I’ll be brief, but I want to explain how social media mobs provide people with a religious experience. Without this bit of understanding, I don’t think we can make proper sense of the new phenomenon.

To put it simply, social media mobs transmute painful emotions into a belief in one’s own righteousness. This is also what religious experiences do. Continue reading “A Twitter Mob Is A Religious Experience”

Here we stand at the edge of an abyss, gazing down at world war. Again. And almost no one grasps the reality of it: it’s all images flying across screens and propagandists seizing emotions. Thinking, world wide, has constricted to the application of binary labels: Good Guy or Bad Guy. And it is presently stuck right there.

Were’ now at the edge of our third world war in just over a century, and that ignores the near misses we’ve had with nuclear exchanges. Continue reading “At The Edge of The Abyss, Again”

After a long wait, I’m happy to begin posting a new adventure in our Return Engagements series. This is Book Three, and I’ll post installments here on a more or less weekly basis. If you’d like to get the whole thing at once, there’s a Kindle link at the end. We hope to have independent eBooks available later this year. Continue reading “Return Engagements: Book Three (Part One)”

We all need certain inputs if we’re to be deeply healthy… if we’re to have healthy souls. But for children this is even more important. If they get the right fuel for their souls, they’ll build not just better hearts and minds, but better expectations of life, which will guide them positively, and may guide their families for generations.

Today I’ll give you a brief list of specific types of fuel for healthy souls. I’m adapting them from the work of Abraham Maslow, who studied the healthiest people he could fine, hoping to determine what sorts of things made them that way. Continue reading “Fuel For Healthy Souls”

Anything that affects the subconscious minds of billions of people, on a daily basis, is a very serious thing, and that is precisely what has happened over the past decade, as social media captured a large percentage of human cognition.

I am well aware that I am running against the stream. Mine, to be honest about it, is a small and largely unwanted voice. Still, someone needs to say these things, and the truth is that social media directly replaces natural subconscious functions. Or, perhaps more accurately, it displaces subconscious operations and acts in their place. And that is very, very dangerous. Continue reading “Social Media Hijacks The Subconscious Mind”

All healthy humans are capable of enjoying excellence. More than that, they can enjoy sustained and repeated excellence. And it does feel good to excel… to know that you worked hard and accomplished something. It proves to us that we can improve, that we can rise, that we are able to achieve. Everyone needs that, and everyone can get it… though many of us seldom or never do.

And so, one of the most important lessons a young person can learn is how to excel… to learn that they have the capacity to excel. Continue reading “The Habit of Excellence”

As I write this, the West has fallen into another spiral: where millions of people plug into a harmonized set of sources, and where the whole complex feeds back upon itself, generating devil figures and blind, collective disgust.

The Russian family down the road is not your enemy, the friend of your enemy, or tarnished in any way. They are individuals, like everyone else. Unless and until they purposely hurt others, anyone mistreating them has fallen into barbarism. Period. Continue reading “I Stand With The Russian People (And The Ukranian People)… And Against Mania”

When the subject of Christian theology comes up, nearly everyone, nearly all the time, goes directly to theologies about Jesus. What is flatly bypassed is the theology that Jesus held personally, before anyone formulated a theology about him.

The point I’ll make today, because it needs to be made over and over, is that the theology of Jesus bears very little resemblance to the theology about Jesus. Continue reading “The Theology of Jesus”

We all know what Covid science is: It’s the science of the Presidential podium. It’s the science of the impressively televised. It’s the science of social enforcement, the science of status, and the science of the censor.

The time has come for all of us, from the kid in the high school science lab to the Nobel Prize winner, to mark the distinction between science and Covid science.

Officialdom will never do this on their own. Very few universities will do this on their own. And the newly empowered army of fact-checkers most definitely will not deplatform themselves. Continue reading “Covid Science”

Humans have a deep problem with dominance. As just a first indication, consider that our status quo systems are dominance hierarchies, with a few important people at the top making decisions, and with everyone beneath them merely obeying. We complain about this incessantly, we try to create rules to keep it from abusing us too badly, but most of us never consider changing the structure.

That is, we all know that the dominance hierarchies of the world are sources of pain and frustration, even of destruction, yet we don’t look for alternatives. Clearly there is something wrong here. It’s simply not sensible to suffer without at least trying one alternative after another (actual alternatives, not just new faces in the same old structure), to see if we can find one that hurts less. Continue reading “Breaking The Cycle of Dominance”