What is the real point of reading history?

Eric Hobsbawm shows us. And in so doing he teaches us about one of the most transformative centuries in history: the 20th century.

I was assigned Thucydides’ landmark history of the Peloponnesian War in my International Relations Seminar in my final year at University.

I remember thinking, what kind of bullsh*t is this? How does this have anything to do with International Relations today?

Looking back, I am not completely persuaded that spending one month of a four-month semester reading Thucydides is the best use of our time. …

For the longest time, I was a big fan of sexual freedom. Well, I still am. However, now I have had a change of view from my previous emphasis on liberte.

Presently, I have chosen to abstain from watching pornography and following Instagram models. I do not have a puritanical reason for doing so. And I strongly encourage you from discarding guilt from your sexual life.

My reasons have to do with where I presently want to focus my attention.

It is interesting when I discuss these things with friends. Let’s take following Instagram models first.

I would often share…

“[W]e are seeking fulfillment while at the mercy of changing experience.” — Sam Harris

Western society has flourished in many ways since the 1960s. With this social flourishing, growing individualism, and weakening face-to-face interactions, we also see a steady increase in depression, anxiety, meaninglessness, and all the rest. Society is burdened with an aggressive emptiness. This burden is by no means new, but we are seeing it accelerate in recent years.

That can explain the popularity of self-help books. However, civilization has seen discussions like this since the writings of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Confucians. There is a lot of…

There is a holiness without which we will not see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14

Do these things and you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Galatians 5:21

One of the first questions that dawned on me as I abandoned my faith in early adulthood, was that I was now “free.”

Along with this feeling, I remember that this “freedom” had an unnatural sting to it.

For some reason, I could not find it fulfilling. Looking back I now realize that it wasn’t simply that abandoning my ideology led to my unfulfillment but rather, it was that I did not…

It should be obvious that atheism does not have anything specific to say about nuclear war.

Atheism naturally cannot say anything about an issue that does not relate to the existence or non-existence of gods. However, an atheist position very well may take a position for the complete eradication of the Christian concept for ‘just war’ based on divine command as was explored in my book. That is what I will do in this post.

We know from cinema and books that nuclear war of cataclysmic proportions is very much a threat. The Cold War saw an influx of cinema-related…

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9)

It is challenging to predict any behavior reliably today. Very few predicted Trump’s inauguration or Brexit, for example. Many even doubted the uprising of Hitler, which was one reason he became so powerful in Europe. Few predicted the Russian annexation of Crimea; 9/11; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and other significant events in recent memory.

We simply do not know what can happen.

On July 16th, 2020, we remembered the 75th anniversary of the Trinity Nuclear Test, which took place in New Mexico…

It is no secret that in the wild many animals die slow and agonizing deaths. In one memorable phrasing of Richard Dawkins, in the minutes it takes to read this text, thousands of animals are “slowly devoured,” “running for their lives,” and dying of “starvation, thirst, and disease.”

So, it follows that if we have the opportunity to help, then we must. Or does it?

If we look closer at the way wild animals reproduce, we observe that many of them are not evolutionarily inclined to care for their offspring.

In fact, many wild animals, particularly lizards, fish, amphibians, and…

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval. ‒Peter Singer

It was not until recently that the animal rights movement took mainstream precedence. Many consider the philosopher, Peter Singer, to have sparked the movement with his monumental book, Animal Liberation.

Since then, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and other animal rights activist movements have reached mainstream news because of controversial activism.

PETA, for one, compared the Nazi Holocaust to factory-farming today. Many took issue with this because of the apparent unempathetic ring it has to it and its inefficiency to…