Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiological needs necessary for basic survival, such as building or finding shelters to protect them from weather and marauders. They formed small cooperative groups to share the hunting and gathering necessary to support the group, including the offspring scurrying about the cave and those soon to cross the threshold from mother's protective womb to Earth's suckling breast.

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith (a form of not knowing) in unseen, supernatural forces. These forces influence life. They rely on rituals, generally stemming from fear or a desire for control and meaning. The key difference is the object of their focus. One's magical thinking is targeted toward a sky daddy, while the other is not limited to a god. Both make space for the inclusion of amulets to bring about good fortune and to ward off evil.

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated toward nefarious ends. And there is the vacuum created when a group is silenced by institutional exclusion, epistemic injustice, and marginalization, bringing about loss of agency and the inability to influence the world around them. The oppression of people is a silence incomprehensible to me, who believes all humans should be equal participants in the game bookended by life.

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the labor force who required higher wages to support their families. It wasn't until 1796 that an English radical published "Rights of Infants,"

There was a time in my arrogant younger days when I would have responded with an unequivocal yes. I thoroughly bought into the anthropocentric doctrine proclaiming that the only valid moral choice would be to choose human survival over the survival of any and all non-human beings. The arrogance arises from the pompous belief that humanity was somehow more special than our evolved brethren of the nonhuman varieties. It was a haughty attitude toward nonhuman life, bolstered by the many religions where man is the face of the worshipped deity, with the rest of the earth to be used and abused to satiate man's desires.

My thirty-plus years as a soccer referee make me uniquely qualified to address this question. It was a role requiring me to be not only the judge and jury, but also the executioner when severe breaches of the Laws of the Game (LOTG) occurred. The brilliance contained in the LOTG is the unwritten law, known as Law 18, that says referees must use common sense when applying the LOTG. This allows the referee to set aside any breaches of the law for the “Good of the Game.” It helps the referee manage unique situations with practicality rather than the strict application born of rigid literalism

Inner peace, aka peace of mind, is generally defined as a state of psychological or spiritual calm that is maintained despite the presence of external stressors. External stressors are events or situations that originate from your environment rather than from your own internal thoughts or beliefs. Let's face it. Bad shit beyond our control happens to us. We cannot control external stressors, but we can choose how we respond, a choice that is healthier than surrendering control. That a question about cultivating inner peace would come from the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the world leader of a religion dedicated to inner peace and a man whose countenance is so beatific...

The earliest identified purposeful burial site dates back 300,000 years ago in South Africa by our hominid ancestors, Homo Naledi, an extinct relative of Homo Sapiens, our species. The Naledi were cave dwellers with a timeline overlapping early Homo Sapiens. The Neanderthals, contemporaries of the Naledi, were buried with grave goods, including flowers. They included behaviors of covering bodies or placing them in protected niches as if their corpses needed to be protected for future use. The earliest Homo Sapiens single individual, intentional burial sites are estimated to have occurred 100,000 years ago. Those Sapiens grave sites contained bodies decorated with red ochre and tools suggesting their ritual care held symbolic intent. 40,000 years ago, burial sites grew more elaborate with graves containing ochre, jewelry, weapons, and artwork, culminating around 4,700 years ago in the Egyptian pyramid system. Modern burials...

There are no known organisms that live on nothing. All must engage in some sort of food consumption to sustain their lives. Predators either hunt and kill or scavenge off the deceased. Grazers mow green plants until they are nubs, then move on to greener pastures. Photosynthetic organisms, such as plants, consume light, water, and carbon dioxide to synthesize the sugars necessary for their survival. Biologically, consuming means taking in matter and energy to live, grow, and reproduce, a process necessary to all living beings if they are to perpetuate and procreate. Without the pressures of death to sustain life, evolution would have taken a vastly different path. I doubt that life would have evolved beyond single-cell organisms, including the blue-green algae that inhabited the primordial soup.

I grew up in the racially charged South Side of Chicago, an area with definitive lines separating white from black. Many of the families in my suburb fled the city neighborhoods in which they grew up because they feared living in an integrated neighborhood, believing they would be under siege from those "colored" people. The exodus was called white flight. It was exacerbated by unscrupulous real estate agents who would cold call and announce that "they" were moving into the area and ask if the homeowner would like to sell before property values plummeted. It was not until I attended University, where, immersed in diversity, that I was able to purge myself of the infected thinking rooted when surrounded by homogenous thought and petty prejudices that I assimilated by osmosis.

