Months after my birth in 1941, Roosevelt secretly met with Churchill at Argentia, Newfoundland with the storm clouds of world war ominously looming. With British and American battle ships lashed together, the sailors all sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Although that battle song would be stricken from the hymnals following the war, this was a luminous …
Belief, in the Enlightenment sense, became an individual cognitive stance rather than a communal act of trust and loyalty.
“God” is the principle that creates the universe by bringing unity out of the state of multiplicity known as matter. —John F. Haught
Robert Bellah: We saw in the case of Israel that Yahweh emerged gradually from being one of many other gods, even the greatest god, to the status of the one and only true God.”
The Metaphysical Belief Driving All Scientific Exploration
Jesus and Marx on Truth
We’ll explore the relationship between severe mental illnesses and our most basic, primal emotions that drive our social interactions.
the authority of truth, which had reigned supreme over six million years of collaboration within the countless tribes of our ancestral species, all in passionate deliberation as to which path would be the most righteous and correct way forward for all as a single creature.
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 …
How parties view each other . . . —————– . . . and themselves
How much more majesty there is in the vision that the unique aspect of our nature is animated not by tooth and claw, but rather by our tribe’s ancient mission to transform the power of aggression into the bounty of communion.
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 …
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: …
The fundamental divide between right and left is the clash between the role of the individual vs. the role of the collective. The right wins this argument because, in a post-Darwinian world without religion, the very existence of a collective will is in question—it has been made an orphan in Darwin’s age bereft of evolutionary …
Collection of morphs
. . . 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 …
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, …
It’s called Darwinism Human nature is determined by: 1) The survival of the fittest (natural selection); 2) Including group selection: There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each …
From Wikipedia: The Pledge of Allegiance was originally composed by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union Army Officer during the Civil War and later a teacher of patriotism in New York City schools.[6][7] The form of the pledge used today was largely devised by Francis Bellamy in 1892, and formally adopted by Congress as the …