WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR US TO CHANGE COURSE?
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, two co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, insist that they are not adamantly opposed to all new technologies. Instead, they claim, we as a society have developed (and/or submitted to) uses of new technologies that make it difficult for all of us to live meaningful lives. Why, they ask, should we assume that our initial ways to implement new tools are the only or even the best way in which these tools can be implemented? I think that’s a very good question. Why is it so hard for us to change course?
Read moreEGO, EMPTINESS, AND REBIRTH
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:
To approach the finality of our bodies while paying no attention to the mini-deaths of daily life is like confusing diamonds with pebbles and throwing them away.
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LOOKING FOR HOPE WHEREVER I MIGHT FIND IT
My wife regularly points out my tendency to expect the worst in any situation. In fact, she goes so far as to call me a catastrophizer (though I’m not sure just how she would spell that word). There are times when I have to admit she’s right, but there are also days when I see my take on things as realistic. Today is one of those days.
Read moreON THE VALIDITY OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT
Thomas Jefferson:
But the whole history of these books is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute inquiry into it: and such tricks have been plaid with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. The matter of the first was such as would be preserved in the memory of the hearers, and handed on by tradition for a long time; the latter such stuff as might be gathered up, for imbedding it, any where, and at any time.
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WHITEHEAD ON READING KANT
Charles Hartshorne:
Whitehead once said that Kant’s Critiques should have been written in reverse order. This is because … Whitehead held that experiencing is primarily and primitively enjoying-suffering and only in special cases knowing; so that the theory of feeling, and hence aesthetics, not epistemology, is primary.
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HUMAN "PROGRESS" AND NATURE
Charles Hartshorne:
“Are we making progress?” should not reduce entirely to “Are we coming to own more things?” It should include “Are we learning to do without some material things?” … The clearest basis for respect for nature is to renounce two forms of dualism: an absolute difference between matter and mind, and a quasi-absolute difference between the human and other forms of mind.
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