The cosmos does not give us a meaning for our lives. What the cosmos gave us (through the evolutionary process) is the capacity to ask questions about...
Well, we don't know how they decided where to put the holes, and we won't be finding out because they didn't leave any documentation inside the bone f...
No, no, I didn't 'invent' it. It's a real word, I misapplied it, and you are correct -- polymorphous is the word I was reaching for. Mrs. Crabapple or...
That's all fine and dandy, but the instrument in question proceeded Pythagoras by maybe 40,000 years. What the 40,000 BCE people had discovered was a)...
Correct: polymorphous. One of those spell-checker insertions. But... I thought you found it "dialogically liberating to listen to and understand the s...
As Kinsey wisely observed (based on a lot of research) It's natural for a guy to give himself a blow job, (natural if one is sufficiently well hung an...
The rainbow, that overworked spectrum, is only the latest symbol for gay people, and anybody that wants to associate themselves with the gay community...
May we hear from daughter Phil what she thought? And what did you name the fourth one? Were Bob and Phil resentful about not getting ice cream named a...
Having children was never something I particularly wanted to do, being an exclusively gay guy of the not-marrying and not-having children kind. Whethe...
It is wrong headed, because specific genes evolved long before the specific behaviors arose that we most like to dwell on. Some people like to gamble ...
Reading better history than what we were given in high school (and college too, for that matter), I gained a more granular understanding of "what happ...
Sorry. The ancient instrument makers didn't scratch a telephone number, street or email address onto the flute, so I wasn't able to ask them. However,...
Not dying is insufficient. Wisdom does not necessarily grow with age. There are stupid, arrogant senior citizens who were stupid, arrogant junior citi...
This is a very good topic. I had some knowledge of American history. The oldest layer (and framework) came from elementary and secondary school lesson...
One of the 'facts' of mental activity that makes us who we are is that so much of it is invisible to that part of the brain that operates as the consc...
I certainly didn't mean to offend those who advocate for the interests of various snakes. It was not I who put the snake in the story. I will have to ...
The story is an attempt to explain why life is a bitch, and then we die. It would not have escaped the notice of the biblical authors that some, many,...
Well, I suppose we won't have "complete" knowledge of good and evil until our time comes to an end. Feel free to interpret the Bible however you want ...
I'm not a biologist, so this may not be precisely right. That said, it seems like one of the principles of evolution is that new traits, capacities, a...
Harvey Cox, a Protestant theologian, says this: Adam and Eve were meant to eat the fruit of The Tree. Cox emphasizes that in His relationship to manki...
It is probably not the case that "music" and "math" evolved as we now experience them. "Music" and "mathematics" are cultural inventions, resting on i...
My John Donne never saw a film and never wrote a screenplay. He died in 1631, London; he was 59. He is considered one of the greatest love poets in En...
What I said was in the context of, and stimulated (caused?) by TheMadFool's Latin quote. It directed me down a particular thought-path. Generally, I a...
I do not have a dog in this fight, but it seems like Quod gr?t?s asseritur, gr?t?s neg?tur is valid. I can claim there is intelligent life on 23 plane...
POINT OF STORY IN THIS THREAD: MAYBE what the aliens will tell us is that some of our philosophical concerns are nothing more than oddball hangups. Be...
One's parents, and the head start they give their children (or not), does indeed plot much of one's trajectory. There are enough exceptions, though, t...
I disagree with this option. No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away...
what you say is true enough. The current crop of students (and maybe the theorists from whom they get ideas) seem to think that power comes by way of ...
Your Philoscience prof was probably correct. My impression is that the the old whore of philosophy has been more than adequately plowed. However, I do...
College does not seem to consist of strictly 18-22 year olds, anymore -- it has not for quite a while, actually. Good luck to you on your education pr...
I've was involved in a leftist political group for 15 years, but was a union member all of about 15 months. I've always worked in the NGO sector of th...
Much of the left has its collective head up its collective ass. The insistence on revolution over reform gets one off the hook of having to figure out...
Very eloquent. Now follow that up with a full faced grovel on the floor of the main drag in St. Pete's big basilica while the college of cardinals wal...
Wise revolutionaries do not take on powerful armed forces even with a batch of citizen soldiers armed with assault rifles. Daniel DeLeon proposed that...
Chou Enlai, the former PM of The People's Republic China (back in the mid-20th century) was asked whether he thought the French Revolution was a good ...
I totally agree about the importance of the enlightenment in establishing the concept of universal rights and unifying concept of man. It is a long br...
"Merely" being born somewhere is all that it takes to become subject to this unwritten, unsigned "contract". You are taking the libertarian approach h...
Obviously the attractive "universal rights of man" were a problem right out of the gate. We had been practicing slavery for a century, in 1776, which ...
Of course our current system of government works -- it works as well now as it ever did. Just because the current system is not working for you, or fo...
Of course we can -- our hunter-gatherers managed to live without all of it, for what, 200,000 years? But without the Gutenberg Revolution maintained, ...
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