Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devastated that her mother felt she had to do this alone, without anyone by her side in her last moments, lest they suffer legal consequences.
Ethics and Morality
Posted inEthics and Morality
Ben Franklin’s noble lie
Reading Time: 5 minutes In his published works, Benjamin Franklin expressed the misanthropic view that most people can’t behave without religion to keep them in line. What does the evidence say about this noble lie?
Posted inDeath & Dying
Disembodied grief, and the challenge of remembrance
Reading Time: 17 minutes We are awash in a wide, traumatizing range of material evidence and emotional truth. And in the throes of active conflict, emotional truth will win out every time.
Posted inWar and Peace
Moral war, a contradiction of terms
Reading Time: 18 minutes Humans are very good at acting self-righteously whether or not we believe that an actual god is on our side. Unfortunately, we all have the ability to rationalize most any conduct on “our” side as legitimate and necessary, while the same from someone else is seen as barbarous and deserving of swift, sweeping reprisal.
Posted inEthics and Morality
How to spare billionaires from terrorist attack
Reading Time: 10 minutes This week for Humanist Book Club, we’re looking at the most infamous facet of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020). Yes, this near-future speculative fiction imagined quite a few ways to tackle climate change: a state-backed crypto coin to incentivize carbon sequestration, Antarctic drilling to pump meltwater out from shifting glaciers, tinting […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: How time travel creeps into Trek today
Reading Time: 11 minutes This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds takes us boldly to Canada, but I promise: just because most of the show is set in my birthplace of Toronto, we won’t go off-mission too much to reflect on how it uses the location. I will only say that if you’re buying street meat (veg or otherwise) […]
Posted inFilm/TV
How do we heal ‘The Broken Circle’ in ourselves, our worlds?
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last year, Strange New Worlds offered a breath of fresh air in a sea of Star Trek-themed shows that demonstrated little patience with the original groundwork of the franchise. From Discovery‘s relentless reinvention of its world to serve the lead character’s journey, to Lower Decks‘ erasure of a post-scarcity economy to give us a crew […]
Posted inDeep Dive
Kissinger’s century, and US complicity
Reading Time: 8 minutes As Henry Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, and his actions and legacy are once again reviewed, it’s important to remember that he was not a solo actor but an agent of US foreign policy and philosophy.
Posted inEthics and Morality
Morality is an ongoing experiment
Reading Time: 5 minutes Morality isn’t a crumbling parchment that will fall to dust if we poke at it. It’s more like scientific knowledge, which actively benefits from constant testing and refinement.
Posted inEthics and Morality
A philosopher’s bigoted views on atheists
Reading Time: 5 minutes Sometimes I think we have come a long way, that atheism is firmly ensconced in modern Western societies as an accepted belief. At other times, I am rudely awakened from my pipedream. I could bring to bear any number of opinions from politicians to celebrities. But, being a philosopher myself, it galls me to read […]