Philosophy & Faith
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Hello, everyone! For all who see this, I’m planning on shifting my blog over to Substack, which is a kind of social media for writers / blogging platform. WordPress (through which I created this website) has been a wonderful place to begin blogging, but I’ve been persuaded recently (mostly due to Substack’s versatility, popularity, and
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An edited version of this was featured in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on Sunday, July 27, 2025. It was titled “Establishing an Arkansas philosophy” and accredited to Bo Simpson, who is also the writer of this blog. … Let’s begin with a simple observation: anyone thinking about philosophy is more likely to picture Athens than Arkansas.
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This internal war of reason against the passions has made those who wanted peace split into two sects. Some wanted to renounce passions and become gods, others wanted to renounce reason and become brute beasts. Blaise Pascal In my post, “Between Two Knights,” I discuss the 19th-century philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is widely considered to
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You have heard it said that bias is bad. Media bias, “fake news,” and disinformation pollute the modern political landscape in word and connotation. Surely no sensible person would contend that bias is invariably good (I would certainly hope not). And yet, would it not be an oversimplification to make the assumption that bias is
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What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable? To have, to keep. To hold, to cherish. What does it mean to have it all? All as in enough? All as in the world? All as in … more? Can we fathom its depths, ones we can’t see? Can we taste its fruit,
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People have all sorts of definitions for truth. These days, chasing that rather ambiguous idea seems both vain and unfashionable. After all, everyone’s truth is their own, right? Fundamentally, each person has a unique approach to life informed by their own experiences. It’s unlikely that anyone looks at the world quite the same as another.
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The Garden of Eden and the Big Bang tell us a similar story. In fact, many of the creation stories familiar to us follow a similar pattern, at least in regard to one thing: entropy. Entropy refers to the thermodynamic quantity that characterizes a system’s inability to convert thermal energy into mechanical work. Now, before
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Throughout the centuries there have been various approaches to understanding the divine nature of the world. In some real sense, human beings know that transience is wrong. Of course, this contention quickly comes into conflict with belief systems such as materialistic atheism or strict naturalism that do deny the potential for mortal beings to come
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What incites insecurity? It appears to me that insecurity results from a fear of relative insignificance or inferiority. This could be to a person, or it could be to an ideal that we have set as a standard for ourselves, invoking a sensitivity to our shortcomings that persists indefinitely. Why do we have such a
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Evading the temptation of judgement is tricky for human beings. Our intelligence prompts us to look for patterns, even when there are no patterns to begin with. It is another way of organizing the continuum. This is an amazing tool that we have developed over the millennia, examining the world and recognizing its continuities so
The Way Fayer 