Tag: skepticism
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Giving Bad Directions
Last night, while waiting for a friend at the corner of Lafayette and Bleeker, I learned that to stand at a busy corner near a Manhattan subway entrance means becoming a directions machine. In the course of half an hour, maybe eight people asked me for directions. I’m a guy with a pretty good sense…
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Where Went the Ancient Astronauts?
The Smart Set, an excellent web magazine of ideas and things, has just published an article of mine on “ancient astronaut” theory—the idea that all the gods that the ancients believed in were actually extraterrestrials with advanced technology. Ancient astronauts are an old hobby of mine, a delightful mix between my interests in religion and…
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Empathy in Action
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been an ongoing back-and-forth over in the comments at a recent post, which have forced me to explain more fully some earlier statements about empathy as a political virtue and skepticism as an intellectual habit. Joel, who has been patient enough to draw me out on these things, has…
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Critics, Critique, and LAWMAKERS
I’d like to invite you, if you’ll be in New York this weekend, to see the final performance of WE ARE THE LAWMAKERS, a daring play of political chaos directed by my dear friend, Marc Andreottola. It is part of this year’s New York International Film Festival and will be playing Saturday, August 23 at…
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Cicero’s Sin
I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or…
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Dialogs and Debates
Thanks to Tom Gilson’s critique, I have already pulled back somewhat on things I said in my article this week at Religion Dispatches. And since it is a dogma of mine that there is truth in even falsehoods, I’d like to try teasing out what put me on a seemingly unwarranted attack. It all reminds…
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Different Sorts of Skepticism
Among Victorians, apparently, it was a kind of minor sport to Name That Hellenic Philosophical Movement. Your friend Charles the glutton would of course be the epicurean, pious William the stoic, and your father, deep down, a cynic. And so on. Since, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, all philosophy is really just footnotes on…