The belief that humans have free will is the basis for the modern laws governing crime and punishment is foundational to most, if not all, modern societies. Those that don't tend to be firmly embedded in Determinism, the belief that all events, including human actions, are determined by prior causes. Modern laws include caveats to lessen or eliminate punishment if a person is deemed either too young to make rational decisions, alleged to be mentally compromised, psychologically incompetent, or coerced into committing an unlawful transgression. Religion is a system known for strict adherence to dogma in the face of conflicting data, requires free will...

The implicit implication when saying something needs to be fixed is that the thing is broken. A stick can be snapped, as can a human bone, when pressure is exerted with sufficient force. Machines can stop running because a crucial part becomes defective, taking down an entire system. Earth is a highly complex system with checks and balances, but I don't envision Earth being broken, considering it is a self-healing system that adapts to variations, creating new realities as elements evolve and the system dynamically adapts, creating new realities.

The USA in which I grew up is but a faint mirage of the USA in which I am now living, despite my living in the same city area for nearly all of my soon-to-be 65 years on earth. Some, increased empathy, individual awareness of their rights, a growing appreciation of diversity, and less outright segregation have been for the betterment of society and individuals. Others, the resurgence of blatant discrimination against the poor and nonwhite, the trend toward embracing fascism, and a desire to return to earlier days when only white males were allowed to vote, are very much to the detriment of a once-admired nation. It is quite a culture shift over my lifetime.

That someone would need to seek out the significance of silence tells me they are likely an incessant babbler compelled to fill the silence they fear with nonsensical words, the way a baby craves a favorite blankey or self soothes by sucking their thumbs. So powerful is the silence vacuum, the police frequently use silence as an interrogation technique because they know silence is a black hole void that pulls incriminating words from people's mouths.

There are five question renderings beginning with the letter 'W': What, when, where, why, and who. Coupled with two tiny words, 'am' and 'I', they span queries from empirical to existential. What I am, when I am, and where I am can pretty much be answered unequivocally by observation. In my case, I am a human living in 2025 Chicago. 'Why am I?' requires delving deep into metaphysics for any plausible answers. 'Who am I?' can be addressed both empirically by observation...

indness, a false equivalency. In this instance, presented as a false dichotomy, attempting to imply that morality and kindness exist in a causal relationship when they are, at best, tangentially related. This question presupposes morality is inherently about kindness, whereas reality is nothing more than the code of conduct a person chooses to adopt and cultivate from within themselves. Kindness is treating people how they wish to be treated...

There was a time in my arrogant youth that I viewed art, narrowly defined as drawing and painting, as a colossal waste of time and artists as people unable to survive the rigors of a classical education focusing on maths and the hard sciences. It was an attitude probably fostered by my complete lack of ability to draw anything other than lopsided stick figures and a desire to be more like my hero, Spock, a person dedicated to logic unencumbered by emotion. Also, in my quest to become a being of pure logic and science, I focused all my reading on non-fiction books to grow my real-world knowledge, not realizing my accompanying empathy deficit would haunt me later in life. It wasn't until years later that I read a non-fiction article explaining that reading quality fiction helped a person develop the empathy that makes them a higher functioning human being,

Humanity's fledgling mind was sharpened on the vast plains and rough steppes in the heart of Africa, long before there was a name for the elephant-headed continent, into a finely honed instrument capable of experiencing the material side of reality. The honing experienced exponential growth once they achieved hunting and gathering prowess, giving them the leisure time necessary to turn inward. The inner explorations gradually developed into a rudimentary spiritual sense, boosting their intimacy with the lands, animals, and plants encountered in their daily wanderings...

I must start off with a caveat (or two). I have two compelling emotional biases when it comes to the ethical question of depriving animals of their liberty and putting them on display for gawkers. On the other hand, I have been an avid gawker visiting zoos for the sheer joy of seeing those magnificent beings in living flesh, blood, and mind. This, despite some of those minds being turned to mush by captivity, leaving a soulless shell to neurotically pace the same worn path over and over, ad infinitum. The two ends of the unbalanced equation amount to my joy at being in the animals' presence...

There is a hidden presupposition in this question designed to skew the answer toward either of two implied outcomes. The question seeks to elicit a binary answer of either right or wrong. This tendency in challenging questions ignores the equally possible answers of maybe or irrelevant because a false dichotomy is being imposed. That presupposition encoded is that right and wrong objectively exist for this or any situation. A secondary presupposition...

