The Philosophical Optimist

            I have heard it said that you should not care about what a man thinks about anything unless you first know what he thinks about everything.   That is, a man’s general worldview affects everything about him, and is perhaps the most important thing about him to know.   It is unfortunate, then, that too many of us spend so little time reflecting on how we view the stage upon which we find ourselves playing out this drama we call human history, and how much of our thinking on the subject we allow to be outsourced to the general cultural climate of our time.             That climate is, as it has always been, one of idolatry; it is only the specific idols of the era that change, and even those only so much.   Two thousand years ago, Christ had warned us that we could not serve both God and Mammon—a Canaanite deity who, like his Classical equivalent Plut...

            A good idea, once someone thinks of it, seems to show up everywhere.   Somebody somewhere invents the wheeled vehicle, and pretty soon, everyone is using it.   Once upon a time someone managed to domesticate that naturally occurring plasma we call “fire,” and here we are still talking about him (or her, for all we know).   The ancients Greeks honored this man so highly, they made him a god—more than just a god, one of the Titans, the generation that came before the gods proper—and, in some versions, at least, this god, Prometheus, was the same god that made humanity in the first place, suggesting a sort of mythic equivalency between being a fire-user and being human.             Another popular god—one also associated with certain naturally occurring instances of plasma physics—is Thor, the Norse god of thunder (whose very name—in all its various f...