Written between August 5 and October 2, 2006 Read the entire document in PDF format: Complex Adaptive Systems Essay v2 Table of Contents Complexity Theory for Dummies (Like Me) 2 Introduction 2 Complexity Theory in Context 2 What is an SOS or CAS? 4 The Universal Diagram 5 How Patterns Form in Complex Systems 7…
A PDF version of this Document: http://goo.gl/JvlTY And Answers to Other “Tough Gospel Questions” in Reply to a Faithful Mormon Scholar’s Defence of Mormonism bob mccue June 20, 2004 Version 3 Nothing falsifies history more than logic. Fransois Guizot Introduction In a June 13, 2004 article on page B7 of the Observer/Faith & Reason section of…
For the last two Sundays, I attended Sky Church. The meetings involve confronting primal fear, and staring it down. This is done on the basis of a desire to fly, an intellectual understanding of the tiny risks you are in fact facing if you choose to do so. Then, while either staring down your demons,…
The following is a lightly edited version of the note I sent to a physicist/neuroscientist with whom I participate on a science and religion e-mail list. I have immense respect for this fellow. However, we have been politely disagreeing with regard to the strategies that are most likely to be helpful to people who want…
This meditation is inspired by an article from the NY Times a friend recently sent me that was written by an intellectual, “born again Catholicâ€, who eloquently described the paradoxical nature of her re-acceptance of her childhood faith. I have cut and pasted the article at the end of this piece. It is worth reading.…
The statement “All religious beliefs should be respected!” or the question “To what extent, and how, should I respect religious beliefs other people have?” come up often enough in my correspondence that I have finally decided to record a relatively succinct response that I can send instead of dictating more or less the same thing…
So, what if the non-Mormon academic community agree with these wordprint studies in more or less the same fashion they did the Mormon related DNA research? Here are a few of the strained arguments in support of the Mormon position that I expect to see trotted out before the Book of Mormon is eventually acknowledged…
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the probability of changing one’s foundational beliefs declines as age advances. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the older we get the less plastic our neural connections become. The second reason, however, is far more compelling from my perspective. Larry Iannaccone explains this…
I found Jon Haidt’s reference in The Happiness Hypothesis to the literature related to ethics of community versus ethics of individuality to be useful. In particular, it was his suggestion that perhaps we would not want to completely eliminate either one or the other that got me thinking about this concept. There is lots of…
I still receive email on a fairly regular basis from the faithful of various stripes (Mormon, FLDS, Evangelical) who encourage me to take the time to consider their latest theories and evidence as to why they have “the truth”. Early on in my recovery/exodus process, I diligently followed up on much of what I received…