Arbitrary Marks

I have an instinct that (theistic) theological studies are far less useful than philosophy. As an atheist and non-Christian, to me it is like spending years studying the properties of phlogiston.

However, there are fellow philosophers spending years working on problems I think are wrong-headed. So is there any larger distinction to make between theology and philosophy, or, as human exercises in reflection, are they equally valuable?

I don’t have time this morning to delve more deeply into it, but I will: an article by Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier in the latest Journal of the American Academy of Religion is guilty of what amounts to creationist quote mining. I doubt that was their intention, but in “He Blinded Me with Science,” the [...]

[contemplative science] In all of these posts on the MMK (Mulamadhyamakārikā), I’m using Jay Garfield’s translation and commentary. That means that I’m not presenting all of the hermeneutic debates, but this version is what I have at a hand.

Earlier, I stated that “causation requires space-time coordinates in order to be intelligible. We need some way of distinguishing between the cause and the effect, and some way of explaining how the cause “picks out” this effect over another.” This attempt to isolate cause and effect is what motivates Nāgārjuna to posit what he calls “emptiness.” Emptiness is not “nothingness”, but rather the dependent origination of all things. At bottom, reality is–to put it using current buzzwords–relational.

In Chapter VII of the MMK, Nāgārjuna discusses the relationship between the agent and the action. We could understand this as the cause and the effect, too, since the same basic argument applies.

Dialectically, Nāgārjuna’s opponents were the Buddhists who admitted that the external world was empty, but wanted to suggest that, at the very least, agents existed. We need a subject to perceive that the world is empty, after all.

Nāgārjuna rejects this approach, claiming that everything, including agents, is empty. Here’s how the argument goes:

As a former Reformed Presbyterian, I knew the work of Jonathan Edwards pretty well, or so I thought. I had read his Banner of Truth publications and knew more about him than just “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Not so: in the past month, I’ve come across his thought in two different [...]

After seeing countless blog entries about Expelled, I finally decided to watch the film for myself. I’d seen posts taking the movie to pieces but purposely refrained from reading them–except for the ones about the PZ Myers/Richard Dawkins debacle. Since I often wind up somewhere in the middle on many science-religion debates, I wanted to [...]

A week later, here’s the second part of my two-part series on Strawson. His major thesis is that we have cognitive experience, as well as sensory experience. The puzzle about intentionality (where to find the dividing line between humans, thermostats and artificial intelligence) can be resolved by asserting that “all mentally contentful phenomena are experiential phenomena.”

This is why I’m reading Martha Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience. A graduate student and Quaker was fired from California State University East Bay for amending her state oath to include the word “non-violently.” Here’s what she did:
Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions [...]

I’m reading Nussbaum’s book, Liberty of Conscience, which is a journey through the history of how the Founders and early America interpreted constitutional law regarding religious freedom. So far, I’ve really enjoyed it and it’s been helping me understand the various positions (originalism, textualism, etc) regarding the Constitution.
This morning, though, I read this section in [...]

Frequently, you’ll hear people claim that atheists are vitriolic and essentially the flip side of Christian fundamentalism. In response, atheists generally cite the fact that, putting tone aside, the nature of their beliefs is different: they require evidence while Christians require only faith.
Fine as far as that goes. However, I think that there is a [...]

This morning I had coffee with Rev. David Owen-O’Quill, who is a Unitarian Universalist pastor starting up a new church in the city of Chicago, called “Micah’s Porch.” The community meets, for now, in bars on Wednesday evenings, in an attempt to reach out to the unchurched. Because they’re close to where I live, I [...]