The Scheduled Death of God
There’s a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it.
religion
The Pleasures of Extinction
The latest apocalyptic fad is near-term human extinction, or NTE for short: the claim that humanity, along with most other life on Earth, will inevitably be extinct by 2030 at the latest.
For Earth Day I Wrote a Letter about the Keystone XL Pipeline (Instead of Signing a Petition)
"Speaking truth to power" was originally a Quaker phrase. Many of us act in ways that might seem to go against common sense, against apparent rationality. This has to do with a belief in what has been called deep ethics, a belief, as I have written about briefly here, that what one does matters even if it might seem insignificant or hopeless at the time.
An Aside to my Readers
I’ve commented several times in these essays about the way that Americans in particular, and people throughout the industrial world more generally, like to pretend that history has nothing to teach them. It’s a remarkably odd habit, not least because the lessons of history keep whacking them upside the head with an assortment of well-aged and sturdy timbers, without ever breaking through the trance.