I think the Vegas vibe — like Frank Sinatra — holds greater and greater appeal as one ages because it is an aesthetic that does not demand youth and energy and athleticism, only the ability to slouch, look bleary-eyed, hold your liquor with expertise born of experience, and have enough money in the bank to […]
If all went according to plan (this post having been written a couple days in advance), as you read this, yesterday I flew to Vegas and sometime around today I may even be touring the (awe-inspiring — but artlessly water-carved) Grand Canyon in a helicopter.
And both those things entail risk, baby, like Vegas itself. If […]
Don’t be fooled by my talk of Vegas into thinking that I am some libertine. Although I’ve been criticizing religion on epistemological grounds this month, I don’t much object to the ethos of self-discipline and sexual restraint it helps spread. (My position is thus the opposite of a lot of modern American critics of religion: […]
In late 1996, the John Stossel team at ABC News was preparing the Freeloaders broadcast that I recently mentioned, a look at forms of parasitism large and small, from petty con men and self-confessed lazy homeless men all the way up to corporations receiving subsidies and favors from the government, specifically the Archer Daniels Midland […]
You can tease out the contradictions in people’s thinking, as every good philosophy class aims to do, or you can of course just gloss over disagreements to keep the peace. I usually do the former, but there’s something to be said for the latter, especially in a world where drawing attention to differences is […]
It crosses my mind that the opening sequence (which I merely stumbled across while channel-flipping) of at least one season of the now fifteen-year-old Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series is a good example of how backwards and irrational our culture’s instincts are, from my perspective.
Realizing that the Earth is imperiled, a giant head/mentor figure in […]
In a Response thread to a prior entry, I was asked — I think — to make sense of the whole universe, evolution and all, without God, the apparent implication being that if I fail to satisfy, religion stands vindicated. That’s a tall order — in principle spanning everything from tonight’s lunar eclipse on […]
I had the odd experience of being told by one of my fellow Phillips Foundation Fellows (many of them more religion-friendly than I, most of us being conservative or libertarian writers, recipients of Phillips grants) at one of our thrice-annual meetings this past weekend that lacking religion, he fears, I may eventually go mad — […]
Hey, as it happens, the morning after blogging about TMZ mocking the homeless, I was awakened by my alarm clock radio playing another reference to the homeless that always makes me laugh, simply because it’s so intensely dated: Canadian Neil Young’s lines “We’ve got a thousand points of light/ For the homeless man/ We got […]
I may have been too condescending in my recent praise of the Hollywood tabloid show TMZ, which just minutes ago performed a valuable public service (not so unlike the one performed by my old boss, John Stossel, on his special Freeloaders) by pointing out that panhandlers are often well-compensated con artists, preying upon the arrogant […]
Every conservative faction has its reasons for being less than fully satisfied with McCain, but we’d do well to get our complaints out of our systems now and, however glumly, vote for him against the Democrat in November.
He at least recognizes the problem of excessive government spending — the core issue from my […]
Michael Novak recently wrote an article offering a taxonomy of quasi-atheists, pseudo-atheists, and nihilists-about-everything who sometimes get lumped under the banner of “atheism,” their differences supposedly indicating that the whole enterprise is doomed to contradictions and hypocrisy, which is a bit like saying that since some conservatives care about immigration and some don’t, all conservatism […]
During that debate featuring Christopher Hitchens that I went to a few weeks ago, about the existence of God, he mentioned in passing that two writers (a British journalist and a Polish/American humorist) had an amusingly succinct debate on the concept of “the Chosen People” that went something like this:
How odd
Of God
To choose
The Jews
To which […]
For me, today is February 15, 2008, and the precise midpoint of my “Month Without God” is marked by hearing a lunchtime speech by Father Richard Neuhaus — no coincidence, some of you are probably smugly thinking — but for you, gentle reader, it’s early 1996, and the Retro-Journal offers you a series […]
I decided to turn February into a “Month Without God” largely because four books dealing with God or godlessness all came my way at about the same time (the fact that I’ll also hear Father Richard Neuhaus of First Things magazine speak tomorrow and might even end up, for the first time in my life, […]
