On Medium: Pragmatic Morality and the Buddha’s Nihilism

Read on about how the Noble Eightfold Path is a tool you throw away when you’re awakened, so nirvana is a nihilistic mental condition.

Medium Articles

The following is a clickable reading list that maps out this blog’s more recent articles, the ones I've been posting on Medium, and this list will be updated as I add new ones. I’ve tried to arrange the readings in a logical order so that the more general, central, or background readings come before the others in each category. The older articles can be found here.

On Medium: Trumpian Evil Is More Seductive than Democratic Lameness

Here's an article about why we seek political apocalypse and tire of routine mediocrities.

On Medium: The Wallflower Niche

Read on about an analogy that shows how people are anomalies in the animal kingdom.

On Medium: Why Conservatives Loved Eric Voegelin’s Take on Modern “Gnosticism”

Read on about the pseudo-intellectual rhetoric that excuses the reversion to savagery.

On Medium: The Top 3 Prizes in Nature’s Dangerous Game

Read on to compare the coping strategies for rational alienation, which are sex, civilized distractions, and artistic spirituality.

On Medium: Are Religions More Helpful than Godless Cultures?

Read on to weigh the pragmatic, moral, and aesthetic comparisons of worldviews to determine whether religious cultures are better than irreligious ones.

On Medium: Cosmic Perils and the Bright Side of Death

Read on about the existential importance of the shift from adult vanity to the enlightened humility of old age.

On Medium: A Sobering Look at the Self-Help Mindset

Read on about the sophistry that counts for wisdom in the shallow, neoliberal, self-help marketplace.

On Medium: The Conservative’s Bad-Faith Flight from Humanism

Here's an article that sorts through some old conservative rationalizations of tribal squalor and brutal oppression.

On Substack: Should All Pragmatists be Theists?

Here's a dialogue about the pragmatic case for theism.

On Medium: Does the Desire for God Show that God is Real?

Here's a dialogue on whether the strangeness of subjective experience indicates that reality is exactly as strange as God.

On Medium: Artistry Matters More than Truth in a Postmodern Society

Here's an article on Trumpism, AI slop, and the rise of aesthetic standards in an Orwellian nightmare.

On Medium: Religion's Coverups of Civilization’s Spiritual Purpose

Read on about the awe-inspiring, existential stakes of mundane tasks, and the best spirituality is based on the most realistic secular humanism.

On Medium: The Challenge for Enlightened Liberals

Here's an article about how our existential predicament constrains what counts as social progress.