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faith and reason (63)

What’s in Your Wallet? Probably Not Money

Murray N. Rothbard. What Has Government Done to Our Money?, 6th edition. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2024, softcover, 138 pages. (1st edition was in 1963.) In my last post, I noted how “I’m ill at ease with the emphasis on anarchism and preference for Hoppe and Rothbard in the [Mises] caucus” because “anarchism strikes me as unrealistic and Utopian, the same sort of ideology-driven fantasizing that created and sustains Marxism.”…

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From Intelligent Design Novice to Fan: A Quick Postmortem of Some Twitter Discussion

Retweeting and commenting on the last in a series of articles by the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CSC)’s Dr. Jonathan McLatchie, a molecular and cell biologist, got me briefly embroiled in some discussions with the disciples of a YouTube “science educator.” Though the “educator” himself contributed the first tweets, the way he conducts himself on Twitter can’t rightly be called “discussion.” The initial interactions with him…

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Culture War: What Is It Good For? (Or, My Sad Farewell to the Culture War)

Introductory Remarks: Culture Peace As Possible God, through the Apostle Paul, urges his people to, “as much as lieth” in them (that is, insofar as doing so lies within their control), “live peaceably with all men” (Romans 12:18). For a while now, I’ve found it difficult to square this divine directive with efforts to use the government to win the so-called “culture war.” I’ve also been troubled by how some include abortion…

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2022 Q3 Correspondence, Part 1: Let Them Live!

Welcome to the latest edition of the series formerly known as “prompted letters,” which chronicles my off-site correspondence with all and sundry. As will be noted in the Pious Eye “About” page when I get around to updating it, all posts on this site are snapshots of my thinking at whatever point in time I wrote down the posted material. Since I’m always modifying and improving my thinking — or trying to…

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Concluding Political Postscript to 2020: My Christian Nationalist Libertarian Platform

Preface ˅ Our nation’s degeneration into tyranny seemed to accelerate in 2020 as a new virus and the respiratory illness caused by it, one with a fatality rate that should not have caused any more fright or alarm than the ubiquitous threat of death hanging over every one of us every day, was used by America’s tyrant-at-heart government “leaders” to force upon a once freedom loving people an increasingly absurd assortment of…

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Lamenting Lost Liberty, Lame Candidates, and Lunacy on the Left and Right

Will you weep for the two poor prisoners in their COVID-19 isolation chamber?[1] Pandemic-excused infringements of liberty and a looming presidential election with typically nauseating major-party offerings have focused much of my attention on political matters lately. Fox News remains the Trumpian news network, of late choosing to emphasize its embrace of mass impulse by titling its election-coverage segments “Democracy 2020,” and MSNBC the official anti-Trump network, no doubt taking its lead…

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Akashic Records Prompt Letters

Since most things that occur to me, and to most people, do turn out to have occurred to someone else before (Ecclesiastes 1:9), I fear I must credit this and all my posts to the mystical Akashic records, that storehouse of all that sentient beings have ever thought or done or experienced….[1] Just kidding. It is past time for a new “[things] prompt letters” post, however. Though I doubtless violate rules of…

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Issues from Race and Religion to Burkinis, Empiricism, and Trump Prompt Letters and More

Introduction and Contents A printed letter objecting to a columnist’s conflation of race and religion; An unprinted letter concerning the latest ultra-rich guy’s call for higher taxes; An unprinted U-T “Your Say” submission suggesting a lesson to be drawn from a tried soldier’s conduct; An unprinted letter drawing the same lesson from the same conduct, but with less detail; Am unprinted letter indicating that the politics of racial identity makes racists of…

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Will, Sensibility, and Tangents

Below: some preliminary remarks on a terminological issue related to a book in progress. The book: George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility (New York: Hachette Books, 2019). The issue: “This is a republic, not a democracy—let’s keep it that way!” to quote a John Birch Society sticker you’ve probably never seen. The content: main remarks and tangents. In The Conservative Sensibility, Will brings together various strands of discussion that have grown in prevalence…

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Zuhdi Jasser: Is Enlightenment Reason-Worship Cure for Islamism?

Image: Islamic symbol modified for the Pious Eye site by David M. Hodges. Based upon a work by Wikimedia user DonovanCrow, used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license and available from Wikimedia Commons. In accord with that license, this modified image may itself be used under the same license term. I posted a comment on a YouTube video. As the PC censors at YouTube might not permit these comments to display, I’ll…

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The Materialist Face of Bouw: Do Omnipotence, Omnipresence Make God a Plenum?

Image: Mysterious galaxy abstract, released to the public domain by its creator, Lynn Greyling, through the Public Domain Pictures site. I’ve recently started reading an interesting book by Gerardus D. Bouw, PhD: Geocentricity: Christianity in the Woodshed (Cleveland: Association for Biblical Astronomy, 2013). As I’ve read the beginning of the sixth chapter, on “The Biblical Firmament,” I’ve run across what strikes me as some very odd reasoning (55, 58-60). Since odd reasoning,…

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