Blog Archives
MISS MARPLE AND BTK Tom McBride Agatha Christie amateur detective Miss Marple is a doddering but commanding old lady who brings only a few weapons to the task. One of these is that she disbelieves most people and is suspicious of what they say.. Another is that she believes in evil, plus “everlasting life..” One thinks nowadays that these are both bad ideas. How can you live from day to day if you have to fact-check everyone? And isn’t everlasting life a superstition? But these values work in the world of Miss Marple crime fiction, where it’s a wicked world and gullibility is a disadvantage. “The world is too wicked for us to believe everything that people say, I fear.” That’s Miss Marple’s mantra. One Read on »
The Unofficial Beloit ZEITGIST LIST for the Class of 2029 by Tom McBride • August 17, 2025 The Unofficial Beloit Zeitgeist List–for the Class of 2029 Tom McBride (solely responsible for contents) (Original Concept by Ron Nief) Zeitgeist = The prevailing cultural climate Class of 2029 = born 2007; entering college this year This is The Zeitgeist speaking The Class of 2029 missed the Cold War, only to be thrust into a new, domestic one based on divided cultures. Some of them will turn to their old pal, Chat GPT, when it comes to having to write a term paper. Their parents were born when Jimmy Carter was president, and they themselves were born just as Jerry Ford was dying. They have no memory of any president before Obama. Read on »
How to Find the Meaning of Life By Making Your Father Stub His Toe Recently a close friend of mine gave a lovely devotional about Father’s Day. He said that life has enjoyed many blessings, and to God is owed thanks for them. He encourages his children to attend Mass daily to offer gratitude to God. He is right: gratitude is good and ingratitude is bad, in the way that modesty is good and treachery is bad. And it is also the case that saying our blessings come entirely from ourselves is false, and saying the contrary is true. Gratitude is hence both good and true. It is, nonetheles, the argument of this essay that goodness and truth are no bases for the meaning of life, but that only beauty is, including the beauty Read on »
–Tom McBride Against Love: Where It Comes From & Why it’s Overrated –Tom McBride We study weasels. They do not study us. Why? Because we have learned to love one another. That is the main advantage of love. We can study weasels. We can also build bridges and recite poetry to each other. We can even make war on each other. Everyone thinks love is grand. Putin loves Russia. Trump loves tariffs. Hitler loved Eva Bruan, his dog Blondie, and Aryans. You will not go wrong if you say you like love. Love comes from the greatest human advantage: the capacity for communicative collaboration. We can work together; compare notes; achieve things (even children). If cooperation were not a competitive virtue, love would Read on »
Only After Human Beings Vanish Can the Problem of Consciousness Be Solved Tom McBride 1 Connection If you follow popular science at all, you know that two common themes are when the sun will run out of fuel, and how we can solve the problem of consciousness. The two are rarely if ever connected. It is time that they were. Scientists know that in a billion years the sun will transition to a red giant and life on earth will be uninhabitable. Multiply a billion times 365 days and watch your calculator explode. You and I have nothing to fret about. Scientists are much less sure about consciousness. Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin, once Read on »
The Selfish: KEY : A New Theory of Music Genes are selfish. But so are piano keys. In 1976, Richard Dawkins transformed the popular conception of biology and of Darwin by proclaiming that genes are selfish but that nature honors them and nothing else. The bumper sticker version might read, “Nature likes selfishness.” This is a misconception of what Dawkins actually said. But in his still best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, he did say that genes, if personified, would be like people who care about being selected and honored and nothing else. They don’t even “care” about other genes unless they see an opportunity to combine them in a body. As for you and me, we are just on loan to our genes. We are gene-carriers Read on »
5 Quick Reasons to Believe in God–and 1 Reason Not To We know that God, so defined, knows all and can do all. But God has a way of not showing up the way someone does to teach a class or keep an appointment. Still, there are five reasons to believe God exists. 1. Insurance. This is an old idea from the philosopher Pascal. If God doesn’t exist and you believe in God, you’ve lost nothing. If God does exist and you believe God does, you get to Heaven. Insurance with a free premium payment. 2. Regularity. Sure, the sun and moon and stars don’t move with total regularity, but…close enough. Most things are predictable. If you plan to go to the Read on »
WAS SHAKESPEARE PRO-DEMOCRACY? By Tom McBride In exit polls after the 2024 election, many people said they’d voted for Trump though they don’t like him; but someone has to get prices down. Trump may be a corrupt liar, but there’s the price of bacon to worry about. Can Shakespeare help us understand what’s going on? Shakespeare had no idea of today’s mass democracy with political parties, rhetoric, debates, lobbies, and advertisements. Lucky him! He missed the 2024 election in the United States. But he did display a sense of the issues entailed by democracy–in his great play Julius Caesar. Caesar himself doesn’t appear that often, but he is the title subject and, in the end, the historical winner. A number of Roman Read on »