by SNS Guest Creator: gece33 – Credit: gece33 (Today’s article is by guest writer Shahreen Quazi. Brief bio is provided below.) Giving from the heart has many forms and names, but at some point, humanity started considering it as a way for attaining spiritual rewards. This could indeed have started with indigenous cultures but one of the first known recorded words for giving for spiritual reward or purification, was and is “dana”. Dana is a word from the Pali language, used in... Read more
by James Jarrett I offer the following in dialogue with Thomas Schenk’s two recent SNS articles, Being a Brain and, A Light in the Clouds. (1) I am drawn to Sci-Fi stories dealing with the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Bladerunner, The Matrix trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, Battlestar Galactica, and the aptly named, Humans are some examples I have enjoyed. If my human sense of self is an effect, the cause of which lies somewhere within the un-consciously-knowable parts of my brain,—and, I do not... Read more
by Thomas Schenk This morning as I sat on my patio drinking coffee, I looked up at the sky where the rising sun was shining on the clouds. And it struck me again how beautiful this world is. I basked in that beauty for a while; centered myself in it. Yes, there is ugliness also. Humans in particular bring ugliness. Human cruelty, destructiveness, vulgarity, stupidity, etc. etc. is all so present. Yet the beauty of a lighted-filled sky is above that... Read more
by SNS Guest (This week’s article is by guest author Gregory Gronbacher. A brief bio on Gregory, is provided below.) A quick glance at recent Pew Foundation surveys on Judaism reveal that many Jews – as many as 60% of American Jews – identify as atheist or agnostic. Jewish views on God have always varied and the tradition avoids definitive explanations of the nature of the divine. There has always been much less emphasis on the supernatural in Judaism than... Read more
by Daniel Strain This post is about comparing the two seemingly contradictory concepts of determinism and moral responsibility. On one hand, if everything is determined by causality and physics, and this includes our brain activity, memories, thoughts, choices, and actions, then how can we be responsible for what we do?[1] On the other hand, it sure seems like we should be held responsible for what we do. If we weren’t, couldn’t we use that as an excuse to be even... Read more
by Jeff Worthy I had a different agenda altogether this month for an article concept (Part III of the Blade Runner series—coming soon), but as life often does, events conspired to force me to grapple with another issue deserving of reflection for this month’s article. Though I have pondered my own mortality in recent years, realizing that I am 51 and have more years behind me than ahead of me, I am not grappling with anywhere near the same universe of challenges... Read more
by Jeff Worthy Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small–small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Three, Passage 10... Read more
by DT Strain The events of the past few years have highlighted the power of social media. Specifically, the power of it to lead to greater levels of misinformation and manipulation when powerful interests utilize it in clever ways. These have included micro-targeting campaigns that play on people’s fears or other interests in misleading ways. It has included messaging designed to increase conflicts between groups. The result of all this is more isolation and alienation between ‘tribes’ who misunderstand one... Read more
by Leigh Anderson My college-aged granddaughter mentioned that she’s majoring in journalism with a focus on public relations. She’s grown up with social media, which is what public relations has turned into. I started thinking about how people feel social media connects them to others without any thought of what being connected really means. They want to be individualistic, and at the same time to connect to (many) others. It’s hard for a normal person to find a balance between... Read more
by Thomas Schenk Every life inevitably ends in death; the creation of the new requires the demise of the old. Thus, in the process of Nature, for every one gained there is a minus one. Yet in Nature, this 1-1 does not equal zero, but equals the great abundance we see all around us. How do we account for this? The simple explanation is that while the 1-1=0 of mathematics is a timeless truth, the 1-1 of Nature takes place in... Read more
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