Tag: Materialism
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A ‘Renegade’ Bishop and God
The recently deceased Bishop John Shelby Spong stayed in the Episcopal Church, though no longer able to accept many traditional teachings at face value. To be true to themselves, people must either leave, or seek change from within. Choosing pursuit of change, Bishop Spong wrote the book “Unbelievable” in which, like the reformer Martin Luther,…
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Let me tell you where I am (ii)
Borrowing from ‘Dragons’ Den’ tradition, in my previous post I decided that “I’m out” as far as the phrase “Intelligent Design” is concerned if it’s implying that, at the source of all that is, there’s a ‘Personal Designer’. ‘God’, for me, is more like an evolving trail and error ‘process’. It can’t be a ‘once…
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Let’s get ‘Real’
Assuming we’re not hostile to Science for religious or other reasons, we really ought to take on board some of its newest findings, however strange or disturbing some of them might seem to be, especially if we’re at all interested in being ‘real’. Imagine you’re sitting at a table. It has a flat top, and…
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Common Sense? I
Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) is famous, or infamous, for arguing that esse est percipi – “to be is to be perceived”. What we humans experience as material objects exist solely in our perceptions of them. In other words, there are no material objects as such, but only minds (human and divine) containing mental ‘representations’. Hence…
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Where does Consciousness come from?
Materialism continues to be the view of ‘how things are’ for a great many people. They see themselves as material beings who live in a world of material things which obey the laws of physics, and can be weighed and measured. They seem to forget that there are ‘things’ that aren’t things. There are thoughts…
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The Ten Commandments
The 10th Commandment “You must not hanker after another person’s house, or wife, or manservant or maidservant, or cattle, or donkey, or anything that belongs to another person.” This final commandment is about ‘coveting’, which means “to desire eagerly, to long for.” It’s what a buddhist would describe as “attachment”, but with a capital ‘A’.…
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