I’ve invented several games for use as teaching tools in my classroom: one of them, a game called ‘Iron Age: Council of the Clans,’ got so popular among my students that they encouraged me to publish it, which I did.
What matters is being a particular kind of person. At the most basic level, it matters that you are the kind of person who resolves problems with force of thought and feeling instead of with the force of arms.
There is nothing natural, inevitable, or necessary about the labyrinth of fear. We can liberate ourselves. There are better ways to live. Someone has to take the initiative to love and trust her fellow living creature and set us all free.
The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I’d like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a ‘circle of meaning.’
Perhaps this is one of the last remaining strands of my Catholic upbringing, but to me the word ‘worship’ means absolute unquestioning affirmation of the authority of the deity. I’ll not have that in my life. If you are wise, neither will you.
My earliest interest in game design came when I was in primary school, and my parents bought a Commodore 128 computer. I taught myself to write programs in BASIC, and then I made my own games.
The birthplace of ‘Western’ civilization is generally agreed to be Greece, and its birth date is generally agreed to be some time during the 6th century B.C.E. Obviously, there is not one single dramatic moment that definitively started the whole thing.
My first Kickstarter project created a book called ‘Clear and Present Thinking’, a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students.
People in minority religious communities, like Paganism, often feel isolated and even marginalized by others because of the lifestyle differences associated with their spiritual path.
Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.
The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.