Overcoming a Dysfunctional Litter
If you still consider yourself a Buddhist, then you are not yet awakened. – Tibetan Buddhist master Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (from What Makes You Not a Buddhist) Our brain is constantly processing data from all of its sensory inputs, so much so that a lot of this data doesn’t even consciously register; the brain labels [...]
After my criticisms of self-help groups, I thought I ought balance out my thoughts with what I believe works about them. After all, self-help rescued me from myself in a way nothing else could have at the time and I have no desire to hide or deny this truth. While I stand by my position [...]
I’m not a joiner. I’ve never been one for group affiliations. Even in high school, I always felt like I had to be phony, somehow, in order to be part of a group. I did it, of course, but I never quite found a comfort zone doing it, and I always felt like I was [...]
That which is outside the possibility of choice is also outside the province of morality. — Ayn Rand The fundamentalist religious people, such as those pushing a creationist agenda in public schools that I wrote about in my last post, believe that the godlessness of modern secular culture has created a moral crisis that is [...]
You are on a thousand-mile journey. Some way into it, you encounter a river too wide and wild to swim. You must build a raft to cross it. You’ve never built a raft before, and it takes you several weeks. With nothing but your own ingenuity to work with, you build a craft seaworthy enough [...]
(Woundedness and True Believerism) The sad truth is that people who grew up in families where their emotional needs went unmet are more susceptible to true believerism than the general population. This makes sense intuitively. People operating from a place of deficit are obvious targets for every predator, charlatan, and absolute-truth peddler who has something [...]
Last week, I watched a Nova episode called Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, about a school district whose board members tried to force the science teachers to read a disclaimer about evolution that said, basically, that it was “only one theory.” The teachers refused, the board members insisted, and angry parents sued, claiming a [...]
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.—Friedrich Nietzsche I recently perused a book called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr about what he predicts will be the next great technology revolution, the switch from local computing to the Internet. I’ll leave the main point of the book to the technology experts to discuss, [...]
Have you ever been a witness at a news story, and when you watched it later on television, they got all kinds of facts wrong? You find yourself arguing with the television, as in, “No, that’s not right!” “You’re wrong!” “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” But of course, the television doesn’t care, and [...]