Sound waves are mechanical vibrations that travel through a medium such as solids, liquids, or gases, carrying energy as oscillations of pressure and particle displacement. Sound waves exist in a wide range of frequencies. For humans, the audible range is 20 Hz (cycles per second) up to 20 kHz. Many animals are sensitive to other frequency ranges. Elephants are sensitive to infrasound, those vibrations below 20 Hz, while bat sensitivity extends to 200 kHz. The Greater Wax Moth detects the vibrations up to 300 kHz, helping it avoid the predatory bats. Hearing any of the mechanical frequencies requires a transducer capable of mechanically converting sound...

Another question seeking to impose a dichotomy where none exists. It doesn't even consider there may be a middle ground where both can be true or neither reflects a truth. It makes me wonder if the question was generated by a politician attempting to deploy a self-serving law that will line their pockets with Judas Gold mined on the breaking and broken...

The dictionary defines consciousness as the state of being aware of one's existence, feelings, and surroundings. Consciousness encompasses the totality of one's thoughts, perceptions, and sensations, both internal and external. The word is often used to mean the state of being awake, not asleep, as in the ability to regain consciousness after fainting or recovering from general anesthesia. It is the Western mind that confines consciousness to the non-sleeping state.

Equality is the state of being equal in status, rights, and opportunities. It means each individual or group of people is given the same resources and opportunities regardless of their circumstances. One pertinent example is paying the same pay for males, females, or others performing the same job. So important was equality to the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence includes the phrase, "All men are created equal." Unfortunately...

Another query designed to create a false dichotomy. A question designed not to derive a thoughtful answer that could fall easily on either side of an imaginary divide, but rather to elicit a response supporting the questioner's view by implying an answer. Psychology calls this a suggestive question, phrased in a way that presumes or encourages a particular answer, often employed in a manipulative context. It is also called a paradox, which is a question without a possible, coherent answer. A common question of this sort is the infamous, "Can god create a rock so big even god can't lift it?"

Right or wrong is an entirely manmade concept that changes depending upon the spurious claims of religions and their ever-changing morality, or on a set of laws codified by government and is subject to a continually evolving understanding of the law's intent by the judiciary, themselves influenced by their religious affiliations. Ultimately, every person picks and chooses their moral foundation, so wrong or right are subject to individual whims, whims...

Every parent of more than one child is acutely aware of the tear-filled cry of "That's not fair!" when one child has or gets something while the other doesn't. It can be as simple as one child being invited to a classmate's party while the sibling who is in a different class is not invited. Parents must make decisions for the child until they are old enough to pick and choose for themselves. There is likely a good reason for the parents' behavior being perceived as inequitable, considering each of us is a unique individual, unlike any other person in history or futurity...

This question is anathema to minds honed on Western ideologies. A stinging bee exploding the fragile ego bubble of people who believe the world was built for humans and revolves around human needs. An arrogance so all-consuming that land, plants, and nonhuman animals were put upon the earth solely to satiate humanity's desires, irrespective of the impact on the natural world that, unironically, is a requisite for human survival and existence. Even the standard definition of harmony has been abrogated by the Western mind to be solely human-oriented.

Globalization, to be clear, is a process by which businesses and other organizations develop international influence or operate on an international scale. The world becomes more interconnected with economies, cultures, and populations linked by cross-border trade, technology, and the flow of goods, services, people, and ideas. In simple terms, it is the integration of countries and businesses across international borders. Full disclosure, beginning in 2005, I was on the bleeding edge of global software development, where I saw the challenges...

Love, in its many splendored forms, has been a primary force in art, especially poetry and its close cousin, musical lyrics, for as long as both emerged from consciousness to express the desperate longings of humanity. Morrissey expressed it with his typical angst in his lyrics, "I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does." The definition of love has as many nuanced connotations as the equally ambiguous word God. The definition lies in the soul of the beholder.

n is phrased as a gotcha, a question that attempts to force a choice between implied extremes, similar to the way lawyers and other biased debaters try and twist words to make a point by employing a false dichotomy. Being human and spiritual are not mutually exclusive. In fact, humans require both physical and spiritual aspects to be fully human. To be spiritual is to seek meaning beyond the material world, often involving a sense of connection to...

on both sides of the faith divide, so feel fully qualified to broach an answer to this metaphysical question. I was indoctrinated into Catholicism from the moment I could breathe, attended Parochial schooling for 12 impressionable years, finally breaking free of the mental shackles as my brain grew to think rationally. That thought freedom allowed me to see the inherent hypocrisy of those immersed in the system. I was avowedly secular for many years, even writing an essay titled "I am God!" for a college writing course. The essay earned me an "A" from a devout Jewish professor, giving third-party legitimacy to my declaration...

