Have you ever heard of Sisyphus? Or the Myth of Sisyphus? No? You probably have but didn’t realize it. It’s the story of that ancient Greek who was punished by the gods to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom before he reached the top…for all of eternity. Why do I bring that up? A French writer/philosopher (Camus) in 1942 published a philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. He suggested that there is only one question worthy of answering: Does the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide? [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Jeffrey Maryak
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It’s the end of the holiday season, but the memories are fresh in our minds.  Since Christmas is supposed to be a season of giving, let’s use those memories to respond to a request that I defend the assertion that “Nature selects against purely altruistic behavior”.  Jump in the car of your imagination, crank ‘er up, and drive with me to the local Wal-Mart parking lot of two weeks ago…

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Tags: environment & nature, religion & philosophy by Mike McGowan
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I just watched what is quite possibly the most brilliant and hysterically funny movie review I’ve ever seen. This masterpiece critique was created by Mike of Red Letter Media and consists of seven parts that can all be viewed on YouTube. I highly recommend everyone viewing at least the first two parts of his videos, but it will not be necessary to understand what I’m about to say. His analysis brought to the forefront something that I’ve pushed down deep into my psyche for over ten years and am only now ready to release: The Phantom Menace is not only the biggest disappointment in movie history, it is also very likely completely responsible for screwing up our world’s history. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, religion & philosophy by Marc Oromaner
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I was asked by someone if it was now improper to say “Tiger Woods is playing 18 holes”.  Ha!  Funniest thing I heard last week.  AND it opens up a very interesting field of questions.

Has the response to Tiger’s indiscretions been appropriate?  He is being punished, hence, he must have done something wrong, correct?  To an objectivist libertarian, what is “right” and what is “wrong”?  How does one define “good” and “evil”, both moral concepts, when you believe in reason, logic, and that the basic requirement that dealing with the world as it is precludes emotional, moral, non-superstitious judgement?

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Tags: religion & philosophy by Mike McGowan
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… those who know me will say that’s something I don’t do very well, or often enough. But I am trying to do better this month, with a little help from my church.

During the Advent season, First Presbyterian Church of Midland is hosting ‘Come to the Quiet,’ Wednesday evenings at 6:30, in the chapel on the corner of Texas and A streets. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Jeff McDonald
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St. Nicholas has become indelibly associated with Christmas, but his actual feast day is celebrated a few weeks earlier, on Dec 6, a date that is also notable for something extraordinary that happened in the history of philosophy. The year was 1274. A Dominican monk known to history as Thomas Aquinas said Mass that morning, as priests do every morning. What happened next, as recounted in the records of the process that led to Thomas’s canonization, is nicely summarized by Josef Pieper in his book The Silence of St. Thomas: [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Saw this bumper sticker here in Houston this week, and I cannot help but applaud that sentiment. Over the last decade or so, Americans have felt increasingly threatened by Christianity. You would have thought the September 11^th attacks were masterminded by Jack Van Impe, or that we had a few hundred thousand troops in Vatican City, by all the bias and mockery of Christianity in pop-culture and media. [Read more →]

Tags: race & culture, religion & philosophy by Robert O'Hara
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Here in the rural South, I’m often asked “Why are you a libertarian?” or “What makes you a libertarian?” when I mention to others what political persuasion I hold.  Living in a State that went McCain by seven points, I am often surrounded by Republicans who seem to think that libertarians are just another face in the “Big Tent”, like we’re their slightly dopey little brother, and that given time, we’ll eventually mature into full blown GOPer’s.  But I think they are mistaken when they make that assumption.  In my opinion, there are very serious discrepancies between a true libertarian and a Republican Party statist!

Over the course of the next few posts, I’m going to try to hit the highlights and explain exactly what kind of libertarian I am.

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Tags: on the law, politics & government, religion & philosophy by Mike McGowan
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It was inevitable that this day would come. With the growing knowledge about the Mayan calendar end date of December 21, 2012, it was just a matter of time before Hollywood seized the opportunity to show its version of what the end date could mean. Since worldwide spiritual enlightenment, a slow transition from a patriarchal to matriarchal society, or nearly imperceptible earth-changes are admittedly not the stuff of blockbusters, Hollywood logically opted for a disaster flick. And not just any disaster flick, but a disaster flicks’ greatest hits. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, religion & philosophy by Marc Oromaner
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I keep running into George Santayana. Last week, for example, I was rummaging in the basement and came upon a galley of Irving Singer’s book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher. I’ve only had time to read about half of it, but it’s a wonderful book. If Singer, a professor of philosophy at MIT, is as good in class as he is on paper, he must be one hell of a teacher.

