Conversational writing is all the rage on the internet. These days the most successful freelance writers keep their writing simple, breezy, and upbeat. But what does this style of writing say about how the internet is affecting our standards?

Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”: what we say may not be as important as why we’re inclined to say it that way to adapt to a technological environment. Before the new media of radio, television, and computers, writing was king. In the ancient world most people were illiterate, so they passed on folklore in an oral culture. …

Monotheism arose in the Middle East, in ancient Egypt (under Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE), Iran (Zoroastrianism), Canaan (Judaism, which spread via Christianity), and Arabia (Islam).

Zoroastrianism and Christianity aren’t purely monotheistic: the former religion envisions a process by which a single God will reign after an apocalyptic triumph of good over evil, and Christianity is only nominally monotheistic, not substantially so since Christians divide God into three divine persons and Catholics add a pantheon of sanctified saints.

Monotheism arises as a reform of polytheism, which speaks to one major influence on this kind of religion: the projection of…

We like to think we have a monopoly on being good or bad, as if animals could be only cuddly and cute or else aggressive just because they’re starving or afraid. But no, if you keep an eye out for them, you can spot them everywhere: nefarious animals.

In fact, when people act like scoundrels, they’re acting like animals. Animals set the benchmark for villainy. I’ll show you what I mean.

Case Study #1:

Out the window that looks onto my backyard, you can see numerous large trees. One day I saw a small brown bird sitting on one of the branches. …

When I was a teen in high school, some of the cool, rich, attractive, popular students would run for student council. There were elections — if you could call them that because the position of Student Representative was a sham, of course, and the elections might as well have been hoaxes.

Hardly anyone voted, and the rich students participated in these extracurricular activities not because being a student representative in high school is a consequential job; rather, they did so mainly to add a line to their resumés and to inflate their self-image.

The students in the underclass of high…

Most of us aren’t very philosophical. We rarely think about our assumptions or doubt their validity. We’re too busy or we’re afraid of what we’d find and what we’d lose by taking a cold, hard look at what we’ve been so busy accomplishing.

As a result, we often operate on autopilot. We absentmindedly perform our chores and social routines without wondering whether all is as it seems to the senses and to mundane conceptions. Or even if the world is as it seems to us, we seldom consider what the world would seem like to another, more mature life form.

…

We have some freedom to develop our personal potential. We get to decide how we want to use our capacities and our limited time. Some are more fortunate than others: they have more doors open and opportunities to explore.

Doors can also close for us if we’re unlucky. Perhaps we’re met with a natural disaster: our house might be struck by a tornado, or we might be afflicted with a disease. We work around these additional constraints imposed on us by nature’s indifference to our welfare. …

There looms the supermarket, the market of markets, home of a million brands and smorgasbords. Although I’m starving and am as thin as a toothpick, I dread entering that food paradise. Though I’m a trained chef and I have the money to buy whatever food I want, I can’t decide what to eat.

You think my plight is frivolous, you who arm yourself with a shopping list before crossing the supermarket’s threshold lest you be overwhelmed by the selection and end up with twice as many groceries as you’d planned on taking home.

But have you thought it through? How…

In Exodus 33, Moses reminds God that if he, Moses, is to lead God’s chosen people, God had better present himself to inspire them. After all, says Moses, “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

The Lord obliges, but the narrative undercuts the occasion with bathos: to see God’s face is to die (33:20), so God carefully arranges Moses in a cleft in the mountain rock so that God can pass by and allow Moses to view only his backside (33:23).

The satirical meaning of this story is…