The selfie reigns. We now take more pictures of ourselves than anything else, even family. Narcissus would have found his home in our culture of vanity. And it’s not merely self-love that drives the like-score-card mentality, it is self-construction. At least Narcissus may have had a more static notions of human identity that we do. Our culture abandoned the idea of human nature in favor of a void, an identity determined by choice or cultural construction. And both notions are at play in the selfie. This little craving for likes is heightened just when identity is painfully in life’s foreground – youth. TV Dr Robyn Silverman writes that teenagers “crave positive…
-
-
American Confucionism?
A class changes your life. Ideas gained from reading, discussing and listening to lectures usually transforms, to some degree, how one sees and lives in the world. This fact is fast becoming the aim of education. Whereas modernity stressed the objective analysis of differing theories, new education systems will, perhaps, stress what has, up to now, only been implicit – that theory should shape life. An example of such an educator is Michael Puett, professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, who now teaches the third most popular course at the university. Puett’s course, “Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory,” is aimed explicitly at shaping students’ worldviews. The aim of…
-
What We Swim In
The aim of this post is cultural awareness. Not merely an awareness of what is happening in culture, what culture produces and an awareness of one’s own reactions, but an awareness of assumptions, “underpinnings” as I will call them. To merely observe a culture and then say what you see is not enough and often leads to oversimplification. As a recent writer for the Huffington Post wrote: As a “Millennial,” perhaps one of the most annoyingly over used classifications in modern lexicon, we are Occupy Wall Streeters and aspiring investment bankers. We consume fast food with frightening regularity yet also create Pinterest-worthy organic meals. We dress in $300 jeans or…
-
Creation Worldview
God Created the World just as Genesis describes. But what does this mean for one’s worldview? To believe that God created the world is to accept a set of principles by which one interprets experience, knowledge and by which one comes to conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality. To believe that God created the World is to believe something like the following: God made, from nothing, all that exists and is not God. This means that what is not God is not eternal. God is eternal. Creation has a beginning. The universe, cosmos, creation also refers to the arrangement of all that exists. (order) God has created stuff and its governing…
-
War on Worry
We live in tense times. Terror, a fragile economy, debt, cultural upheaval, a rise in cultural rejection of Christianity and government shutdown all contribute to an increase in worries. Perhaps we feel like the song writer who said: “Anxieties bash my mind in, terrorizing my soul like Bin Laden” (Black Eyed Peas) Worry is a state of anxiety generated by fear of what you do not know or cannot control. Worry manifests itself in thoughts, images and emotions that are negative and threatening. Worry is the mental attempt to mitigate those threats. Worry is total. It might begin in one place, but it takes over everything. As Robert Wise wrote…
-
Head and Heart
Head and Heart A commonly held belief is that there is an essential distinction to be made between a person’s head and heart. The head refers to what is propositionally held. The heart commonly refers to a more emotional component of human processing. If one holds to this kind of distinction one might come to the conclusion that the head and the heart could in some way conflict with each other. I have heard the distinction between head and heart in a multitude of contexts – “Don’t let your heart rule your head!”… “I know it is right in my head, but my heart says…” … “Just follow your heart!” etc. I hear it as…
-
The Dogma of Doubt
It is now mandatory to doubt. To claim to know anything with certainty is to fall foul of dogmatism, the stubborn refusal to subject beliefs to any test for truth. But is certainty the same as dogmatism? And isn’t the demand for universal doubt merely another form of dogmatism? First, to the latter point. It seems that to demand doubt is to assume a universal knowledge claim – something like: it is not possible to be certain of the truth of any belief, or, no human being can be certain of any belief, or even, no belief can produce certainty. Such claims, although different, have the added premise that no…
-
Story Plus Presupposition Equals Worldview
As I read The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by Alex Rosenberg I am reminded that a worldview, any worldview, needs two components – a good story and some presuppositions. Rosenberg aptly co-opts physics and biology for his own worldview. Newtonian physics, for Rosenberg, is what one needs to provide a constitutive account of reality, everything is made of force and stuff (“bosons” and “fermions”). Physics explains all reality, tells us what all of reality is made of, and is almost complete in its attempt to comprehensively describe how everything relates to everything else. Presuppositions done. Now for a good yarn, a story that tells us how we got to where…