How a ranking algorithm promotes mediocrity — You may have heard that algorithms are quietly filtering our “content creations” according to some capitalist, Big Tech agenda that’s ultimately making the world a worse place. But have you come across a smoking gun that proves this is happening? How algorithms automate the media platforms is opaque to the…

Egregores and the fictions that take on independent life — What’s the difference between gods and the mascots that brand an institution? “The gods are real,” say the religion’s practitioners. But mascots are real, too — as symbols and even as egregores, as protagonists in corporate myths and rituals that sustain the brand. And as Yuval Harari suggests in Sapiens…

Why religion’s take on the numinous isn’t the thing itself — You know how some brand names become so popular that we mistake those companies’ products for the functions themselves? Think of Band-Aids, Kleenex, or Google. …

The hopeless hero’s existential task — Have you considered that the difference between whether God is real or not is insignificant because either way we’d be dealing with a reality that’s monstrous? If there’s a sole living thing at the helm of all beings, an eternal mind that wears the universe as its cosmic body which…

Myth-making and the existential leap of faith in life’s meaning — Can we stop pretending our core convictions are mere beliefs, thoughts, theories, assumptions, interpretations, posits, or opinions? You assume that squirrels are good climbers, you think it will rain tomorrow, and you opine that rock music is better than pop. …

And how the talk of “gods” and “objects” humanizes the vast, alien wilderness — Just because we can explain how relatively mundane things work in the world, like tools, rocks, the seasons, or even molecules, life, and the stars, does that mean we should expect much from our explanations of the whole universe? Isn’t it even a category mistake to speak of a theory…

And the weakness of the design argument for God — One of the few reasons for believing that people aren’t just by-products of impersonal, natural processes is the teleological or design argument for theism, which says there’s a person at the bottom of reality, after all, as indicated by hints of supernatural design in the universe. Most so-called reasons in…

The sovereignty of money and the call for outgrowing personal greed — According to Britannica, neoliberalism is the ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of…

Explaining how there can be mass craziness even under late-industrial conditions — How is it possible that after the Scientific Revolution hundreds of millions of educated people still have roughly the same religious beliefs and practices as the ancients who were practically in the dark about the universe? Indeed, is that persistence of theism itself miraculous evidence for the existence of God? …