We rightly give attention to scrutinizing a belief’s claim and its object, i.e., what it asserts (or claims) about something or other (its object). As a perspective on its object, we should be able to check reality for evidence to determine whether the object is well-grounded. Once confirmed, we can then move on to considerContinue reading “The Anatomy of Belief”
Tag Archives: worldview
Bringing Up a Racist
If you really want to raise your child to be a racist, referring to someone who regards skin colors and ethnicities other than one’s own as inferior, untrustworthy, and in more extreme cases even subhuman, then it will help to know something about how such beliefs get established. It won’t work to sit your childContinue reading “Bringing Up a Racist”
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”
The Illusion of Who You Are
Post-theism doesn’t deny our need for salvation, only that we should expect it from elsewhere. Moreover, it’s not about getting rescued or delivered to a better place, free of enemies or bodies to drag us down. Such themes are common in so-called popular religion, particularly its theistic varieties, where believers are conditioned to anticipate theContinue reading “The Illusion of Who You Are”
The Weights of Truth
Most of us, most of the time, don’t really grasp the fact that we are continually constructing the meaning of life. A naïve perspective assumes that meaning is something ‘out there’ in reality to be searched out, discovered, and assimilated into our view of things. So, even though constructivism has been in our cultural consciousnessContinue reading “The Weights of Truth”
Staying Safe, Playing Small
One of the odd and wonderful things about us humans is how an extended period of juvenile dependency, which makes us impressionable to social shaping like no other species, also leaves us exposed and vulnerable to all kinds of social abuse. What could open the path for creative evolution and human progress often ends up shuttingContinue reading “Staying Safe, Playing Small”
Journey Back to Reality
Just as soon as I make a case for the necessity of religion, it’s time to insist on our need to transcend it. If my atheist friends squirm at my insistence that we all have a religion – a system of beliefs, attitudes, values and practices that links the separate ego back to reality – my friends whoContinue reading “Journey Back to Reality”
Matter, Life, Spirit
One of the challenges we face as we advance deeper into a secular and global reality is how to redefine the terms ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘spirituality’ so they can have relevance to life today. While they carried metaphorical meaning in a mythopoetic reality, and were converted into a supernatural and metaphysical realm above or apart fromContinue reading “Matter, Life, Spirit”
What’s Going On
Each of us is responsible for creating and maintaining a personal system of meaning called a world. It isn’t entirely our invention, as much of it, including the foundational elements known as assumptions, were installed by our culture (family and society) even before we acquired language. These pre-verbal dimensions of our world – which I also referContinue reading “What’s Going On”
Meaning and Paradox
A while back in a post entitled Myth and the Matrix of Meaning I offered a way of understanding our personal and cultural myths (referring simply to a narrative plot, from the Greek mythos) as constructed upon a deep system of codes (matrix) which generate the concerns and motifs that preoccupy us as human beings. If our livesContinue reading “Meaning and Paradox”
Tracts of Revolution 