He's Back

Why I Started Writing Again:
(You can skip this and head right to the main idea for the day. I won't mind.)
After a long hiatus, I've decided to return to the blogosphere, if for no other reason, than to clarify all the thoughts that keep company with my brain. I expect that most of my readers have long given up on me and that my writing will go unnoticed. Yet, I still find the direction of politics and society in general quite disturbing, and I wish to contribute what I can to clarify and promote those ideals which lead us to choose better paths.

I have little desire anymore to blog about the general news (usually bad) or to address every silly whim promoted by society (also usually bad). Instead, I wish to write about such unpopular subjects as morals, ethics, absolutes, and the lessons that I've learned. To leftists, yes, I'm still the bigoted, homophobic, racist, misogynist, H8er that you think I am. To the rest of the world, I'm just a guy with some ideas about how to live a better life than to give in to the sophistic relativism and specious reasoning that plagued the pre-Socratic Greeks and which plague today's modern society.

Thank you all for finding my blog and for those who have stuck by me over the years.

The Main Idea:
A short while ago I attended an all-faculty meeting at the university where I teach. By some strange and unexpected turn of events, I attended a session of faculty exploring the newest theories and ideas about critical thinking. I say this was unusual because the concepts of "critical thinking" at the university level usually include the latest means of indoctrinating students into leftist dogma - including promoting the socialist ideals of command economy, hedonism, and groupthink.

Yet, as I sat in that presentation, I realized that all of the presenters were different from the usual group of sophists which tend to occupy university teaching positions. This group had ideals based on very concrete religious concepts, and which valued absolute ideals rather than relative values. Instead of clinging to modern leftist dogma, the panel of presenters were free to ask real questions about how to best help students learn. (I know! What a concept, right?) They formulated arguments without relying on the faulty premises that seem so prevalent in university curriculums across the Western world.

In fact, they could look at all sorts of ideas in order to present solutions to solve the problems of the dumbing down of American students. And these came not in spite of their religious ideals but, and this is the kicker, because of their religious ideals.

I learned a lot from those women and men who presented their ideas on critical thinking that day. The most important of which is this: metacognition (how we think about thinking) is best served when we understand, and hold, those ideals which ground us in reality. Those who claim to have no such ideals or those who claim to be above such ideals, just as the sophists of old, have no basis from which to avoid the faulty premises and conclusions of modern thought.

With faulty premises, modern leftist thought can never come to correct conclusions.