Hitting the Links 9/10/2018
Here's a good Ed Latimore quote:
Passive-aggression is weak. It tries to get the benefits of confrontation at a steeply discounted price.
If you have something on your chest, speak directly and leave no room for misinterpretation.
— Ed Latimore (@EdLatimore) January 6, 2018
Of everything I've cooked lately, this is my wife's favorite: 5 Ingredient Carnitas. Enjoy.
Strength training is an aging prophylactic. And it takes remarkably little time if your goals are modest. If you don't lift, you having nothing to lose but weakness, get to the gym/garage/push-ups. Also, here's this 70-year-old lifter.
Link Soup: 11/30/2017
As it turns out, communism is objectively bad. Laura Nicolae writes, "After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives."
Over at the overpriced economics blog, WSJ, we learn that moms buy trashy clothes for their daughters, apparently, because they feel less sexually attractive than they used to, "As for the girls themselves, if you ask them why they dress the way they do, they'll say (roughly) the same things I said to my mother: "What's the big deal?" "But it's the style." "Could you be any more out of it?" What teenage girl doesn't want to be attractive, sought-after and popular? And what mom doesn't want to help that cause? In my own case, when I see my daughter in drop-dead gorgeous mode, I experience something akin to a thrill—especially since I myself am somewhat past the age to turn heads."
Interesting Reading
David Bentley Hart’s Reflections on the Early Christians I don’t agree with everything he says here, but it does remind us of how powerful the rhetoric of the New Testament can be.
Amy Cuddy Reviews the Science of ‘Power Posing’ after unfair criticism Cuddy’s research conclusions on endocrine and power posing seem like common sense to me. When I try to stand with better posture I feel more alert, less depressed, and more quick-witted.
James Chastek nails it on Being as such
How can God not be a being among beings?
In one sense first member of a causal series is a part of the series, but in another sense it isn’t. If ABCD causes something, then A is obviously 1/4 of all the causes you have, but we don’t think about it that way. We don’t say that George Bush played a part in the Iraq War, or even a crucial part in it – it was just his war. Truman wasn’t a part of the system that dropped the bomb – the system was brought int existence by his choice. This is true in every genus of causes. Winning isn’t one part of an athlete’s goals, even if one can isolate other goals than this in the game or in training. A fire hydrant is red and a light wave in the right spectrum is red, but the “is” is not said in the same way. The two things “are red” but not in a way that the one is a part of the whole.James' blog on Thomism is one of the best philosophy blogs on the internet. I really appreciate his succinct explanations of complicated topics. In this case he hits the nail on the head. Many Christians accidentally see God as a figure within the cosmos. This is right and good as far as such images support Christian piety because the are the models utilized in Scripture. But insofar as they are mistaken for giving precise expression concerning God's reality, such ideas (God is a part of the furniture of the universe) tend toward treating God as a creature. The Bible, in its more literal moments, treats God as the being in whom all things live and move and have their being. Similarly, God is the cause of all non-God reality in Genesis 1, John 1, and Hebrews 1. I've written elsewhere about how open theism and forms of Calvinism both take anthropomorphic language about God (preordaining and being surprised) too literally.