crates | April 16, 2009
The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology Greek philosopher in Athens (469 BC – 399 BC) I am reading Peter Pouncey’s book, Rules for Old Men Waiting, enjoying the wonderful writing and the images and thoughts that were evoked. I got to thinking about how difficult it is today to [...]
crates | March 17, 2009
I’ve spent a great deal of time categorizing things. We all do this from birth, some more than others I think. As we grow up from early childhood, we are always learning new things, and trying to place everything in the proper perspective. We learn to name things. As a child I learned the names [...]
crates | March 15, 2009
Last May in western Tanzania, two men with long knives forced their way into a family’s home while they were eating breakfast and hacked off the legs of a young girl and made off with them. She died soon afterwards. A few days ago a twenty year old man in Burundi was attacked by [...]
crates | March 14, 2009
Plutarch tells the following: An old man in the Olympic games being desirous to see the sport, and unprovided of a seat, went about from place to place, was laughed and jeered at, but none offered him the civility; but when he came to the Spartans’ quarter, all the boys and some of the men rose [...]
crates | March 9, 2009
I’m sure that most people have thought about this question at one time or another. The answer that a person arrives at will determine his attitude towards various practices in our society. Does a person become a person at fertilization of the egg? We know that the oocyte is alive and that the spermatozoan is [...]
crates | February 24, 2009
I got to wondering what people mean when they say that a person is good. I’m not sure why I started wondering about this. I think it is because somebody told me that I was a good person on the same day that somebody told me that I was a despicable person. The latter person [...]
crates | February 23, 2009
Shugendo is an amalgam of various religions such as Japanese shamanism, Kannabe Shinko, Tantric Buddhism, religious Taoism and Confucianism–a religion peculiar to Japan comprising aspects of all the various religious influences that has influenced Japan. Shugendo, translated as “the way,” is a method of mastering magico-ascetic spiritual powers– a search for spiritual, mystical, or [...]
crates | February 19, 2009
When one examines the available literature on overpopulation (or any other environmental problem), it can immediately be seen that there are vociferous advocates both pro and con. One side is predicting dire consequences if world population isn’t checked, and the other sides pooh-poohs such people as wild-eyed extremists, claiming that there IS no problem. Whom [...]
crates | February 17, 2009
I just saw a very instructive two hour program by NOVA. It had to do with the recent events (2004) in a town in Dover, PA where a couple of individuals on the school board pushed through a requirement that Intelligent Design be taught in biology classrooms as a viable alternative to the modern theory of evolution. They also required that [...]
crates | January 31, 2009
Plutarch tells a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Julius Caesar and his party as they passed through a small Alpine village. His friends jokingly asked whether even in such an isolated and poor setting men still strived and scrabbled for power and office. Caesar very seriously declared that he would rather be the foremost man [...]