I find Santayana — an atheist with a passionate attachment to Catholicism — a fascinating figure, principally because I share two of his fundamental notions. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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For those who may not know, I’ve been deciphering mythological messages in TV shows, music, and movies long before Lost, and will hopefully continue to do so long after its finale next May. It’s something that most people don’t think about, but I believe that these stories and themes are reflections of our collective unconsciousness, and that storytellers are able to tap into them. In other words, I feel that today’s writers, musicians, poets, and artists are like modern-day shaman who channel messages that all of us are ready to know consciously. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, religion & philosophy by Marc Oromaner
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I have been reading George Santayana’s The Life of Reason. I downloaded all five volumes into my Kindle a few months ago and started reading it while ensconced in a cabin in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region.  I’m not sure if I quite grasp Santayana’s line of argument, not because it is unclear, but because his prose is so intoxicating. It is all so perfectly phrased, one hardly bothers wondering if any of it is true, especially since, from time to time, he punctuates his discourse with aphorisms that seem so right that one simply presumes that everything leading up to them must have been eminently sound. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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The poet Frank O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur tells the story somewhere — I’m pretty sure it’s in Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara — that after O’Hara’s memorial service in Greenwich Village, the composer Ned Rorem invited everyone in attendance back to his apartment. Impressed by how smoothly Rorem handled matters, LeSueur took a moment to compliment and thank him. According to LeSueur, Rorem leaned over and murmured, “You must understand, I don’t feel things deeply.” [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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A bizarre airplane crash, mysterious whispers, a foreboding set of numbers, a strange group of outsiders who seem to know what’s going on, and a shiny black stone which hints at clues to a resolution. While these themes could apply to Lost, all of them are also featured in Knowing — the recent sci-fi movie with Nicholas Cage that comes out on DVD on Tuesday, July 7th. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, television by Marc Oromaner
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Who is your God?  Is your God a man?  A woman?  A transvestite?  Does your God have a skin pigment that matches your own?  Does your God have long hair?  A mohawk?  Does your God even evince anthropomorphic characteristics at all?  What is your God’s opinion of homosexuals?  Sexual intercourse before marriage?  What of divorce?  Stem cell research?  Does your God approve of the ongoing resistance movement in Iran?  Is your God a vegetarian? [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Nathan Cushing
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Faith is a test. As a Catholic, I was asked to believe in Papal infallibility even as the Church actively protected pedophile priests. Now Iran’s Supreme leader instructs his people to accept they had an honest presidential election, even as the government concedes there are at least 50 cities where there were more votes cast than actual voters. And that’s as it should be. It’s simple to believe something clearly accurate — where’s the challenge in that? — but to embrace a thing that’s demonstrably wrong requires a leap of faith separating the truly devout from the casual follower. It’s possible the recent international humiliation will lead Iran to shove their Ayatollah into the shadows. But if he survives with his power intact, it’s a reminder that in the battle between faith and reason, irrational dogma still holds its own.

Man of the Moment appears each Wednesday.

Tags: politics & government, religion & philosophy by Sean Cunningham
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When I first saw The Matrix back in 1999, I instantly became fascinated with its “virtual reality world” concept. At the time, and for many years afterwards, I saw the theme as a metaphor for the illusionary material world we live in — a world of time, space, and the assumption that we are all separate individuals. My belief, in line with what I had taken from kabbalah, was that in reality, we were all one united energy force. Call it God, the light, Buddha, Allah, the universe, sentient energy, whatever. The point was that this energy created our illusionary world in order to experience itself. After all, since it was an all-knowing, all-powerful energy, existence was pretty boring. This energy wanted to experience the one thing it couldn’t know: what it was like to not be it. So, it created an imaginary world of time and space and separated itself there into different material elements that eventually evolved into human beings. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, religion & philosophy by Marc Oromaner
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I am a recovering Catholic. I attended a Catholic grade school, high school and even a Catholic University for a while. To say that I was not amused would be an understatement. It really didn’t take me very long to realize that there were some glaring inconsistencies in church doctrine. Once I was old enough to start thinking on my own, what I call “The age of reason”, the hypocrisy became much too burdensome. [Read more →]

Tags: movies, religion & philosophy by Larry DeRose
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Only an individual with the most daft understanding of poetics would fail to appreciate the tragic irony of Dr. George Tiller, famed late-term abortionist, being murdered by a “pro-life” advocate in the lobby of his Lutheran church as he served as an usher. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, religion & philosophy by Nathan Cushing
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Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once uttered to the Heavens, “Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” More commonly identified as the Serenity Prayer, this petition may now be uttered more frequently during the current socio-economic climate, one replete with much uncertainty. Niebuhr’s invocation plays quite well into time of immense worry. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Nathan Cushing
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