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Some scientists see religion as a threat to the scientific method that should be resisted. But faith “is really asking a different set of questions,”

Why It’s So Hard for Scientists to Believe in God?

Why It’s So Hard for Scientists to Believe in God? – Big Think

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Western Philosophy

Philosophy is amazing, it gives us humans tools to experience the world, it teaches critical thinking, close reading, clear writing, and logical analysis; it uses these to understand the language we use to describe the world and our place within it.

Plato: The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, authored by Plato around 375 BC, concerning justice the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato’s best-known work and has proven to be one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.

In the dialogue, Socrates talks with various Athenians and foreigners about the meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man. They consider the natures of existing regimes and then propose a series of different, hypothetical cities in comparison, culminating in Kallipolis, a city-state ruled by a philosopher-king. They also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and of poetry in society. The dialogue’s setting seems to be during the Peloponnesian War. Continue Reading → Plato

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Moral Philosophy, Philosophical, Theology, test

Moral Philosophy: Moral philosophy is the branch of philosophy that contemplates what is right and wrong. It explores the nature of morality and examines how people should live their lives in relation to others. … It addresses specific, practical issues of moral importance such as war and capital punishment.

Moral: Concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

Philosophy: Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.  Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation.

Philosophical: Relating or devoted to the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. “philosophical discussions about free will”

Personality: The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.

Test: A procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something, especially before it is taken into widespread use.

Khan Academy. Most people are held back not by their innate ability, but by their mindset. They think intelligence is fixed, but it isn’t. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you use it and struggle, the more it grows. New research shows we can take control of our ability to learn. We can all become better learners. We just need to build our brains in the right way. Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace. 
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Justice is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online. Nearly a thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Michael Sandel,  talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship. In this 12part series, Sandel challenges us with hard moral dilemmas and invites us to ponder the right thing to do in politics and in our everyday lives. The course he’s been teaching has made him one of the most popular teachers in the world.” 
Continue Reading → Watch Episodes

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy was founded in 1995 to provide open access to detailed, scholarly information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The Encyclopedia receives no funding and operates through the volunteer work of the editors, authors, volunteers, and technical advisers. At present, the IEP has over a million visitors per month and just under 20 million page views per year. The Encyclopedia is free of charge and available to all users of the Internet worldwide.
Continue Reading → Political Philosophy

Ten Commandments. Humanity has everything it needs to create a good world. We’ve had it for 3,000 years. It’s the Ten Commandments; ten basic, yet profound instructions for how to lead a moral life. If everyone followed the Ten Commandments, we would not need armies or police; marriages and families would be stronger; truth would be a paramount value. Dennis Prager explains how the Ten Commandments led to the creation of Western Civilization and why they remain relevant to your life today. 
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Dr. Jordan B Peterson is a professor and clinical psychologist. The videos are derived from two sources:1. His University of Toronto courses Maps of Meaning (which describes how values, including beliefs about good and evil, regulate emotion and motivation); and Personality & Its Transformations (which describes psychological theories from Eliade, Jung, Freud, Rogers, Gray, Luria, Sokolov, Vinogradova, Panksepp, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Solzhenitsyn as well as psychometric models such as the Big Five). 2. His public lectures on topics of general psychological relevance, including the meaning of music, the significance of hero mythology, and the structure of the world as represented in religion. 
Continue Reading → Dr. Jordan B Peterson
Jordan B Peterson → Maps of Meaning

