Mormon Apologetics Redux

Some time ago, I wrote my usual long, verbose, redundant, meandering, biased, ad hominem, misleading analysis of how Mormon and other apologetic groups work. It was, of course, described this way by a Mormon apologist. You can find it at http://www.mccue.cc/bob/documents/rs….. For reasons unclear to me, I woke up this morning with a few things to…

Trevor Southey’s “Dark Light”

Trevor Southey is one of the greatest living Mormon or post-Mormon artists. You can see his work at http://www.trevorsouthey.com/ . His “Dark Light” has come to have significant meaning for me. You can find a picture of this work at http://picasaweb.google.ca/bob.mccue4… it is an approximately 3′ x 5′ mixed-media piece. A bronze figure, about 3 feet in…

Stocks Are Down; Religion Is Up

Today’s Globe and Mail has an interesting article with regard to the recent upsurge in church attendance. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servle… No news here really. Religious belief and behavior are to large extent a response to perceived danger. That is not to say that this is all religion is. It is a complex social phenomenon that performs many…

Uncertainty, Depression And Creativity

The recent psychological literature has noted a striking increase in depression rates at more or less the same time as the psychological community has turned its eye, and pen, toward what makes people happy.[1] It seems, to an extent, that the more aware we become of our potential for happiness, the more depressed we are.…

Do Liberals Need Conservatives And Vice Versa?

While contemplating life the day after an historic US election, I decided to jot a bit about basic, ironic, differences between political liberals and conservatives, and how small group dynamics (in particular, religious group dynamics) play into this. For background, I highly recommend Jon Haidt’s TED talk athttp://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jo…. Haidt is one of our most consistently…