Category: Humanistically Speaking
Religion and Reason: Letter to My Daughter
When my daughter Sasha was about three years old, she began asking questions about religion. She wanted to know if such an entity as a god existed, along with whether other characters, such as Santa Claus, were real. Her little friends talked about a god, and later when she attended pre-school, the question of religion …
The Human Flower
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste it’s sweetness on the desert air.” —Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” How does one like me reconcile the conviction that the human race will be gone in less than a hundred years due to global warming, resource depletion, and population increase? …
On Kuhn and COVID-19
Philosopher Reginald Williams uses Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to flog COVID-19 research and policy as being stifled by authoritarian politics suppressing all but the establishment view (“Thomas Kuhn and COVID-19,” FI, October/November 2020). Kuhn’s book was a wildfire hit among nonscientists. Among scientists, not so much. The failings in Kuhn’s understanding …
Jefferson, Jesus, and Slavery
In his favorable review of The Jefferson Bible: A Biography by Peter Manseau, Rob Boston notes with approval that Manseau “holds Jefferson to account for one of his most disturbing inconsistencies” (Church & State, November 2020, 19–20). Boston specifies this inconsistency: Thomas Jefferson seemed to admire Jesus’s morals while enjoying a comfortable life built on …
Of Persons, Human Beings, Things Human, Roses, and Toxic Waste Dumps
Shake it up, baby, now (Shake it up, baby) Twist and shout (Come on and twist and shout) —“Twist and Shout,” written by Phil Medley and Bert Russell. Recorded by the Isley Brothers, 1962 What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. —Romeo and …
Major Nuances in Population Control
Most experts agree that the present world population cannot live in reasonable comfort without experiencing serious environmental deterioration—and this in as little as one generation. I first began to think about this issue in the late 1960s and early ’70s (from 1968–70, I lived in Afghanistan). Controversy over China’s adoption of its one-child policy was …