From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze: Aquinas wanted to say that — he did say, famously, in the Summa Theologica — if we say God is wise, and then we say that Socrates is wise, we're not really saying the same thing. We're saying what is a kind
The Trinity is one of the more vexing doctrines in all of the Catholic tradition. God is one, and yet God is three: the father, the son Christ who walked on earth, and the Holy Spirit. To make matters worse, God even has a mother, to whom one prays quite
Here is Joseph Ratzinger, formerly Pope Benedict, on St. John the Baptist. He was not ordered to deny Jesus Christ, but was ordered to keep silent about the truth” (cf. Homily 23: CCL 122, 354). And he did not keep silent about the truth and thus died for Christ who
To say that one believes in God is to be stupid and wrong by the definition of these words in modern secular culture. And yet I believe that I believe, so how? The word “God” does not mean what modern people mean when they deploy it. The word is ambiguous
One feature of religion a lot of secular people do not understand is that, although religion can make one feel guilty at times, it also prevents one from feeling guilty about trivial matters. Secular people think that by avoiding religion they avoid feeling guilt, but often they end up overwhelmed
Robin Hanson thinks it the result of a signaling spiral, "wherein people strive to show how moral they are by thinking... even more lowly of standard exemplars of bad..." Certainly possible, and plausible. But there is an alternative explanation: Hitler is the Devil — for Protestant atheists (secular progressives, in the
Nina Power just lost her gig at The Wire because of her appearance on my measly haphazard experimental one-man Youtube channel with no particular identity and a whopping ~2k followers. (Feel free to give our talk a listen, alternatively). The Wire is a small British music magazine you've probably never
I got high in the morning, for the first time since I can remember. There exists a defensible Christian opposition to drugs, no doubt, but it's poorly calibrated to the Information Age. This is not to say it is incorrect for the Information Age, as a popular relativist interpretation would
Thanks to some good questions in last night's livestream, I managed to give a relatively concentrated hour of talking, with a surprisingly high signal/noise ratio (relative to my average, which isn't saying much). With more than one machine-learning tool and a couple hours of editing, it's now searchable for
The task of identifying the line between good and evil is like infinitesimal calculus. Mere intuitions are insufficient, which is why "going with the flow" so easily ends in evil. Many marriages fail this way, as sincerely innocent intentions to "make friends" or enjoy "a rich private life” all of
The mild-mannered socialist humanist says it's evil to use algorithms to exploit humans for profit, but the articulation of this objection is an algorithm to exploit humans for profit. Self-awareness of this algorithm may vary, but cultivated ignorance of one's own optimizing functions does not make them any less algorithmic
A listener of the podcast writes me about a Christian pastor in China who was recently detained. The pastor Wang Yi has released a personal and theoretical statement that followers of my work (and readers of late Foucault) may find compelling. My listener summarizes the background: In your podcasts I've
[Disclosure: I don't actually know that much about European feudalism. Most of my posts contain a fair bit of speculative guesswork and imagination, but after finishing this I felt compelled to make clear it's almost all conjecture. Rather than make every sentence wishy-washy with too many qualifiers, I've kept many
Libertatem hierarchia. What we call European feudalism was the becoming–patchwork of the Roman Empire. As the control structures of the Roman Empire atrophied, and the de facto liberty of its subjects increased, those subjects sorted themselves according to their objective levels of political power. Slaves sorted into Serfdom, mid-tier
The religious, who possess only tacit knowledge of the pragmatic truths inhering in religion, should be forgiven their occasional intellectual backwardness, for the same reason we forgive the idiocy of someone who recently suffered brain damage in a car accident. The religious today are still in a state of cognitive
Chesterton: Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians
I think tomorrow morning I will take the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession). It will be the first time for more than 15 years. Why not? I will do it with absolute sincerity, but also reflect on it afterward as an experiment I am conducting on my being. High-IQ rationalists often
I must admit to feeling afraid of death. I am drawn to religious belief, in part, because I think I do want help with my fear of death. I don’t see why it would be an intellectual violation to want such help, and to experiment with solutions coming from
G.K. Chesterton happily understood in advance what the Frankfurt School theorists only observed with great horror after the fact. Namely, that without an authority such as the Catholic Church, placed above the orbit of merely rational calculation and willing to enforce ethical standards over its head, human reason will
