoretical, …

Read More
A Must Read for Seekers

A Must Read for Seekers

Filed under: Belief, Faith

If you are a religious “none” (none of the above), but remain a seeker, this is the book for you. John Haught is a distinguished theologian who has spent his long career thinking through connections between our outer world revealed by science and the inner experiential world of religion, and has a seasoned grasp of …

Read More
Conservatives and Darwin

Conservatives & Darwin

Filed under: Belief, Human Nature, Justice | 1 Comment

If you are a progressive, perhaps you identify yourself as a Darwinist in relation to the religious right who deny evolution, but you are probably unaware that you are embracing a dark view of human nature—and one that is at the foundation of modern conservatism. In Darwin’s Autobiography (1887), he reports, In October 1838, that …

Read More
Sexual selection

Trump and Carson: Archetypes in Human Evolution

Filed under: Belief, Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, God, Popular, Sexual Selection | 15 Comments

Ben Carson can be understood as an archetype of our “old-mind” in which dominance and submission in apes evolved into obedience to the sacred authority of justice that has sustained our bounty and fertility. When our own species arose 200,000 years ago, superimposed upon our six million year evolution since apes, we evolved the passionate desire to attain social admiration, traditionally known as vanity. No one—no one—is going to make the claim that Trump is not vain.

Read More