In epistemology, parsimony; in ontology, lavishness.

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The One, True, Correct Interpretation of Nietzsche (Aesthetic Materialism V)

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On Nietzsche's Perspectivism [SPOILER ALERT] "There are no facts, only interpretations." This is has become the Nietzsche quote, even more than "God is dead," which has become a bit passe (and of course Nietzsche didn't come up with that one).  Liquefactionists , especially, tend to love this quote.  "There are no facts, only interpretations" would seem to be the rallying cry of what is sometimes called postmodernism , if such a thing as a postmodernist rallying cry could exist.  Perhaps postmodernism could be renamed The Great Unrallying.  Postmodernism is the name we give for what happened when the wind gave out from modernism's sails: the doldrums.  [For more on this, see here .] It's an understandable sentiment, and there is a strange kind of dignity to it.  Similarly and perhaps relatedly, William S. Burroughs used to complain about most Americans being Christians or similarly religious in one way or another, and then most
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Why I Love Religion

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  I'm too much of a materialist to agree with people like Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher and Sam Harris. They see world problems such as war, sexual repression, the oppression of women, terrorism, and so on as being caused by religion. As a materialist, I find the notion that an idea could cause these things to happen rather dubious. Dig a little deeper, and one always finds economic forces behind all of these problems.  Rather than scapegoating and blaming the existence of systemic problems on the interior beliefs and thoughts of individual human beings, I think it's a better use of our time to focus on how privilege and oppression can be embedded in structural institutions.  Religion isn't the enemy.  Indeed, by vilifying religion, we risk alienating ourselves from potential allies in the struggle against real material economic interests that run contrary to our own. My name is "Ian."  When I was growing up, this was an extremely unusual name.  No one that I
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A Defense of the Ego

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I love egos.  I love big egos and small egos and purple egos and polka-dot egos. It's astonishing, when you bring up the word "ego" how people will immediately begin to snarl, their lips curling in aggression and disgust.  But ego is simply the Greek word for "I".  It represents the self, or more often, the self-concept.  If you say, "I hate the ego," this is not too far from saying, "I hate I" or "I hate myself" or "I hate the very concept of myself." When I use the term "ego," I am thinking of the mental construct that you create, to some degree consciously and mostly unconsciously, on the basis of your social and cultural context, to represent yourself to yourself as a distinct individual being, with your own desires, attributes, personality, and so on. There are some people out there who think that egos are bad, and that they should be annihilated - that if we could attain permanent egolessness, we
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