And the Nature of Biblical Truth — I have, for quite a while, identified as both an atheist and a Zen Buddhist. I do not believe that the biblical prophets, the apostles, and the Early Church Fathers were “making it up” when they claimed to have these mystical experiences in which they saw the “uncreated light,” had…

I recently watched a couple YouTube videos that got me thinking. In one video, Rokas and Icy Mike talk about boxing being the best martial art for dealing with multiple attackers. They make a really good point — boxing is the only martial art where there are multiple videos of…

I was listening to music while working the other day and an old Third Eye Blind song came on. The meaning and significance of songs seem to change drastically over time. I’ve always loved this album, mostly because it evokes feelings of nostalgia for me. As a kid, I spent…

We Don’t Have to Choose One Over the Others — I am a fan of various basic income schemes, including negative income tax, the social dividend, and universal basic income. We often think of these as mutually exclusive schemes that are incompatible with one another but I don’t think that they actually are. We don’t necessarily have to pick between…

I follow two Twitter accounts that just retweet all the tweets of every Congressperson (one for the Senate and the other for the House). …

It is frequently claimed that Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world because it is loosely based on the Vedas. It is also claimed that Siddhārtha Gautama founded Buddhism in response to Hinduism (or, possibly even as a reformation of Brahmanical/Vedic Hinduism). It is assumed that the Buddha was…

This is an anthology of all of my posts in the Progressive Libertarianism series. Summary of Part 1 of Progressive Libertarianism: I discuss how free-market libertarianism was originally a radical leftwing or center-left philosophy that questioned the legitimacy of capitalist property, noting how rightwing libertarianism didn’t exist prior to ca…

Part 3: Libertarianism, Distributism, & Welfare — The Overlapping Consensus Socialists and libertarians both integrated key Burkean conservative insights into their philosophies around the turn of the 19th Century. The revolutionary idea of tearing the system down to build something completely new from scratch fell into disfavor. Libertarians started to shy away from anarchism and socialists started to shy away…

Part 2: Hayekian Libertarianism vs. Burkean Conservatism — In this essay, we will look at the progressive libertarianism of F. A. Hayek and examine the ways in which it is at odds with conservatism as well as the ways in which it overlaps with Burkean conservatism. Libertarians are at odds with conservatives on a number of issues. Traditional…