(Continued from Part 1)

Early one morning, when the boy was very young, he was exploring a raised area on the side of the Valley and dug up a beautiful and shiny box. He was shocked to find such a thing and didn’t know what to do with it. But as he held it in his hands, he noticed something… his own image was moving across the shiny surface of the box! This confused him, since it was not a reflection, as he would have supposed. The image was as if he were looking down upon himself. Continue reading “The Valley, Part 2”

There are times that not only try men’s souls, but warp them.

Westerners of our generations never believed that mass manias could re-appear, but we’re living through one right now, and against my wishes I feel a need to address it; not as a victim or a participant, but as an observer. Continue reading “The Mania of 2021”

This is another of those pieces that “wanted to be written,” rather than me planning it… but this one some years ago. I’ve been meaning to make it a stand-alone children’s book, but I’ll also include it in this collection of lessons in moral education.

This one is suitable for a wide range of ages, presuming that the parent/teacher interprets a few of the terms.

The story was striking and meaningful for me, and I hope it is for others too. Continue reading “The Valley, Part 1”

In Lesson 2 we examined the problem with the word “God.” This time we’ll look at the reasons for believing in a creator… simple and compelling reasons. This story is probably a bit complex for very young children, but for the older children it should be fine.
Continue reading “Lesson 3: Was There Really A Creator?”

Very few words in the English language, and probably none, have more interpretations than God. This is a large impediment to not only theology, but to human communication in general. After all, nearly all of us, even atheists, use “God” as an ultimate or a superlative. But the problem goes much further than that: This word profoundly affects the deepest and most compelling questions we can presently conceive. Continue reading “Lesson 2: Who Is God?”

It would be hard to start a series like this (eventually it will be a book) with anything less than the creation. Passing it by would leave a gap that we’d be dancing around for the remainder of the study. And so I’m beginning with the hardest parts: The Creation, Who is God? and Was There Really A Creator? These are fundamental questions, and they have persisted through all of human history. They have to be addressed. Continue reading “Lesson 1: Creation”

Having completed a long study on thinking clearly, my next project in this line is moral education. Like critical thinking, this important field of study has been removed from Western education over the past century, and its restoration is, in my opinion, sorely needed. I aim to fill the gap.

Moral education, however, is a dicey subject: many people have pre-existing opinions on the subject, and frequently very strong ones. Still, moral education needs to be restored, and I think I can work around those problems well enough. Continue reading “A Primer On Moral Education”

I am not trying to insult libertarians; they’ve been right, or reasonably close to right, on most everything, and for decades on end; that’s not a trivial thing. Nonetheless, they could never get much moving in the world, while Bitcoiners, to use an old but fitting phrase, are turning the world upside-down.

I think it’s important to understand why. Continue reading “Why Bitcoiners Are Doing What Libertarians Never Could”

As far back as we can see in any detail, we find humans creating art. But art is an odd thing, in that people generally create it for internal (and thus hard-to-articulate) reasons, making clear, logical explanations difficult. Making it still harder has been an obsession with incoherent and confusing art over the past century… something that Salvador Dali once called, “the cult of strange.”

And so most of us have had a hard time coming to grips with art. What, after all, is the point of a painting that provides no coherent image? And why would people consider a signed urinal great art? (Yes, that’s a real example.)

We can begin our examination with a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?: Continue reading “The Purpose And Value of Art”

We all know that parenthood has been publicly trashed over the past half century. The larger culture portrays Fathers as dolts and full-time moms as second class women. These ideas, hammered endlessly and over decades, have had their effects.

The big drivers of this abuse have been socialism and Freudian beliefs. I’ll explain below, but let’s be clear on the fact that both socialism and Freud’s “it’s your parents’ fault” can and must be thrown aside. We don’t need to keep arguing the same points, simply because dogmatists in marble buildings refuse to see reality. Continue reading “Revisiting Parenthood, After A Century of Socialism And Freud”