Paul Hazelden's Articles (109)

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Improving the World

All of this site can be seen as a search for ways to improve the world, make it a better place. This page is for the 'meta level' question - how do we promote and implement all the specific ways to make the world a better place? These are the ideas

Spirituality

As social creatures we need to share our spirituality, and shared spirituality is what we call 'religion'. You can have your own private spirituality, but as soon as you try to communicate it, you need words; and as soon as you find a way which help

Binary Thinking

This is a common theme running through many of the issues we face: it is very easy to see the world as a set of binary choices - either this is true, or that is. But, even if our choices are sometimes binary, the issues we face rarely are.

I Will Build My Church

Jesus promised His first disciples, "I will build my church", but it seems unlikely that the Church we see today was what He had in mind at the time. If we are genuinely seeking to follow Jesus, then we have to ask ourselves: when Jesus promised to

Social Theory

Our conversations regularly circle around aspects of social theory - how society operates, and how it could or should operate better.

Real Life

There has been a lot of talk recently about various aspects of artificial life - artificial intelligence, sentient machines, computers gaining self-awareness, and so on. It seems self-evident that we can easily distinguish between living and non-liv

Farming

[Back to Physical Challenges]

Introduction

This is clearly a massive topic.

Because there are no clear boundaries, this topic will cover not only farming, but all food production and use of the land to deliberately grow things or raise animals.

Growi

Gods, Ancient and Modern

People constantly talk about God, whether they believe in God or not, and they clearly have something in mind when they do so. But, when you move beyond the beliefs of a specific group, there is almost no agreement about what a 'God' (or 'god') is.

God and Gods

There is a common assumption in many Western countries that if you are religious, then you 'believe in God', and that your choice of religion is all about believing in the 'right' God. However, while you will find a God or multiple gods in many reli

War

This is an attempt to identify the key aspects of war. Almost everyone agrees that war is bad, something to be avoided if possible, but we are not very clear what the ‘if possible’ might consist of: whoever you talk to, the responsibility for avoidi

What does it mean to be human?

In Western thought, there are two traditional ways of understanding what it means to be human, associated with the two major philosophical traditions found in the Greek and Hebrew cultures: in the Greek tradition, a human is a soul trapped in a body,

Human Nature

I believe that human beings are essentially good and rational, but we are pulled in two different directions because we are both social and selfish. Everything else, pretty much, comes from this basic starting point.

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