Subscribe:
RSS feed
Browsing All Posts filed under »philosophy«
Earaches, Loneliness & the Health Benefits of Kindness
December 4, 2012
The science and reality of psychological pain I was recently reading an article about emotional pain. It put a scientific gloss on what was clear to me already, that emotional pain is real pain. But it added a few other surprising insights on top of that. Of course emotional pain is real pain. Loneliness has […]
The Generation That Didn’t Go to the Moon
August 26, 2012
I grew up on science fiction. Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison. Etc. The entire history of human space exploration has happened within my lifetime, within the lifetime of Baby Boomers like me. From Sputnik in 1957, through the moon landings in the ‘60s […]
Onions Brooms Questions
September 2, 2011
You can never really know anything, but you can have knowledge which has been well-questioned. You need questions to sort through knowledge, because you can’t rely on experience alone. For instance, if you and I walk down the street, and I look left and you look right, whose experience of the street is the correct […]
If you hate…
July 26, 2011
If you hate, if you let your hate tell you what to do, then you have become one of the people our parents taught us to fear. If you arm yourself for military action against an enemy, you declare yourself an enemy—against the public peace. If finally the innocent die at your hands, the purity […]
Extroverts
August 28, 2010
I’m an introvert. Everybody—except sociopaths and psychopaths—is an introvert to some extent. That’s the part of you which pays attention to your effect on others. Extroverts don’t care that much. They assume that their own acceptance in society is enough to wipe away any missteps. They’re right, because as humans we’re programmed to deal with […]
The North Wind and the Sun
August 13, 2010
I remember encountering this story in elementary school, probably in grade one. Even the illustrations seem the same. The story has stuck with me, I think, because the moral rings true. – a fable from Aesop The North Wind and the Sun disputed which was the more powerful, and agreed that he should be declared […]
Doing Evil to Create Good, cont.
June 18, 2010
I wrote before that doing evil to create good has an inherent flaw: the certainty of the evil has to be balanced against the uncertainty of the good. I realize now that I left out the greatest flaw. If we accept evil as a means to good, we validate evil. And to validate evil is […]
Grandpa Theo
With Malaika
Klick This Pic
An Informal Chronology of the Aboriginal Land Question in BC
Father Theo's Blog 
July 28, 2013
3