psychology ⁽¹⁷⁾

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…

Prospective Remarks This post comprises three sets of remarks: Some concluding comments will follow these three sets of remarks, though I can’t promise those comments will strengthen the linkages between the sets. I can’t even promise that they will attempt to do so. Favoring liberty but opposing anarchy, defending radical skepticism as a coherent and rational choice for unbelievers, and promoting the cause of abortion abolition to atheist empiricists who idolize Ayn…

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…

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…

The mainstream media were briefly abuzz last week over left-liberal Media Matters’ unearthing of some old Tucker Carlson audio. Media Matters’ Madeline Peltz begins her related article (topically organized transcript collection) with a summary of Carlson’s bad behavior, part of which reads as follows: Between 2006 and 2011, Tucker Carlson spent approximately an hour a week calling in to Bubba the Love Sponge [BTLS], a popular shock jock radio program where he…

Item 1: Our Drunken Culture Not long before this I had overheard someone mentioning “getting a beer” with a new acquaintance in what has become the standard way males in our culture interact. Apparently, men today find each other too difficult to tolerate without a little alcohol in their systems. Maybe the fact that most of them have been convinced they are the evolved kindred of monkeys and apes, who must always…

As I began to realize a few days ago, when I spoke of the “Baffling Clash: Pro-Life Leaders v Donald J. Trump,” some of us cannot be part of movements. As someone who believes every person’s inalienable right to life begins at conception, I’m saddened to discover I cannot be part of the pro-life movement. The insistence of this movement’s leaders on lockstep conformity to the women-who-abort-are-guiltless-victims position, however, has made clear…

I saw a very strange documentary recently: (A)sexual (directed by Angela Tucker, Arts Engine Inc., 2011). The premise of the film, which takes for granted the contemporary belief that people have innate sexual orientations (inclinations to have sex with persons of the opposite, their own, or both sexes: heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality, respectively), is that there are people who have an orientation not generally acknowledged: asexuality (an innate lack of inclination to…

Earlier this week, an email from my local creation museum informed me that said museum had been refused membership in the area’s Museum Council. I’d spoken to employees and friends of the museum the day that some representatives of the Council had visited, so I knew those representatives had been favorably impressed and that museum employees and friends fully expected their Council application to be approved. Dour gloom-and-doomer that I am, my…

Christians active in the battle against pornography have lately been excited by news of a not-yet-peer-reviewed Cambridge study popularly reported to prove that “porn addiction” is as real as addiction to drugs or alcohol. When I first heard about this (in an email from Breakpoint), I was skeptical, since I recalled (or thought I recalled!) from a couple Physiological Psychology courses that alcohol and drugs don't just prompt certain patterns of brain…

Yesterday (Saturday 28 September 2013), the creation museum in my area held its yearly “Museum Day.” Though the event ran from 9 AM to 6 PM, with presentations by a range of speakers from Gary Parker to John Morris to Ray Comfort, I only managed to attend a single presentation: Randy Guliuzza's “Creation Apologetics.” Dr. Guliuzza is both a Medical Doctor (M.D.) and an Engineer (P.E.), and the title “Creation Apologetics” falls…

Richard Ganz condemns the growing popularity in Christian circles of such self-exploratory therapies as “healing of memories,” which Pious Eye would note (from his own observation and experience) seem very popular in seminary “spiritual formation” courses. (Politically correct lamenting over, and inculcation of personal guilt for, various social inequities one personally has neither contributed to nor [so far as one can discern] benefited from, also seems very popular in such courses...but that…