Category: Enlightenment Warrior

Ethics: The “Do Not’s” The following ideas were heavily influenced by the Theologian Dr. Huston Smith, who I saw give a talk on “The Enduring Truths of the Great Religions.” The word “Enduring” jumped out at me as the language of Science. There are not absolute truths, only enduring ones. While Huston Smith often laments…

“Class Warfare” is a term we often hear politicians evoke when attacking and when under attack by those who disagree with their economic viewpoints. Both liberals and conservatives charge the other with engaging in this tactic as a means of unfairly motivating the “poor” and the “wealthy” against one another. This rhetoric completely ignores the…

Two and a half blocks down the street from my house stands a monument to the irrational enterprising spirit, the Old Dominion University Maglev train. “Maglev” is short for “Magnetic Levitation”. This is a train that would float on a cushion of air a half-inch thick above the track, shuttling students across campus. It would…

There are some things in life you can simply jump into without much preparation and simply learn through hands-on experience: dancing, socializing, many games and sports. There are other things you must learn the rules of before engaging. You don’t enter a chess match without knowing how the pieces move. Debate should fall into this…

I’m at the YMCA, just finished my workout and I’m waiting for my wife to get out of the locker room and I overhear a man complaining to the manager that an another man was staring at him in the showers. The janitor comes out and asks if it was me. I just look at…

What’s the best market model? While pundits scream words like “Communist!” and “Fascist!” across the isles in an attempt to demonize the opposition, the reality is that civilization requires a balanced market with both Capitalist and Socialist aspects. Both economic strategies require a healthy Democracy to work. The result of splitting the debate over government…

Words are not defined by what the dictionary says, but by how they are used in daily life. How people use words decides how they are defined, and thus another battleground is forged on the landscape of the mind. We see it everywhere in our political discourse. One Democrat’s “Tax Cut” is a Republican’s “Tax…

I have a rather embarrassing confession to make. Until recently, I had no idea what the phrase, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” meant. You read me correctly. I did not understand why someone could not simultaneously have their cake and eat it until I was 30 years old. Before that I…

Normally when I put the “VS” into a title, I am referring to a False Dichotomy — reducing a debate with many degrees into two extremes. Here I wish to illustrate a False Analogy, making two things equivalent when they are in fact very different. In this case, the difference between a Political Party and…

With five known senses we take in the world around us. We see, hear, feel, smell, and taste our surroundings, scribbling all of these experiences down in our Cerebral Cortexes. There, this information is analyzed, cross-referenced, conclusions are drawn, and a worldview is established. We think we think, therefore we think we think we are.…

“[P]olitics has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”–Henry Adams A Demagogue is someone who attains influence or political power through inflaming people’s emotions. The methods Demagogues use are legion, from distorting the truth, selectively choosing what facts to portray, to outright lying. Demagogues pull you into their world, make you see only what they…

I’m a tatoo afficionado with about 20 hours of ink set into the left side of my body (I won’t get tattooed on the right side of my body because I believe good art is unbalanced.). I have many plans for future tattoos, but I am waiting for the right artist to come to me.…