Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Tolerance does not mean acceptance

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[H]umanists counseled toleration of heretics, temporarily, so that the heretics might be persuaded of the truth or so that the bloodshed tha...

Reject it!

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You surely understand in principle that worthless information should not be treated differently from a complete lack of information, but WYS...
Monday, February 27, 2017

Humanism (as in the Humanities)

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I read an older book recently, recommended via the Classics e-list and obtained via Interlibrary Loan (love that service!—your tax dollars a...

The big splash

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In today’s world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible except...
Sunday, February 26, 2017

Thought for a Sunday morning

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It is God’s elusiveness, His freedom, and gracious character, which make prayer meaningful.— Standing in the Breach , page 91
Friday, February 24, 2017

Perceptions and the reality

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• Strokes cause almost twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80% of respondents judged accidental death to be more likely. • T...
Thursday, February 23, 2017

From the playbook

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A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Auth...
Wednesday, February 22, 2017

It requires effort

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The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive...
Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Don't overreach!

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The often-used phrase “pay attention” is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you t...
Monday, February 20, 2017

Are you sure of that?

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We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed...
Friday, February 17, 2017

What about intuition?

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Valid intuitions develop when experts have learned to recognize familiar elements in a new situation and to act in a manner that is appropri...
Thursday, February 16, 2017

What are you thinking about?

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People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined...
Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Israel as the divine image

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In the book of Isaiah, corporate Israel is often compared to a statue. In some cases, she is a damaged image that must be smelted and recast...
Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Mirrors and distortions

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For a somewhat different look at the last three weeks, read this Here's the final paragraph, which alone is a good reminder. But you re...

A word of caution

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We must keep in mind that neither the mīs pî pīt pî nor the wpt-r marked the original creation of the god. Rather, it was thought to be...
Monday, February 13, 2017

Not to be identified as the same

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It was here in Gen 3 that we saw a significant departure from the pīt pî and the wpt-r , the rituals by which a divine image was enlivened...
Friday, February 10, 2017

Hard questions

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We must consider when, in ancient Israel’s history, the metaphor of kinship would have been a fitting analogy for the divine-human relations...
Wednesday, February 08, 2017

LIberal Arts education

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Really good article/review over at the New York Review of Books . Well worth your time to read, but here's a nice snippet: That’s the c...

Why use the image of a divine image?

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Rather than assuming that P used ṣelem to describe humanity because Israel was no longer engaged in the worship of divine images, and it wa...
Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Royal son

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Undoubtedly, the biblical author was familiar with the mythological literature of his day, but what his sources of influence contained, whet...