Whether or not you believe in one or more deities or even in life after death, there are advantages to being religious.  This is counterintuitive but true. Being an atheist is not the same as being faithless, not the same as believing in nothing. Many atheists, are vigorous enough in opposing the widely accepted canon of Western…

In a earlier blog I talked about the extended period of dependence seen in our millennials. Many are living in our basements, having failed to find work, marry, buy homes, have their own families. Here I am wondering out loud, whether this extended period of adolescence might not turn out to be all bad. If…

Animals have devised a period of dependence and apprenticeship for their immature offspring called childhood. That strategy is meant to improve the fitness of the next generation but is expensive in time and effort. Most animals, for example dumb mollusks, and all plants too, take an opposite and equally efficient approach in producing in large…

Kids have more fun surprising us and themselves. They have youthful enthusiasm deriving from newness, the first time experience. Children wonder about everything and are questioning all the time. And when hormones kick in, young love waxes hot. Nothing trumps the depth of feeling of a childhood crush. Never mind that you are more likely…

  Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By…