Thursday, November 30, 2006

On the Origin of Language - by Les Bruce, Ph.D. This essay on the creationist view of language comes from ICR.org

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Commerce and Culture - Paul Cantor; literary criticism from an Austrian perspective. "Having studied with Ludwig von Mises, he is working to counter the Marxist understanding of culture that dominates in the humanities today."

There are ten audio lectures and they can be found at Mises.org

Lecture titles include;
Shakespeare's Theater
The Economics of Classical Music: Patronage vs. the Market
The Economics of Painting: Patronage vs. the Market
The Serialized Novel in the Nineteenth Century

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty. This outstanding essay (of 80 pages)appears as an appendix in the book 'The Dominion Covenant' by Gary North. The book is a free download at Freebooks.com

- North is a prolific writer, whose work is very uneven in quality. Here he's at his best, in a discussion of the ethical and political implications of a belief in Evolution.

Monday, November 27, 2006

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece - Theodore Dalrymple reviews A Clockwork Orange; at City Journal.

'Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant.'

Sunday, November 26, 2006

The Psychology of Atheism - an article by Dr. Paul Vitz

'Freud regularly described God as a psychological equivalent to the father, and so a natural expression of Oedipal motivation would be powerful, unconscious desires for the nonexistence of God.'

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Home alone in the universe? An article by Fred Heeren; from First Things

- I found the part of the article that deals with Fermi's paradox fascinating. The book by this name by Stephen Webb is thought provoking; a great read. In it various people try to give some reasons to explain the fact we haven't discovered any intelligent life outside our solar system; as I remember it, there are about 50 different reasons given.... some of which are highly imaginative.
- If evolution theory is correct the universe should be full of intelligent life; but we have been unable to find any. This is the one 'critique' of evolution that adherents find most difficult to deal with.

Friday, November 24, 2006

A Time for Truth - Os Guinness;
- the author of Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin, argues that in our postmodern society, truth no longer exists in any objective or absolute sense yet is necessary for freedom and "a good life" Here

Thursday, November 23, 2006

The Rhetoric of Charles Darwin - Dr. John Angus Campbell
A video lecture; approx. 55 min. Here

- you'll have to scroll down the page.
- I only got an audio feed; but an interesting lecture.
Can science know the mind of God? An audio lecture by Phillip Johnson. Here

- scroll down the page. (I only got the audio portion of what is supposed to be a video.)

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

An apologetic for Christian Reconstruction; a wide ranging audio interview with Michael Butler; from the Chalcedon Foundation

Quotes and comments;

- the tape covers a lot of ground from CR to the apologetics of G. Bahnsen.
- most people don't realize that CR is anti-statist.
- "the last 6 years have seen the greatest erosion of christian liberties since the administration of Abraham Lincoln.'' - M.B.
- if you listen to the end, chances are you might be quite surprised.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Deadly Delusions: Intellectuals and Utopian Dreams - Paul Hollander; an audio lecture from FEE.org

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Harvard and the Unabomber; a review of the book by Alston Chase from
First Things

- This is one of the best books I've read in years; fascinating reading for a variety of reasons.

T. Kaczynski grew up in a home where talk of politics, philosophy and ideas was abundant. Speaking of the intellectual climate of the post ww2 era Chase writes.
"And the best minds in those days were very worried. Fear permeated the culture of the time. WW 2 had killed 60 million people. The bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima... convinced many intellectuals just how technological knowledge might destoy the world. The grotesque 'experiments' on human subjects by death camp doctors... reminded them where science could lead."

Friday, November 17, 2006

The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism - Bruce Frohnen
An audio lecture from ISI.org

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Awakening from nihilism - Michael Novak
An article from First Things

'One principle that today's intellectuals most passionately disseminate is vulgar relativism, "nihilism with a happy face."

'Freedom cannot grow-it cannot even survive-in every atmosphere or clime. In the wearying journey of human history, free societies have been astonishingly rare. The ecology of liberty is more fragile than the biosphere of Earth.'

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

C. S. Lewis on Mere Science - M. D. Aeschliman
An article from First Things

Quote; 'Thoughtful twentieth-century commentators such as Lester G. Crocker and Aldous Huxley have seen its reductionism leading straight to the moral nihilism of the Marquis de Sade, and later to Social Darwinism and the Nietzschean transvaluation of values in the interest of amoral strength and force. Lewis' Abolition of Man is, inter alia, an extended treatise against the deification of science.'

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Mental Illness as Brain Disease: A Brief History Lesson By Thomas Szasz. Here
- quotes and comments;

'In the United States, the idea of mental illness as humoral imbalance was famously espoused by Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), the founding father of American psychiatry. Rush did not discover that certain behaviors are diseases; he decreed that they are: “Lying,” he declared, “is a corporeal disease.”

"First, as Carl Wernicke (1848-1905), a prominent nineteenth-century German neuropsychiatrist observed, “The medical treatment of [mental] patients began with the infringement of their personal freedom.” In addition, it began with “benevolent tortures,” such as frightening them by throwing them into a pit of snakes, the origin of the term “snake pit” for insane asylum."