The clash between the model of adventure and the Pareto principle — Stories are more popular than arguments. We absorb volumes of nonfictional information in school and in our workplaces, and if we’re sane we try to keep in touch with the facts so that our life doesn’t go off the rails. But fiction and nonfiction intermingle. Even a fantasy story models…

How we can escape personal hypocrisy only to be mocked by our collective vulgarity — The kryptonite for idealists, intellectuals, and spiritualists who chastise us for failing to live up to our highest potential is none other than the ubiquity of sex. Sex in all its forms — intercourse, masturbation, fetishes, pornography, dating culture, romance, lusts, and so on — amount to the bathos, the…

And the shocking misnomer of scientific “laws of nature” — We’d have a better chance of seeing how virtually miraculous ideals are if we hadn’t been lulled into complacency by the scientific figure of speech which says there are such things as “laws of nature.” There are no such “laws,” which is to say that no scientist in his or…

Southern racism, religious fundamentalism, and the backlash against modernity — It’s common now to remark on how the Republican Party has turned into a cult of personality for Donald Trump. For example, a 2023 CBS poll found that “Trump’s voters hold him as a source of true information, even more so than other sources, including conservative media figures, religious leaders…

Should we revere or resent nature in co-creating with the universe? — Is naturalism, the philosophy that says nature is all there is, compatible with spirituality, or must naturalists succumb to nihilism because the God of the monotheists died with the progressive revolutions of modernity that began in fifteenth-century Europe? There have been numerous attempts to spiritualize nature, or to establish an…

Precolonial African tribalism and the luxury of grand unifying myths — If you were to read that Africa has suffered from an unusual number of civil wars, you’d probably chalk up that observation to a vestige of European colonial racism. According to the racist imperialists, Africans were racially inferior to Europeans and thus more prone to primitive violence. And you’d be…

Meeting the challenge of deep ecology with an existential perspective — Deep ecologists say that civilization, the drive to expand human societies at nature’s expense is evil and that our presence on the planet needs to be drastically downscaled to respect the inherent value of all other life. Where we’ve gone badly wrong, these ecologists say, is in valuing people more…

How Roman imperialism disrupted the Hindu logic of Christianity’s latent polytheism — “Whenever there is a decline in righteousness and an increase in unrighteousness, O Arjun, at that time I manifest Myself on earth. To protect the righteous, to annihilate the wicked, and to reestablish the principles of dharma I appear on this earth, age after age.” …

Transhumanism’s existential status in the history of religions — The overall trend in the history of religions is ironic since it’s one in which we eventually ignore or downplay the supreme creative power that hides in plain sight, which is nature, and reify our inclination to aggrandize ourselves, worshipping “gods” and “goddesses” until that vanity was unleashed in the…