As an advocate of post-theism I stand in an interesting space, with suspicious theists on one side and suspicious atheists on the other. As they debate the literal existence of god, I want to know what god means – not what did god mean by this commandment or that Bible story, but what the mentalContinue reading “Where is God?”
Tag Archives: constructivism
Who Tells America’s Story?
Our present era of “fake news” has introduced the American public to a key premise of constructivism, which is that meaning is constructed by human minds and always perspective-dependent. What we call “news” is someone’s perspective on what happened and what it means. Until now we have counted on the news media to tell usContinue reading “Who Tells America’s Story?”
The Heart of Genuine Community
Our most pressing challenge right now is not global warming, school security, or building a wall against Mexico. Somewhere in the DNA of all those troubles is an aberrant code which is undermining our success in working together for solutions that really matter. Simply put, we can’t work creatively together if we can’t get along;Continue reading “The Heart of Genuine Community”
Your Fact-Value Map
All you need to know is that there are just four kinds of people in the world. There are those who live as close as possible to what their own senses validate as real; we’ll call them Skeptics (from Greek skopeîn, to examine). They have their opposite in the Agnostics who keep reminding themselves how much,Continue reading “Your Fact-Value Map”
A Nation of Children
I see and hear comments in the media, about how we have elected “a toddler” to the White House. Obviously what they mean to say is that our president behaves like a child – not imaginative and playful and innocent, but reactive and manipulative and narcissistic; not so much childlike as childish. It does strikeContinue reading “A Nation of Children”
Why Spirituality and Religion Need Each Other
In their effort to distance themselves from irrelevant and pathological forms of religion, many today are identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” This general move across culture has also tended to brand religion itself as inherently irrelevant (outdated) and pathological (extremist and/or delusional). The so-called New Atheists have promoted this identification in their advocacyContinue reading “Why Spirituality and Religion Need Each Other”
Deconstructing Yourself
One important application of the idea that meaning is constructed by our minds and not discovered in reality is in the way it forces us to see ourselves in our constructions. The meaning we put together and project onto things is itself a symptom of our deeper insights, aspirations, ignorance, and insecurities. Our product revealsContinue reading “Deconstructing Yourself”
The Big Picture
It’s true. I’m obsessed with trying to clarify the Big Picture, referring to the full view of our human situation not only inside our ethnic and national pocket cultures, but on the planet and across evolutionary time. Much of our difficulty at present, recurring through history as we tend to get snagged on the sameContinue reading “The Big Picture”
On The Way
The process of becoming somebody and finding our way to genuine community, which I regard as the evolutionary directive of our species, is a hero’s journey fraught with pitfalls and dead ends. If we were driven and determined by a force entirely outside our control, we would have arrived at our apotheosis [see definition 2] longContinue reading “On The Way”
A New Hierarchy of Needs
Back when Abraham Maslow formulated his hierarchy of human needs, the science of psychology hadn’t yet clarified what I have come to name our subjective or “feeling-needs.” At that time the concept of need was still equated with a dependency on something external to the individual which is required for healthy development. As we moveContinue reading “A New Hierarchy of Needs”
