In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges playfully suggests through an unreliable narrator that Don Quixote could have been written twice, once by Miguel de Cervantes in the seventieth-century and again by a fictional French … Read the rest
Month: April 2020
Waiting on My Rights
I’m reading 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know, and was surprised by Barron v Baltimore (1833), which determined that the Bill of Rights doesn’t actually restrict the states. Textually, the ruling seems to be sound as the First … Read the rest
The Difficulty of Giving
In Theravada Buddhism, the Bodhisattva (the Buddha pre-enlightenment) spent 540 lives cultivating the ten perfections so that he could at last be enlightened as Siddhartha. The most difficult to master is generosity. The Bodhisattva began by giving his wealth. Then … Read the rest
God’s Lie to Abraham
Earlier we determined that commands can deceive and possibly be lies because they can be used to convey deceptions or lies. What is the theological significance? We have reason to believe that God deceives Abraham, one of His greatest servants. … Read the rest
Deceptive Commands, Lying Commands
In the The Man in the High Castle, Inspector Kido orders his subordinate to hunt down an enemy operative. His last instruction is: “I can’t interrogate a corpse.” Of course, this is an instruction. A necromancer newly bereft of … Read the rest