Let’s take just a moment and consider some fundamental paradoxes within the United States’ legal system. We like to think we are the nation of freedom, the nation of get-ahead, the nation of self-made men and women who just have to have a dream in order to thrive. With the Constitution as our founding document, including the Bill of Rights which outlines express guarantees of all sorts of “inalienable” rights such as the freedom to say whatever we want, the freedom to own guns, the freedom to worship whatever god, etc., we like to think of ourselves as a pretty clever nation. Now, nevermind the extent to which those rights have been watered down and whittled away over the years, because what I want to consider is a sort of flaw in our thinking when it comes to what we claim we believe (as opposed to what we actually allow our “servants” to write into law and enforce).
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A Question of Reality
We think we know what reality is. Our lives are filled with work, sex, and food that we consider to be real. The processes within your mind, where you categorize the input of your senses and turn it into recognizable patterns, you also consider real. For most of human history, reality has been a fairly easy to define thing: reality is the world around us that we can see and touch and smell and taste. But the boundaries of reality are shifting. With the ever-expanding world we are creating in the spaces between our computer screens, we suddenly find ourselves in the position of questioning what is more “real”: the things we can feel with our hands, or the things we feel with our hearts? Continue reading