Category: Uncategorized

There’s a concept called the Tragedy of the Commons that generally says individuals acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group’s long-term best interests by depleting some common resource. A real-world example is fishing. The scale of global fishing operations has outrun the ability of the fish to… Read more

Today’s news includes a report about a sport federation that has banned Iran from hosting international volleyball games. Why? Because an Iranian woman was arrested for wanting to watch the game. In the West, this is bewildering. Why in the world would a women be arrested for wanting to watch a ballgame? The answer to… Read more

Beginning over twelve hundred years ago, Islam enjoyed a three hundred year run of science advancement, a cultural golden age. It ended due to a government collapse and military losses. Thus it was that the entire Reformation and Renaissance period in Europe bypassed most of the Muslim world. The principle difference, the one that made… Read more

Winston Churchill once famously said that Americans can be trusted to do the right thing…after they’ve tried everything else first. We have had our ups and downs as a nation, but we still lead in many important ways, some good and some not so much. There are dire signals emanating from the budget deficit and… Read more

The practical effect of accepting a faith is that rather than choose your own values, your faith does it for you. Read more

Winston Churchill once said that people who aren’t liberals in their youth lack a heart, and people who aren’t conservatives as adults lack a head. His keen observation wasn’t about political outlook so much as it was an understanding of our relationship with power. In youth, people see a world where progress is impeded by… Read more

After spending much of the past week very focused on the conflict in Hong Kong, I feel compelled to share why, even knowing I don’t need to. Hong Kong was aligned with the West for 155 years (with a brief interruption during the WWII) albeit as a colony. It inevitably absorbed some Western values from… Read more

One of the things that Bart Erhman goes into in “God’s Problem” is the business of sacrifices. We know that animal and human sacrifices have occurred throughout history and there are plenty of biblical stories that include animal sacrifices. It’s only natural to wonder how that got started. I’ve read quite a bit about early… Read more

This is an observation borne from life experience, and it may not be correct. I call it my crackpot theory because I’ve never taken time to dig deeply into it, so take it for what it’s worth. Certain personality traits tend to cluster among people on different sides of left-right political spectrum. Among conservatives, I… Read more