Why You Are A Fundamentalist - Adam Phillips

"One thing that the modern liberal and the fundamentalist may be said to share is what psychoanalysts after Freud call a resistance: each believes that there is something the other refuses to see what is considered to be true, or at least better. Were the other side capable of the requisite acknowledgment, both of them believe, the world would be as it should be. We would be living the lives we are required to live–required, that is, by God, or the relevant set of secular beliefs and authorities… here we come up against the real difficulty of changing people. It is, of course, a version of the feeling that most couples have at one time or another, that there is, as we say, no point in talking… The talking cure turned up to show us what talking cannot cure.

…There are now a lot of upbeat democratic and rather more low-key psychoanalytic accounts of why conflict is to be valued–as stimulating, as generative, as productive, as truthful, as inclusive, and so on. And fundamentalisms of whatever persuasion at best pay lip-service to value of conflict and at worst want to abolish it. The fundamentalist of Western capitalism, just like the more ostensibly religious fundamentalists that we hear more about, really believe that the only good life is one in which the enemy, the dissenters, the unpersuaded, are no longer part of the conversation; a world without communists, a world without Jews, a world without unbelievers, is the world as it should be. Those of us who are not drawn to what is loosely, and not so loosely, called fundamentalism; those of us who don’t want to be fundamentalist in a war against the fundamentalisms, have a very serious problem. What is the point, after all, of having respect for people who do not respect our respect for them? I don’t know what an answer to that question would be; but we are endangered by our optimism"

 - Adam Philips, a physoanalyst, "On Balance" via MockingBird's article

In order to be happy... - Blaise Pascal

"As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all."

- Blaise Pascal

Grim Fandango

Thought - C.S Lewis

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."

- C.S Lewis

Why you can't "see through" everything - C.S Lewis

“The kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. 

The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. 

If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

- C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Guns and Freedom - The Diplomat

Part of the difficulty in comparing these countries is that the notion of freedom is somewhat different as compared with the U.S.  For many in Japan, freedom is not simply about free speech, freedom of the press, and voting, it is also about having a society that is safe and in which people support each other.   Many Americans tend to construct a concept of freedom as being associated with a lack of interference from government and other members of society. 

These different ideas about the nature of freedom contribute to the generation of distinct cultural attitudes about guns and gun control.  I am not going to argue in favor of one view of freedom over another, but I will make a simple point: the idea that guns are necessary to preserve freedom is empirically wrong.  Countries like Japan make it very clear that it is possible to have a free society while also maintaining strict control over guns. In fact, the Japanese recognize that widespread gun ownership decreases safety and security and, in turn, makes for a less free society.

The Diplomat

What the "Walking Dead" says about the war on terrorism

It’s the reversion to this tribalism that makes The Walking Dead‘s apocalypse so chillinglly real. Modern moral progress, as Peter Singer argues, has proceeded by expanding the sphere of moral concern to an ever-larger group of people. People may have once only cared about those who share their nationality, race, or gender, but as Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights took root, humans have moved inexorably towards treating everyone as equally worthy of moral concern. The Walking Dead‘s third season has suggested that, when you demolish a stable society, this purported moral progress will have proved a smokescreen, and that our enlightened selves are just as brutally tribal as our ancestors.

Walking Dead on Human Nature 

Faith and Reason - Greg Koukl

"So let's set the record straight. Faith is not the opposite of reason. The opposite of faith is unbelief. And reason is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of reason is irrationality. Do some Christians have irrational faith? Sure. Do some skeptics have unreasonable unbelief? You bet. It works both ways."

-Greg Koukl

A reflection from a Soviet labor camp - Solzhenitsyn

While in prison, Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on his own experience in a Soviet labor camp.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Solzhenitsyn admitted that being in a labor camp showed him how easily he could have engaged in what the camp guards did if the tables had been turned.

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t….

Meet the Facebook version of you - Gizmodo

The wit in your status updates is delightful. The real life version of you always seemed intent on cornering me into a night of drinking wine after work so I could listen to you go on rather humorlessly about money problems and the usual rash of petty resentments against family and colleagues. But the Facebook version of you is one languid little paragraph of blurted bon mots after another. 

And I am crazy about the fact that the Facebook version of you is spiritual bordering on religious and philosophical. The real life version of you is, to be blunt, pretty quick to judge people for believing in anything more than reasonably priced alcohol, entry level luxury cars, restlessness, and chronic dissatisfaction. But the Facebook version of you has spun an enchanted web of a bio that feels like a cross between Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech and the mission statement of an idealist’s filthy commune that I long to spend my remaining years on.....

- Gizmodo  

The iPhone 5 vs the iPhone 4GS

A Type of Faith - Tim Keller

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because 'There can't be just one true religion,' you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, 'There can't be just one true religion,' nearly everyone would say, 'Why not?' The reason you doubt Christianity's Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith."

- Tim Keller

Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4 - The Onion

"...Indeed, the Pew report found that 99 percent of Facebook members could not recall having enjoyed any of the social network’s features at any time since 2009. Of that subset, 74 percent said they had asked themselves “How has my life come to this?” while checking the website multiple times per day, 67 percent said they were “inevitably plunged into an alternating cycle of vanity and self-disgust” when reviewing tagged pictures of themselves, and 52 percent said they had questioned the whole point of life itself after spending half an hour on the site only to realize the most interesting thing they had seen the entire time was a photo of what someone had for dinner..."

the rest at The Onion

Dilbert on Statistics

The First Things Principle - C.S Lewis

“Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.”

- C.S Lewis