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A matter of belief
My father grew up a Baptist, my mother an Anglican; they compromised after they married: they joined the United Church of Canada. So for me, growing up in post war Winnipeg, there was no confusion, no need to meld different traditions into an edible stew -I had simply accepted the compromise that they had made;…
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To weep is to make less the depth of grief
To say that emotions are important for us, is a rather trite observation, I suppose -they all seem to have functions although usually so seamlessly woven into the cultural Zeitgeist they defy easy inspection. Happiness seems to serve a fairly obvious purpose, if only as a contrast to its absence; pain (at least when considered…
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What’s done is done
‘Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.’ -remember that poem? It kind of reminds me of my childhood fantasies of things that might be if I could just wish hard enough. Things that could have been, if only I could remember the details. The distant past has always been like that for…
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The outward shows be least themselves
I read somewhere that in less than a second of talking to someone you don’t know, you begin to determine their trustworthiness, and that after only a few seconds more, you have formed an opinion about them. It could be their appearance, their manner, or even their face that sways the decision; I suppose that…
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The temple in which we live
I realize I’ve been obsessing about this for quite a while now, but my progress has been slow, and the chances of resolution seem to recede further and further each time I make the attempt. It’s easier, of course, to analyze it, measure it, and categorize it in someone else, but for this… for this,…
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The liability of intelligence
As I age, what I once thought I knew about intelligence has evolved, partially because knowledge has itself changed over time, of course, but also because what we value, what we regard as appropriate, unfolds differently as society develops. It’s why we seem to espouse new ethical standards, find new ways of interpreting History, and…
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Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week?
Have you ever wondered why things like pleasure and happiness, are so evanescent? For some things, we accommodate to their presence and after a while cease to notice them even though they are still present; pleasure is fleeting as well, and yet it is not simply because we no longer notice it, but rather because…
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How bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another’s eyes
Something I read a while ago started me thinking again about how we perceive things[i]. Some conditions, like hot and cold, lie at opposite ends of a spectrum I suppose, but is it necessarily the same with happy and sad? Binaries tend to mark edges -boundaries, by and large- but they don’t really define the…
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What is it like to be a…?
When I first read the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ essay, I was intrigued by his idea that ‘an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism’. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Empathy -the ability…
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