Coexist Part 1: Framing the Issue
It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it. Robert E. Lee. I frequently see cars with the Coexist bumper sticker. When I see them, I often wonder about the person who put the…
Communism’s Dirty Secret (and Capitalism’s and Democracy’s as Well)
Communism is a utopian philosophy, summed up by the quote from Karl Marx in the figure above. Communism’s secret is that it requires virtue to implement. Its dirty secret is that communism does not teach, induce, or want virtue.…
Politics, Politicians, and Demonic Possession
“One of the artifices of Satan is, to induce men to believe that he does not exist: another, perhaps equally fatal, is to make them fancy that he is obliged to stand quietly by, and not to meddle with…
Ethics, Morality, and Virtue: Relative vs. Absolute Meaning
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Genesis…
Virtue: Religion and Philosophy, What does the Founders’ Vision Embrace?
Common wisdom among the right is that we are in trouble as a society because we have chased God from our institutions and are no longer religious. Their solution is to bring religion back into our institutions to re-institute…
Operant Conditioning, Path Dependency and Societal Revolution, Part 1
First a disclaimer. I dislike the practice of operant conditioning. It robs a person of their free will and inherently erodes virtue. Now there are some people in the neuroscience community that say freewill does not exist. While I cannot…