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Lykken, T. David. The Antisocial Personalities. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1995. 259 pp. Per Lykken in The Antisocial Personalities in 1995 put…
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Aquinas’ use of remissio peccatorum in his Aristotelian taxonomy of justification as the “remission of sins” has led some to conclude that ultimately he argues for…
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I have herein summarized and quoted from articles 1-10 of question 113 in the prima secunda of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica: “Of the Effects of Grace.” I…
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I have so far offered mostly praise and appreciation for Julian Baggini’s book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), 119 pp. In my last…
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I have so far offered almost nothing but praise and appreciation for Julian Baggini’s book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), 119 pp. I…
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In the year 2013, all my posts have been a summary of Julian Baggini’s book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2003), 119 pp. …
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Is Atheism the same as Humanism? If not, what is the difference? Who are the major atheist thinkers of history and what are some of…
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What about arguments for the existence of God? Are they sound? Is the faith of religious believers actually based on such rational arguments? In our…
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In our summary of Julian Baggini’s book Atheism, we have already covered how to better define atheism, explored his summary of the case for atheism,…
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We have examined how to better define atheism and the rational case for atheism according to author Julian Baggini. In our last post, I summarized Julian Baggini’s own…
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We have looked at how to better define atheism and the rational case for atheism. In this post I will summarize Julian Baggini’s own summary of atheist ethics,…
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In this post I will summarize Julian Baggini’s own summary of the case for atheism, presented in chapter 2 of his book Atheism: A Very Short…
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In the next few posts I will be both summarizing and reviewing a book designed to explain and defend Atheism. The book is not written…
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I have summarized highlights of John Chrysostom’s interpretation of the introduction to the book of Romans. I believe they foreshadow much of his interpretation of…
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Remember Francis Shaeffer? The great evangelical apologist who, for example, helped galvanize evangelicals over the issue of abortion? I ran across an old video of…
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Who Are the Unitarian Universalists? It was a customary scene I have been familiar with since my own childhood: first-time visitor parking, greeters at the…
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**UPDATE: My research article has fluctuated from 3% to 6% in the top viewed trophies at Academia.edu. Famous British theologian and philosopher John Hick passed…
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For those of us who tend to think of slavery as merely a historical evil (that is, an evil only to be studied from our…
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The following audio is a book reading about “The Great Questions” from William Portier’s Tradition and Incarnation: Foundations of Christian Theology (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist…
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Do Catholics practice open communion? In the past, I would’ve answered this with a simple: No. And perhaps on the local level for many Protestants…
T h e o • p h i l o g u e 
Very enlightening. I’ll think twice before I buy my next pair of jeans…or car…or whatever.
Yeah … very stimulating talk huh?
I thought one guy in the Q&A session brought out an interesting critique of some of his opinions though. Much of the cause behind our economic decisions is psychological not economic, and I don’t think he fully reckons with the value of psychological gratification/peace. He made some really great points from merely an economic standpoint, but we are human beings, and therefore we have more than mathematical economic calculations to consider.
True, and the Q & A guy did have a point, but I still would argue that even though there is a sense of gratification that comes from the excitement of the possibility of winning the lottery, there is still too much to lose for the amount of joy that it brings us. In my humble opinion, losing life-savings or hard earned wages and significantly lowering one’s quality of life is a great cost to pay for a little excitement in buying a ticket. I understand that this excitement is another reason that people gamble, but if they would think more logically, they would realize the foolishness of their decision. While the speaker may have excluded this factor from his equation, his point still stands, that humans are generally illogical in their logic. It’s like my dad always says, “People are basically stupid.”
In the particular case of gambling/lottery his point still stands. But take another one of his examples … the woman who refuses to buy the same ticket twice because she lost it on the way to the play. The thought of having invested $40 when she was only expecting to pay $20 just to see a play because she lost her ticket might be enough to put her in a bad mood such that she might fail to even enjoy the play.
This would decrease the value of the experience significantly. What the lady is paying for is not a ticket, but an experience. If after losing the ticket she perceives that she will not be able to enjoy the play as much knowing she spent $40 for it, the ticket is valued less from the standpoint of potential experience (even thought economically, it’s still the same) At that moment, her decision to skip the play may bring her some emotional relief that she wouldn’t otherwise get. Who’s to say her piece of mind isn’t worth $20 or more?