Category: Of Random Interest

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Great observation: “Some advice about advice, or advice-squared: If someone tells you what they wish they would have done, listen. If they only tell you things they wouldn’t have done, ignore them, because they’ve confused regret with wisdom. When someone fantasizes about having achieved less in life instead of figuring out how to make things better, that’s more of a review of the life than the problem. Even when they’re right about the problem, they’re the wrong person to help you solve it.”

6 Important Things Nobody Tells You About Grad School

Some advice about advice, or advice-squared: If someone tells you what they wish they would have done, listen. If they only tell you things they wouldn’t have done, ignore them.

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This brief article is full of surprising statistics, including an apparent contrast between how churchgoing LGBT adults view most denominations (most think of the church as a whole as unfriendly to them) vs how they view their personal congregational experience (only 6% feel their congregation is unfriendly to them). Am I reading that correctly? Because that’s a huge contrast.

More Than 4 in 10 LGBT Adults Identify as Christians

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Great thoughts by my friend Ben. My favorite bit, “Rainbows aren’t technically illusions. They are exactly what they appear to be, its just that you’re seeing different images from many microscopic objects to form the complete picture.  That’s why rainbows are so amazing!  They have nothing to hide because they are themselves a revelation!  They are proof that every beam of sunlight is made up of all the colors you can imagine, but its only when refracted through a cloud of tiny water drops that those colors split out so you can see them.”

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How quickly academics turn on their fellows when they betray the prevailing orthodoxy. Thomas Nagel has the audacity to hold views such as this: “If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.”  This, of course, generated huge pushback. “In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error—the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption into a comprehensive explanation of the world. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: “1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed” about metallic objects. But of course a metal detector only detects the metallic content of an object; it tells us nothing about its color, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Feser writes, the methods of “mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus on only those aspects of nature susceptible to prediction and control.” Meanwhile, they ignore everything else. But this is a fatal weakness for a theory that aspires to be a comprehensive picture of the world.”

Interesting throughout. 

The Heretic

Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world’s leading philosoph…