Frozen Toothpaste

Lacking anything terribly interesting to review, I’ve decided to write a retroview of a book I liked when I was young, Tacky the Penguin.
Rereading it today, I’m sorry that I didn’t notice it sooner. Helen Lester’s Tacky the Penguin is a rather unabashed reappropriation of the major idea in The Ugly Duckling. Sure, Tacky’s just […]

Since I’ve been writing about ignorance, I thought a quote on a similar topic was in order. This quotation is from W. K. Clifford, an atheist philosopher and mathematician, who argued that faith is both irrational and immoral. You can read the (almost) full text of “The Ethics of Belief” online, if you’re interested. It […]

My recent piece entitled “Ignorance is Dangerous” was essentially an angry condemnation of ignorance and the ignorant. In that piece, however, I failed to adequately distinguish between many types of possible ignorance and levels of it, which is essentially my aim here.
The first distinction that must be made is one that is, at best, implicit […]

As you probably know by now, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize last week, sharing the medal and the money with the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. This seems to have triggered some new press for consideration of the idea of what it means to be an environmentalist.
Though few dispute the idea that concern […]

I’m tired of it. Just plain tired. Ignorance is not now, nor has it ever been, bliss. Bliss — extreme happiness, perhaps spiritual in nature — is not caused by ignorance of the world around you.
If discovering the message of Jesus is bliss, than ignorance clearly is not. For it is only through knowledge — becoming aware that Jesus died for […]