This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade-- a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense. We make and test risky predictions all the time; our success is not dogma, but a highly probable indication of evolution's basic truth.
Error | Grief | Imagination | Man | Science | Truth | Work | Truths |
Why, then, have we been bamboozled into accepting the usual tale without questioning? I suspect two primary reasons: we love a sensible and satisfying story, and we are disinclined to challenge apparent authority (like textbooks!). But do remember that most satisfying tales are false.
Error | Insight | Literature | Promise | Writing | Loss | Instruction |
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
So a fool is one that hath lost his wisdom and right notion of God and divine things which were communicated to man by creation; one dead in sin, yet one not so much void of rational faculties as of grace in those faculties, not one that wants reason, but abuses his reason. In Scripture the word signifies foolish.
Desire | God | Good | Love | Man | Mind | Object | Order | Sense | Wisdom | God |
The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
Error | Organic | People | Learn | Understand |
Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.
Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund
The dreams have no dream. Just as the technicolor heroes do not allow us to forget for a second that they are normal people, type-cast public faces and investments, so under the thin tinsel of schematically produced fantasy emerges in unmistakable outline the skeleton of cinema-ontology, the whole obligatory hierarchy of values, the canon of the undesirable or the exemplary. There is nothing more practical than escape, nothing more fervently espoused to big business: we are abducted into the distance only to have the laws of empiricist living hammered from afar, unhampered by empirical possibilities of evasion, into our own consciousness. The escape is full of message. And message, the opposite, looks what it is: the wish to flee from flight. It reifies the resistance to reification.
Important | Injustice | Injustice | Object | Phenomena | World |
Stoics, The Stoics or Stoicism NULL
The soul should know whither it is going and whence it came, what is good for it and what is evil, what it seeks and what it avoids, and what is that Reason which distinguishes between the desirable and the undesirable, and thereby tames the madness of our desires and calms the violence of our fears. [Seneca]
Choice | Dawn | Duty | Good | Harmony | Ideas | Morality | Nature | Object | Order | Worth | Value |
One’s age should be tranquil, as one’s childhood should be playful; hard work at either extremity of human existence seems to me out of place: the morning and the evening should be alike cool and peaceful; at mid-day the sun may burn, and men may labor under it.
Common Sense | Insanity | Mind | Sense |
The universe itself is the primary sacred community. All human religion should be considered as participation in the religious aspect of the universe itself. It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself.
A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun.
For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.
Tell us, ye men who are so jealous of right and of honor, who take sudden fire at every insult, and suffer the slightest imagination of another’s contempt, or another’s unfairness, to chase from your bosom every feeling of complacency; ye men whom every fancied affront puts in such a turbulence of emotion, and in whom every fancied infringement stirs up the quick and the resentful appetite for justice, how will you stand the rigorous application of that test by which the forgiven of God are ascertained, even that the spirit of forgiveness is in them, and by which it will be pronounced whether you are, indeed, the children of the Highest, and perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect?
Curiosity | Evidence | Experience | History | Lord | Nature | Object | Phenomena | Philosophy | Science | Spirit | Learn |
Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can.
Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Error |
The difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend as well as he.
Action | Body | Change | Day | Distinction | Imagination | Impression | Light | Man | Memory | Men | Noise | Object | Past | Present | Receive | Sense | Time |