What Are You Saying?
This seems like a strange choice for a simile: “… as welcomed as child sacrifice.” I came across it in a book I’m reading, and it gets thoughts swimming in my head, thoughts like, Who thinks this way? You want to…
Recognizing Limits
Leo Tostoy believed that all history is essentially false. How is it that two people can witness the same accident and give conflicting testimonies only a few minutes after it happens, with both witnesses convinced they are sharing accurate information?…
How Did We Get Here?
The psychological stress caused by cognitive dissonance is something that has caught my attention. How could it not? You don’t have to go far to find people getting upset over things that likely would never have bothered them in the…
Illegitimate Truth?
I wonder how many of us ever consider the concept of legitimacy. Maybe we catch the cover of a magazine at the grocery checkout and think, “Oh, her. She’s beautiful.” Perhaps the image, instead, elicits an eyeroll, because we simply…
Prove It?
Madeleine L’Engle wrote, “The deepest scientific truths cannot be expressed directly,” and I have to wonder if that’s because there may not be any scientific truths. Cynical, I know, but just today, I mentioned to Dennis that a certain someone,…
The Bad and the Good
So, I learned a new word: ponerology, which is the study of evil. I guess in some ways, I have been an accidental student of ponerology for approximately a year now (give or take a few). Well, then again, if…
The Cave
Our lives are filled with assumptions that most of take as true. We see these things with our eyes, hear them with our ears; sometimes, we touch, taste, or smell them. I am holding this big, heavy, dull grey rock…
The Tales We Tell
It turns out that I have a tendency to make the most of a bad situation, and I write it that way because this was not readily apparent to me for the longest time. If I had been asked, while…
The Old and the Novel
The notion of a path or journey to describes one’s life is a bit overused, so I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid such a metaphor. The problem is that I have yet to find one that works as well.…
Please Don’t Get Comfortable
The best part of reading more than one book at any period of time is finding the connections among them. It is a conversation, and like most conversations, paying attention is important, because if you do, you’ll likely find answers…
Discernment and Desire
If nothing else, the last year has taught me to be more discerning. I have learned that little is as it seems and nothing that comes out of the mouths of the ruling elite or their propaganda machine is to…
Who Does Your Thinking?
A very short poem from Robert Louis Stevenson ran through my mind this morning: The world is so full of a number of things,I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. Now, I can’t personally vouch for the…
