seeker for truth

(While reading Karen Armstrong's latest book The Case for God I was struck by a thought - ok, series of thoughts - about our fears of material determinism...) Does our human cognitive tendency to reductionism produce a false fear/rejection/perception of material determinism? Is the fear that we are reducible? That our fullness is, in the end, insignificant? What if we found out that while material determinism is true, the universe (including us) is irreducable? What if our rejection of deterministic ideas is a result of our not believing that we are reducable to simplistic, singular, or trivial physical/chemical reactions?  What if this idea is misplaced because the universe can be both deterministic & irreducible... What if the fullness of our being is, as the sages suggest, fully important, fully interconnected, and fully necessary to the functioning of the universe... does determinism take on a different cast if this is true? does this impact our understan...

Jonathan Haidt - The Happiness Hypothesis Short, accessible, transformative... this book reevaluates ancient wisdom in light of contemporary psychology and social psychology research - a must read for anyone wanting to grasp the cutting edge understanding of the human condition Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue Neither short nor particularly accessible - but transformative. His analysis of the root causes of our modern condition of interminable moral disagreement is the most cohesive and compelling that I have (yet) read. It has changed my opinion about certain aspects of enlightenment thinking 180 degrees. Alan Watts - Tao: The Watercourse Way short, accessible, transformative... In under 100 pages Watts has managed to compel the integration of the core precepts of Taoism into my spiritual worldview. Like the other major world religions, Taoism has areas where it provides surpassing wisdom... it is an approach whose capacity to generate peace and humility seem to me second to...

I have been background processing further possible implications of Citizen's United... see what you think... Does the Citizens United case imply any (or some) of the following: The bans and limitations on cigarette advertising are now unconstitutional. The limitations placed on pharmaceutical advertising are now unconstitutional. Television, movie, and video game censorship is now unconstitutional. Restrictions barring 501 C 3 nonprofit organizations from political speech are now unconstitutional. The Equal Time Rule is now unconstitutional. The door is open, I wonder what will come through... eric

I'm afraid my blog posting last night was heavy on rhetoric (and maybe a little hyperbole) and short on analysis, a symptom of the intense emotional impact of the decision. I've spent a good portion of my academic career dealing with issues of legal sociology including supreme court decisions and how jurists construct law using precedents. For me the 'how' of this game changer feels very clear, although I may be mistaken (only time will tell). The first phase of the analysis starts with media markets and media outlets. There are relatively few major outlets nationally and relatively few in most major media markets. Campaigns, which for the sake of argument we will treat as being run by candidates, rely upon funding to produce access to these outlets in the markets where they need to get the message out to voters. I agree with Ginsberg that this ruling will diminish their capacity to get access and to control their message. In fact, I would go one step further and ...

Any illusion that the United States of America is still a functioning democracy (representative or otherwise) was shattered today by the Supreme Court's unprecedented extension of the legal fiction of corporate personhood. The legal fiction of corporate personhood began in order to enable people to sue corporations (early corporations were used to avoid or limit owner liability - among other things). The extension of this fiction to entitlement to first amendment rights only shows how disconnected American jurisprudence has become from concern with anything resembling popular justice. The Supreme Court's decision has essentially rendered all previous campaign finance reform completely obsolete. Furthermore, it has made it nearly impossible to design meaningful future campaign finance reform (i.e. it would now likely require a Constitutional Amendment). At this point, even across-the-board single term limits would not be effective enough to staunch the huge power that has been...

On November 17, 2000 Bill Gardiner died in a cycling accident while commuting home from work, he was 67 years old. On the day that he died, I didn’t even know his name. A decade later he still comes to mind when I think about the kind of person that I want to be. It was months after his death, which I had heard about on the news, before I was able to connect his name, and his fate, with the familiar face that I had come to miss in the hallways at work. Bill and I had just one interaction, repeated many times. I would greet Bill with a standard ‘how’s it going?’ and he would shoot me a toothy grin and say, ”I struggle. How about you?” What was clear about Bill’s struggle, just from the way he said it, was that it was both a joy and a duty. It was his definition of his own life, his way of laying claim to it, and every day he both invited you and challenged you to join in. It was offered like an invitation to a celebration. It was issued like a challenge to live up to your own high...

Rachel, When responding to the new GOP Chair's distinction between making 'work' vs. making 'jobs' on the 2/9/09 show it felt like you intentionally misunderstood or refused to understand his point as a way to poke fun at his argument. While I understand the pull to maneuver and spin these soundbites, and while I agree that his proposition was preposterous, I think that in order for the nation to follow President Obama down the path toward more honest government where he is attempting to lead us, the press will need to cooperate by taking a more substantively engaged position on these issues. In this particular case, the issue with the work/jobs distinction is based on the fallacious assumption that private sector jobs are more stable or last longer than government jobs. Or that infrastructure projects are somehow ephermeral in their impact. I think that these points can (and need to be) refuted, both with argument and with data. But to simply...