To social mammals like us, mindless physicality may be inexplicable — “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from…

Assessing Bard’s and Söderqvist’s Lacanian screed in “Process and Event” — What the heck is psychoanalysis? Is it science, pseudoscience, a cult, a philosophy, an art form? Perhaps no academic school of thought has taken more heated criticism than Freudianism, apart from Nazi or Soviet pseudosciences. Sigmund Freud’s theory of how the mind forms itself through psychosexual stages in childhood has…

The clash between the international acceptance of war, and the domestic outlawing of murder — Recall the relish that progressives took in condemning George W. Bush’s government for its “war crimes” in Iraq. “Dick Cheney’s a war criminal,” they cried. And progressives would rush to say that Israel, too, in its bombing of Gaza is evidently guilty of war crimes, of not doing enough to…

Jung’s intriguing psychoanalysis of Yahweh — Carl Jung once psychoanalyzed God, in a 1952 book called Answer to Job. Luckily for Jung, the Goldwater rule wasn’t yet in effect, so he needn’t have feared recriminations from psychiatric associations for engaging in so indirect a psychiatric assessment. Mind you, God’s hidden to the point of not existing…

And the relative triviality of most preoccupations — A million tribal grievances divide us into warring camps, as we leap to defend the symbolic caricatures that give our lives meaning. But if a race of intelligent extraterrestrials visited our planet, I wonder whether they’d interpret all our cultural comings and goings according to a single, overarching distinction: Ultimately…

And the liberal’s burden of distinguishing Israel from its Islamist neighbours — Israeli political propaganda draws a sharp line between Israel and the Islamist terrorists who seek to end the Jewish state. Israel is supposed to be a civilized, liberal, democratic republic that happens to be surrounded by Arab dictatorships and medieval theocracies, and whereas Israel is relatively pragmatic and restrained in…

The sanctimonious prejudices behind Edmund Burke’s case against atheism — The father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, is often held up as a virtual prophet for predicting the reign of terror and the dictatorship that resulted from the French Revolution. Early modern progressives had been naïve in thinking they could reason their way out of Christendom since their zeal for…

War’s strange legality, and the UN’s call for a truce in Israel’s war with Hamas — According to a press release, on Oct 27 the United Nations issued its first formal response “to the escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine since the Hamas terror attacks of 7 October, after the Security Council failed on four occasions to reach consensus on any action.” The response, backed…

The supposed irrationality of atheists, according to a Christian nationalist — The alt-right activist and author who’s commonly called “Vox day” (as though he were the voice of God, as in Vox Dei) wrote in 2008 the book The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. …