Where the field of psychology has continued to be the main authority on the nature of one’s inner world – thoughts, feelings and anything concerning the subjective inner-psyche, there seems in recent years to be an awakening of a new cultural sociology of emotions. While perhaps not as statistically and empirically rigorous as the psychological…
Author: avishaiella
Pascal’s Wager – the Best Argument in Favor of Faith
Let us examine this point of view and declare: ‘Either God exists, or He does not.’ To which view shall we incline? Reason cannot decide for us one way or the other: we are separated by an infinite gulf. At the extremity of this infinite distance, a game is in progress, where either heads or…
The Role of God in the Evolutionary Emergence of Cooperation
“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead to the collective good of society. Some maps take their followers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths […] The maps were made by the people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work.” – Scott Adams, 2004….
The Three Motivations For Love: The Hidden Negative Effects of Authenticity and Choice
Introduction: In this essay, I will argue that the current neo-liberal psychotherapeutic discourse on autonomy and self-fulfillment has invaded popular culture so pervasively as to become indistinguishable from daily-ethical “common sense”. In the realm of romantic relationships, this shift in focus promoting allegedly desired states of “authenticity”, “happiness” and “relationship health” have come to obscure…
The Long Lost Letter Exchange Between the Original Stoic, Buddhist and Taoist
This is an excerpt of a news article published on fake-news-articles-so-superfake.com on the 8th of October, 2021. For many years the consensus of historical scholarship assumed that the great philosophical traditions of east and west developed for the most part independently, with minimal or no contact with one another. This alleged independence though plausible, seemed…
On The Function of Philosophy
“To be a philosopher means to travel all the time, questions in philosophy are more essential than answers.” – (Karl Jaspers) Here Jaspers seems to identify, by way of analogy, the philosopher with the traveller, claiming that it is the questions that are “most essential” in the process of doing philosophy rather than the answers…
The Psychological Significance of Christ’s Double Life: God and Man
Summary: This essay discusses the unique combination imbedded in the Christ figure, as being both the abstract all-viewing God as well as an anthropomorphized deity. By understanding the role of uncertainty in the anthropomorphizing tendency, it is speculated that the dual-nature of Jesus enables the “hijacking” of the mentalizing system, by using the same social…
A Walking Paradox
“I’ve always been told that… well nothing, nobody told me nothing. I got here to where I am, and nobody told me nothing!” I grumbled; laid back my back again, gazed at Virgil’s stupid understanding face, and then I realized – I was pissed. I’ve noticed that my chair though straight, was bent against me…
A True and Deep Story About a Stick and an Ass
Canyon Colca, Peru, Three-day trekking, August, 2019: Known as the second deepest canyon in the world (not the first since it skipped one too many lessons in Jewish philosophy), my tremendous arrogance becoming increasingly clear every step carrying the redundant 16 kilograms with each moment of descent and ascent (which were equally physical as well…
The Strange Stranger (El Extraño Extraño)
As always, I was working quietly in my small shop, hidden by the newly opened five-star hotel of grotesque size standing proudly on the main street. Behind the great building, if you take two lefts and a right, you can find me. There I lurk in the shadows, allowed to carry on with my work,…