Farid al-Din Attar, who died in the early thirteenth century, is one of the greatest of all Muslim mystics. His most famous work is a lengthy allegorical poem entitled Mantiq al-Tayr, which is typically rendered in English as The Conference of the Birds or The Parliament of the Birds. It’s full of little sermonettes and stories and exhortations, subordinate to the overall plot of the story that it relates. Here is one of them, as translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick... Read more
Below, I share three passages from Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). Dr. van Lommel is a Dutch cardiologist. Various naturalistic explanations have been proposed for the phenomena reported in accounts of near-death experiences. Here are Dr. van Lommel’s responses to two of them: Because low doses of ketamine, a drug formerly used as an anesthetic, can cause hallucinations, it has been postulated that this kind... Read more
On Saturday night, my wife and I took in a very good Utah Shakespeare Festival production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Set somewhere, I would guess, between 1895 and about 1920 — the era of “ragtime” — it used Shakespeare’s text (of course) but supplemented that with asides and with music from roughly the appropriate period. *** I suspect that Brigham Young’s tastes in theater may have been more overtly didactic than mine are, and... Read more
I often use temples as illustrations for entries on this blog. I do that because I love temples. And not just because they’re often quite beautiful. Even being on their grounds inspires me. They seem to me tangible representations of a link between heaven and earth, between this world and the next, between this life and that which is to come. I think that my earliest intimations of faith came in connection with temples, and I still feel much... Read more
From my virtual “notebook,” a couple of items regarding our home planet: The earth, we are repeatedly told, is not at all unusual. It’s merely an average planet, revolving around an average star, in an average galaxy—in the words of the late Carl Sagan, “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”[1] The late John A. O’Keefe, a prize-winning NASA scientist who is sometimes referred to as “the godfather of astrogeology”: We are, by astronomical... Read more
I finished my 2018 Education Week presentation series today with a lecture on the sixth-century AD Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I and his colorful and highly intelligent queen, Theodora. If Hollywood still made this kind of film, this is very much the kind of film that Hollywood would make. Their lives were extraordinarily dramatic. Cinematic, in fact. Every day, a number of people asked me if I had written a book covering the subjects that I discussed... Read more
There are still a few archaeological surprises out there remaining to be found: “Massive Pyramid, Lost City and Ancient Human Sacrifices Unearthed in China” And some things remain to be found even in areas that you might imagine had been investigated about as thoroughly as they can be: “The lost harbour of Pisa revealed: The key to Roman mercantile power turned into a lake more than 500 years ago. Now, researchers think they’ve found it... Read more
Back on 12 July 2018, I debated the atheist Dr. Michael Shermer on the question “Is Faith Compatible with Reason?” at FreedomFest 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Dr. Shermer, a prolific author who was trained as an historian of science, is the founder of The Skeptics Society and the editor-in-chief of its magazine, Skeptic. He also writes a monthly column for Scientific American under the title “Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye.” The text of my remarks in that debate —... Read more
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has taken an official stand — hardly alone, in this case — against Proposition 2 on the November Utah ballot. In case you missed it, I append below the material that came out from the Church. Some inveterate critics of the Church are deriding or attacking the Church for opposing the use of “medical marijuana.” But they haven’t paid serious attention to what the Church is actually saying. Here... Read more
Some wish to dismiss the testimonies of the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon on the basis of the fact that Martin Harris, for example — on perhaps two or three occasions — described seeing the plates and the angel and the other artifacts with “spiritual eyes.” These skeptics assume, despite many other statements affirming the physical literality of the Witnesses’ experience, that this means that the Witnesses only “imagined” seeing the plates, the angel, the Liahona, and... Read more
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