In 1600s New England, many Puritan churches had someone called a tithingman. He would hold a long staff and either sit above the congregation in the balcony or walk up and down the aisles. Whenever he spotted someone dozing during a sermon, he would hit the person with his staff to wake the person up. (One end of the staff had a feather for a gentler way to wake the elderly and small children.)1 Once the parishioner was suitably awakened,…
Wokism is an extremist religion. The West has not faced so powerful of an extremist religion movement since the 1600s. One of the maxims inscribed outside the Ancient Greek temple at Delphi was “nothing to excess”. Aristotle expanded on this with his concept of the Golden Mean: Moral virtue is a mean . . . between two vices, the one involving excess, the other deficiency . . . it is such because its character is to aim at what is…
The following comes from my book, The Triple Path (available as a free download in PDF or ebook formats, or for sale in hard copy and ebook formats wherever books are sold–the book lists references for the e sources for this passage). My posts from recent days have been about the new religion of Wokism. I will be posting more in coming days on the subject. This passage from The Triple Path (Virtue 4) is particularly relevant: Beware the zealots,…
Note: This is a re-post of a post originally from September 24, 2017. I am reposting because it is more relevant than ever. I will be posting more on this subject. I’ve said it before: religion is an innate part of human nature. Someone can give up on organized religion, but he can’t give up on being human, so religiosity will still be a part of his character. Those who give up on church just transfer their religiosity to other…
Note: This is a re-post of a post originally from July 25, 2017. I am reposting because it is more relevant than ever. I will be posting more on this subject. In my first post on this blog I said that Religion is an inescapable part of human nature—it has been a part of all human cultures everywhere and at all times. Religion serves important functions by providing, among other things: 1) a way to make parts of our lives…
Note: This is a re-post of a post originally from June 20, 2016. I am reposting because it is more relevant than ever. I will be posting more on this subject. Summary: Religiosity is an inescapable part of human nature. Secularization won’t—can’t—overcome it. Instead, the growing trend of secularization has just led those professing no religion to express their innate religious natures in sub-optimal, ill-thought-out, ad hoc ways. My book, The Triple Path, offers a better alternative that integrates our…
Note: This is part 7 of a series on morality and ethics. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 (plus additional posts on hypocrisy and free will). The entire series makes up the fourth chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats). The history of religious…
(The following is the second half of the introduction to my book, The Triple Path; you can download a current PDF draft of the whole book at TriplePath.org/download, part one of this post is here) The Triple Path Approach If the previous approaches do not work, then how can we preserve, honor, and practice the valuable traditions, morals, and stories of our culture? The problem is that the symbolic and archetypal value of our religious traditions and stories are tied…
(The following is the first half of the introduction to my book, The Triple Path; you can download a current PDF draft of the whole book at TriplePath.org/download, part two of this post is here) The West is increasingly giving up on religion. This is a problem. The United States remains the most religious of the developed countries1, and even here the percentage of the adult population claiming no religious affiliation has increased significantly—from 3 percent in 1957, to 8.2…
According to this and this, ESPN (which is owned by Disney) lost 203,000 subscribers in October and is estimated to lose 480,000 more in November. That’s 683,000 households who have given up on ESPN in the two months since the national anthem protests began, . In 2017, an estimated 98.7 million households had pay TV of some sort. That means that .7% of pay TV-watching households cut the cord and dumped ESPN in two months. Cable and satellite providers pay…