Confessions of a Quirky Christian Artist

The year is 2075.  I’m on my deathbed.  I’m surrounded by family and friends.  My son and his two children, and several of their children.  Along with my closest friends collaborators in my business, Breath of Life Art Studio. They are a diverse bunch.  I took a lot of risks in hiring people based more on the shared value of propagating love than on raw talent.  I’m about to breathe my last and I’m content.  I feel like I accomplished just enough to have met my life’s goal: to make the world more loving with stories.  I know I can’t quantify that.  But I have evidence. The wall of my bedroom is covered with print-outs of letters from people who claim that their lives were changed for the better by the work my company has done.  I’ve highlighted the ones where a person has claimed that they respect and love others more because of the stories that Breath of Life has created, the characters that inspired or challenged them.  The metaphors they’ve drawn from the adventures and world of Ta

We are in a funny time in culture when we have all these social science studies that are being cherry picked and used for political purposes (most of which I agree with) and in the last year or so it's been discovered that there's a major replication crises with so many of those studies. So now, if you point out the problems with the studies you get labeled as a racist/sexist/etc. When I first heard of The Implicit Bias Test I was skeptical. Not because I didn't think that we all have implicit biases we don't acknowledge or admit. But because the core assumptions seemed inadequate to me. The idea that minute time gaps in associating words and pictures could only be explained by latent racism/sexism/homophobia/etc. seems preposterous to me. My understanding of human psychology (as a layperson with no official education on the subject) is that all kinds of biases fall under a giant umbrella bias, which is simply this: We are more comfortable with what we are familiar

http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-every-terrible-person-thinks-theyE28099re-hero/ My thoughts about this piece. 1. I think Wong is totally wrong about (whatever percentage he's referring to... that's unclear) about people on the left who are willing to do violence to the alt-right. He implies they are only there (in the far left culture bubble) because they just want the fun adrenaline of doing violence. He accused them of not being FOR something and only being AGAINST something. I just doubt that's the case for many of them. I assume that like me (someone closer to the SJW end of the spectrum than most) they are doing what they do because they want JUSTICE for oppressed people. That's IS being FOR something. 2. I think Wong is absolutely right on the money about how culture bubbles compress, refine and 'purify' people to get more and more radical, which makes more and more of the world an 'enemy'. I spent most of my life on the Right, and in conse

Below is a facebook thread spawned from someone sharing my last blog about “Ethical Street Violence” and why I disagree with the concept in the current context.  I don’t expect anyone to read this unless I become super famous, and then some poor biographer’s assistant is going to given the unenviable task of reading it.  And to that person, I apologize.  The reason I want to have it on the record is simply for myself because I think it illustrates a couple interesting things about my intellectual journey.  First, it demonstrates how a person’s choice with whom to engage in deep conversation can impact one’s thoughts and attitudes.  My primary interlocutor here is a very interesting fellow currently calling himself Rathaille.  I’ve e-known him for several years now and always find my run-ins to be… interesting.  He has a lot of positions that I’ve previously only heard from really stupid people, so it’s tempting to lump him in with them.  But for that one historian’s assistant who’s go