Creativity is the ability to generate new and original ideas, solutions, or objects by making connections between different concepts. In other words, creativity is using the imagination or original ideas, especially in the realization of artistic work. Art is the expression of human creativity and imagination through various media, including painting, sculpture, music, and literature. Art requires creativity, but creativity does not necessarily produce art. Einstein's Theory...

By definition, to be moral is to act according to principles of right and wrong based on personal or societal standards of good behavior. Moral standards serve as a basis for people to live together in groups predicated on established guidelines of proper conduct and character. Personal moral standards are typically influenced by society, culture, and religion, but ultimately come down to what an individual decides is their personal code of conduct.

Predeterminism is the belief that all future events are fixed or decided in advance by a divine plan, fate, or other force, rather than being determined by present conditions or random chance. In short, all aspects of the future are inescapable, meaning the future cannot be altered. It is the polar opposite of having free will. In human terms, everything we think, say, and do was set in stone at the advent of time with no possibility of deviating from the set course. The mind we think we are changing, an illusion...

Morality is defined as a set of principles and standards that define what is considered right or wrong, good or bad within a society, culture, or individual. It encompasses beliefs about proper conduct and character necessary to live cooperatively and make decisions based on a shared understanding of acceptable behavior.I posit morality is subjective...

ath, the, at least, 50,000-year-old question, a date based upon the earliest ritualistic burial sites, assuming they are an indicator of humans looking beyond earthly existence. Probably earlier, considering our minds tend to wrestle with ideas long before those concepts are made manifest in some tangible form. Art is a creative endeavor. The earliest known cave paintings, at 66,700 years old, are likely the result of early hominids asking the big questions, including how do we summon food to feed our tribe and what do we become after we die?

nism is defined, rather narrowly, as an organic entity bounded by a collection of traits, including cellular organization, the ability to grow and develop, the capacity to reproduce and metabolize, respond to stimuli, maintain a stable environment through homeostasis, and adapt to change. Anything without these characteristics is classified as non-living matter. The first problem arises when we realize there is no evidence that the Earth has or even can reproduce either sexually or asexually. Asexual reproduction requires...

From a philosophical perspective, reality comes in two potential frameworks. Physicalism claims reality is purely physical, that everything is composed of matter and energy, and follows the laws of physics with no existence of spiritual, mental, or other non-physical realms. The other extreme, Spiritualism, claims reality is purely spiritual, with the physical world merely an illusion arising from consciousness. I have been hit on the head with a rock...

I consider life to be the most sacred, check that, the only sacred artifact in the universes. I am not just referring to human life. Rather, all life in any form it manifests. My wife's pets? Sacred. The disgusting rats I see running around alley trash cans? Sacred. Trees and flowers? Insects? Bacteria? tardigrades? Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. And sacred. While I do not believe sin exists outside the twisted machinations contained within human metaphysics, the one transgression I would entertain as unholy is the taking of any life in any form. Kill a human, rat, tree? Unholy. All equally unholy. I don't recognize as true any dogmatic creed or spiel that claims humans are more important than insects. Nor do I ascribe to the arrogance buoying the silly notion that animal life exists on a higher plane than plant life, especially when it claims eating plant flesh is morally superior to consuming animal flesh.

Nationalism is an ideology and movement centered on the idea that a nation should have its own independent state and govern itself within its perceived homeland. It involves strong identification with one's nation, fostering national pride, and can serve as a powerful force for unity and self-determination. I have no problem with the concept of people identifying with a nation, although dislike any system that divides people along arbitrary lines, including the soil where their umbilical cord was buried after birth. I prefer to identify myself as a citizen of planet Earth, a definition I'm perfectly willing to expand to a citizen of the universe when extraterrestrial civilizations

Consciousness is a complex and difficult-to-define state of awareness of one's surroundings and internal self, allowing for subjective experience, thought, and emotion. It is universally understood human experience, yet remains one of the most profound and challenging questions in science and philosophy, with no single agreed upon definition. It is a phenomenon we know from a first-person perspective that can only be inferred in others. Consciousness cannot be...

Perception is an active process by which an individual organizes, interprets, and makes sense of sensory information from their environment to form a coherent understanding of the world. The foundation for perceiving is our senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. A simple example of the process. A vibration is gathered either in the ears or via bone conduction and is transformed into sound. Perception helps us recognize the sound waves as a coyote's howl, a hawk's screech, or a gun firing, and then decides how to react to the sensed sound. It is a simple, straightforward process of stimulus begetting reaction until, that is, we include extrasensory phenomena that are notoriously difficult to validate or invalidate with current scientific equipment. An example to clarify. A person claims to hear the voice of God speaking...

