thinktoomuch.net

Grim, a question you might have come across before: Would you rather lose a loved one in a sudden unexpected accident, or through a long-running terminal disease? Unlike a philosopher’s dilemma, this is not a quandary that one considers in order to develop some understanding of ethical or moral considerations. Personally I think it is [...]

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Today was Pluralism Sunday. Initiated by the Center for Progressive Christianity, Pluralism Sunday is an interfaith effort celebrating religious pluralism, a term used to describe the acceptance of all religious paths and promoting their coexistence (some words borrowed from wikipedia as usual). A part of the first paragraph from the Pluralism Sunday website: On the [...]

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Brandon of the blog named Siris wrote a post on Immanuel Kant’s guide to a good dinner party. On Kant’s view dining alone is bad for a philosopher: it encourages ‘intellectual self-gnawing’ that leads to a lack of vitality. Eating with at least one other companion, on the other hand, allows for a good interchange [...]

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I will always remember going for runs with my father. I don’t remember how often we did that, it was simply one of those activities you do, as a human, to take good care of yourself. Consequently I didn’t think of myself as a runner — I was actually in the process of becoming a [...]

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Today I again stumbled on an old article I bookmarked/miniblogged on November 6, 2008 (two days after Obama won the election). Titled The American void, Simon Critchley wrote about the role of belief and faith in Obama’s worldview, and the nature of his conversion to Christianity. It was the musings on the “anthropologist’s distance” that [...]

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How do you think about the future? How does the past influence you? Do you live “in the moment”, is that something to strive towards? Dr. Philip Zimbardo gave a talk at RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) about time perspectives. He discusses past orientated, present orientated and future [...]

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In Many Faiths, One Truth, an op-ed in the NY Times, the Dalai Lama (a Buddhist leader of religious officials of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism) calls for religious tolerance, for finding common ground among faiths, bridging needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. I couldn’t agree more. [...]

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I spotted this on TED (autoplays) this morning: Viktor Frankl is a holocaust survivor and the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Positive psychology ftw?

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Approximately September last year I stumbled upon a particular app in the Android market: a Tao Te Ching app by Barclay Osborn. It contains the original Chinese and three public domain translations (specifically: a translation from 1891 by James Legges, D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus’ 1913 translation and Dwight Goddard and Henri Borels’ 1919 [...]

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We are a story telling species. Our culture and our minds developed around the stories we told, the narratives we weaved. And they weren’t just narratives on some big screen that we watched for two hours, and then walked out and continued with “real life”. Our narratives were woven into our lives. And still are. [...]

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