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity’s role in the secular world have become widely influential. The Cost of Discipleship by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer considered a classic of Christian thought. It is centered on an exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Bonhoeffer spells out what he believes it means to follow Christ. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler’s euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. Later, he was hung by the Nazi regime.
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Perimeter Institute is a leading center for scientific research, training, and educational outreach in foundational theoretical physics. Founded in 1999 in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, its mission is to advance our understanding of the universe at the most fundamental level, stimulating the breakthroughs that could transform our future. Perimeter also trains the next generation of physicists through innovative programs and shares the excitement and wonder of science with students, teachers, and the general public. 
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Mensa is the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world. It is a non-profit organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test. Mensa’s constitution lists three purposes: “to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity; to encourage research into nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members”. To these ends, the organization is involved with programs for gifted children, literacy, and scholarships, and it holds numerous gatherings including an annual summit. 
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Sue Khim Brilliant’s mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals in STEM one person, one question, and one small commitment to learning at a time. We enable great teachers to illuminate the soul of math, science, and engineering through bite-sized, interactive learning experiences. Our courses explore the laws that shape our world and elevate math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. We aim to cultivate a world of better learners, thinkers, and problem solvers. Continue Reading → Website

Intelligence is about brainpower, whereas rational thinking is about control. Critical thinking skills are more important than IQ. Having a creative mind is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative. Applying the conventional thinking strategies of creative geniuses will make you more creative in your work and personal life.

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe is a philosophical theory of the relationship between mind and reality. Its author, Christopher Michael Langan, has been billed as “the smartest man in America”, with an IQ reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at around 195. Langan created the CTMU in the mid-1980s while working as a bar bouncer on Long Island. Among his claims for the theory are that it constitutes absolute truth, provides the logical framework of a Theory of Everything, and proves the existence of God. 
Continue Reading →  Website

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe:
A New Kind of Reality Theory, Christopher Michael Langan
Continue Reading → Website pdf

Martin Luther. Can one man change the world? The life and work of Martin Luther prove the answer to that question is an unqualified, “yes.” Stephen Cornils of the Wartburg Theological Seminary details the rebellion that fractured a centuries-old religion and changed the course of history.
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Science “knowledge: Georges Lemaître a Roman Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He proposed on theoretical grounds that the universe is expanding, which was observationally confirmed soon afterward by Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble’s law, or the Hubble-Lemaître law, and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the “Big Bang Theory” of the creation of the universe, originally calling it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom.”

Love of Wisdom: Philosophy is a way of thinking about the world, the universe, and society. It works by asking very basic questions about the nature of human thought, the nature of the universe, and the connections between them. The ideas in philosophy are often general and abstract.

The Mission of PragerU. The most important thing you can do for America today. What makes America different? Specifically, what makes American values different? And why are those values struggling to gain traction in today’s environment, whether in media, entertainment, or academia? In five-minute videos with some of the world’s best thinkers, PragerU reaches tens of millions of people per year and explains what makes the United States and its values unique. In this short video narrated by our founder, Dennis Prager, learn about PragerU’s mission, vision, and promise. Continue Reading → PragerU

Mathematics. Mathematics, the science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved from elemental practices of counting, measuring, and describing the shapes of objects. It deals with logical reasoning and quantitative calculation, and its development has involved an increasing degree of idealization and abstraction of its subject matter. Since the 17th century, mathematics has been an indispensable adjunct to the physical sciences and technology, and in more recent times it has assumed a similar role in the quantitative aspects of the life sciences.
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Theoretical Physicist. How to become a good Theoretical Physicist
Theoretical Physics is like a skyscraper. It has solid foundations in elementary mathematics and notions of classical (pre-20th century) physics. Don’t think that pre-20th-century physics is “irrelevant” since now we have so much more. In those days, the solid foundations were laid of the knowledge that we enjoy now. Don’t try to construct your skyscraper without first reconstructing these foundations yourself. The first few floors of our skyscraper consist of advanced mathematical formalisms that turn the Classical Physics theories into beauties of their own. They are needed if you want to go higher than that. If you are mad enough that you want to solve those tremendously perplexing problems of reconciling gravitational physics with the quantum world, you end up studying general relativity, superstring theory, M-theory, Calabi Yau compactification and so on. That’s presently the top of the skyscraper. There are other peaks such as Bose-Einstein condensation, fractional Hall effect, and more. A warning is called for: even if you are extremely smart, you are still likely to get stuck somewhere.
Continue Reading → Theoretical Physicist