Recap, Recap Technique
Seth Freeman, interviewed by Marty Nemko: Especially these days, such conversations can be stressful. It may be helpful to agree to use the Recap, Recap technique. I’ll explain with an example of how I might introduce the “negotiation:” I’d like to talk politics but to make it safe for both of us, should we try […]
Definition: Key Man Risk
“Key Man Risk” is the threat posed to a company from over-reliance on the skills of one or a few individuals. When ratings agency Fitch lowered Berkshire Hathaway’s rating from AAA to AA-plus, they noted: [Berkshire Hathaway’s] ratings also continue to reflect Fitch long-standing concerns with respect to “key man” risk in the form of […]
Animal Rights and Legal Protection
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The Selfish Gene, Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with […]
Human Life Has Absolutely No Meaning
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine […]
Counter Effects of Natural Methods of Population Limitation
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The Selfish Gene, It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not […]
The Stories That People Invent
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our […]
Children of Religious Parents
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The God Delusion, A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she […]
The Danger of Religious Certainty
Richard Holloway writes in Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue the ardour and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging. Which […]
Comparing Theists, Deists, Pantheists, and Atheists
Richard Dawkins writes in his best-selling The God Delusion, Let us remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic […]
Dependency of Nature on Our Perception
Wallace Stevens, the renowned American Modernist poet, spent most of his life working as a lawyer at an insurance executive. He wrote poetry privately and suggested the dependency of nature on our perception to establish any meaning and value, as well as the imagination’s limitations. Exploring the role of a poet in tracing “the resemblances […]