Sin is broadly defined as a transgression of divine or moral law, a violation of what is right, or a failure to meet god's standards. The concept of sin includes transgressions of action, thought, or attitudes, such as disobedience, selfishness, or not performing good deeds, and is often seen as separating an individual from connection with the divine. Sin typically carries negative consequences up to and including eternity in a place of perpetual torment. Sin requires...

According to Star Trek, space is the final frontier. I disagree. Yes, space is vast beyond comprehension. We will never completely know what lies amongst the stars, let alone understand a mere 0.0001% of the billions of galaxies comprising the solar system. The final frontier, in more ways than one, is death, the mysterious realm where all men and women have or will go when the life force decides to exit and find new vessels to inhabit. Death is a state of nonliving that has fascinated or terrified, possibly both, every person who has lived long enough to be consciously aware that they are an ephemeral being. Near the end, some do crave death as a release from debilitating physical pain, emotional agony, or are simply too exhausted to function another day. Some grow to accept, possibly welcome, release from their mortal coil. Others, such as the literary Dorian Gray, are willing...

When it comes to free speech, I am pretty much an anarchist, viewing speech as a an individual freedom, a universal right that must be free from state-sanctioned coercion or regulation. No central authority should have the right to censor or inhibit expression by an individual or a group. If there are going to be consequences for speaking, they should be social, such as boycotting or exclusion from the social collective. It must never be criminalized by a government authority or be subject to the state's legal system. About the only time the government...

The challenge with any cross-cultural dialogue resides in the reality that what we say generally has roots deep in our cultural context. It is a context in which we move seamlessly, unknowingly, not realizing the context is unknown to others, meaning any attempted dialogue is obscured by clouds blotting out foundational understandings. A couple examples should help clarify. It is common in Vietnam to point using the middle finger, an action frequently viewed as vulgar in the USA because it is seen as flipping a person off, a flagrant insult. Seeing that finger will blind an American to any message being conveyed simply because neither understands the other's cultural context. During my first ever international trip to merry old England, I found myself in Cambridge, England. It is joked...

I find it helpful to answer this type of question by first defining the terms, in this case, the proposed dichotomy between believing and knowing, to help ensure a common foundation from which to draw a meaningful conclusion. Knowledge is defined as facts and information acquired by experience or education, with facts further refining it to be something verifiable and, just as importantly, can be disproved, meaning it is also falsifiable. Unfalsifiable claims cannot, by definition, be tested, meaning they simultaneously explain everything and nothing. That which cannot be proven also cannot be disproven, rendering the statement or claim to mere speculation, neither true nor false. Belief is the acceptance of a statement as true, a firmly held opinion or conviction.

Daedalus and Icarus could very well be the first recorded instance of humans, the two men, and machines, attached wings representing a simple machine, were combined to form a man-machine hybrid in literature. Yes, it is a bit of a stretch considering the wings were not permanently attached. Edgar Allen Poe, in 1943, wrote a short story about a war hero who, it is gradually revealed, is almost entirely mechanical with an extensive series of artificial limbs, organs, and other integrated components. In 1982, an artificial heart transplant was successfully completed, replacing what is arguably the 2nd most important organ in a human after the brain, a distinction with...

The idea of "self" is multifaceted and complex. Self refers to an individual's unique identity and being, understood as a combination of one's beliefs, memories, thoughts, physical and mental attributes, and the subjective experience of consciousness. It encompasses both the "I," source of agency, and the "Me," the object of reflection, creating a continuous story over time. Key aspects include the narrative we construct to understand our experiences. The self is shaped by both genetic heritage and life experience, where the brain synapses change with the encoding of new information. It involves subjective experiences and consciousness illuminating the world, allowing for perception, thought, and feelings. Theories attempting to explain the nature of the "Self" have been proposed by great minds, including but not limited to Freud, Jung, and Maslow, across philosophy, psychology, sociology, and neurobiology. All include debates...

The idea that animals should have the same rights as humans extends back to the 9th century BCE, along with the principle in Eastern religions of ahimsā, non-violence toward all living beings, advocating for kindness and non-cruelty expressed daily by a vegetarian diet. I guess they did not believe growing, breathing plants were living. An odd prejudice, one arising because humans are unable to hear plants screaming in agony when being cut, plucked, or extracted from nourishing soil. I wonder how much the trees wail when the fruit, a parallel with chicken eggs, they lovingly bear are removed from their mother plant, and the seeds are consumed...