Thursday, January 12, 2012
If you’ve been following our series, we’re looking at whether War can be eliminated and the economy revived through the creation of a system that combines the competitive aspects of Sport, the objectivity of Science, and the non-materialist orientation of Art. Back before the holidays we made a start on a synthesis by examining aesthetics [...]
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Each of us is a little tiny piece of God; our purpose here is to appreciate the other tiny pieces of God; and our lives on Earth will be a pleasure to the exact degree that we can accomplish that task. (Happy 2012, everyone. I’ll try my best to get back on schedule by next [...]
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Thursday, December 29, 2011
[Note: We will return to our ongoing series about eliminating War after the holidays] Of all children’s authors who have integrated their Christian beliefs into their writing, C.S. Lewis is perhaps the most famous and well-respected, both within and outside the faith community. His celebrated Narnia series is uncompromising in presenting its author’s beliefs and [...]
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Part of a continuing series on how to combine Art, Science and Sport to create a hybrid capable of replacing War. Like Beauty in Sport, Beauty in Science also proves easier to define and understand than Beauty in Art, particularly with an example of the contrast between an “ugly” theory and a “beautiful” theory. Towards [...]
Thursday, December 8, 2011
To recapitulate our project, the goal is to combine Art, Science and Sport to create a hybrid capable of replacing War. But is there a way to do this without just creating some Frankenstein-like assemblage with none of the strengths of any of its parents? Instead of cobbling this institutions together, maybe a better approach [...]
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Sport, Science and Art each have strengths, but none of them has proven capable of replacing War in its natural form. It seems plausible, however, that one could create a true War-class ECS by synthesizing the three together. In other words, we might be able to reverse-engineer the system we need from the parts that [...]
Thursday, November 24, 2011
In the old days, prior to Individuality, your Identity was entirely a function of what slot your community plugged you into. You might be the Village Idiot, the Village Chief, the Village Medicine Man, the Village Wise Woman or the Village Whore, but there was no question of you taking on a role outside of [...]
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Fourth in a series on ending war. Art may seem like a odd substitute for War, but there’s reason to not dismiss the idea out of hand. We already know that Art can be a powerful economic engine, legions of starving artists and musicians notwithstanding. For proof just look at the movie and music industries. [...]
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Third in a series on ending war. If Sport can neither take the place of War, nor of Consumerism, then how about Science and Technology? Together they compose a powerful economic engine, with advances in technology shaping and reshaping the global economy both through the development of new consumable products and through technological advances in [...]
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Second in a series on ending war. The most obvious and ancient substitute for War is Sport. The origins of the first athletic game are lost in the mists of history, which means that Sport has been helping individuals and nations release their aggressions for a very long time. And given the billions of dollars [...]
Thursday, October 27, 2011
In the previous series of blog posts we explored the question of why unemployment is so high, which led to the ways in which Consumerism is coming to the end of its usefulness as an economic engine. That in turn led us to evaluate War as alternative manufacturer of employment. Although War initially seemed to [...]
Thursday, October 20, 2011
From the time I was very young, I worried about the question of whether the true nature of Reality was as we perceive it or not. And if we could be deluded about the nature of Reality itself, what did that mean in terms of our relationships with others, others who might be mere figments [...]
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tenth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work After reading last week’s post you may be thinking that War is such a wonderful thing that we should just forget about peace and just promote nonstop full-time worldwide warfare –and then no one need ever be out of a [...]
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ninth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work I’m a huge hippie pacifist. But with all due respect to those great Motown songwriters, Mr. Whitfield and Mr. Strong, the answer to the above question cannot possibly be “absolutely nothing.” In every generation, in nations across the world, in [...]
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Eighth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work It may seem odd to look back at Feudalism, universally considered one of the most unpleasant and backwards economic systems ever invented, as the first stop on the quest to replace Consumerism. However, in order to know where you’re going, [...]