First Blog

  Uncertainty is Certain G. Donald Allen 12/12/2024 1.       Introduction . This short essay is about uncertainty in people from both secular and nonsecular viewpoints. One point that will emerge is that randomly based uncertainty can be a driver for religious structure. Many groups facing uncertainty about their future are deeply religious or rely on faith as a source of comfort, resilience, and guidance. The intersection of uncertainty and religiosity often stems from the human need to find meaning, hope, and stability in the face of unpredictable or challenging circumstances. We first take up the connections of uncertainty to religion for the first real profession, farming, noting that hunting has many similar uncertainties. Below are groups that commonly lean on religious beliefs amidst uncertainty.   This short essay is a follow-up to a previous piece on certainty (https://used-ideas.blogspot.com/2024/12/certainty-is-also-emotion.html). U...

The Elephant and the Cabbage. Did you know that farmers fields in Kenya are raided nightly by elephants?  The elephants eat the crops and ruin what’s left. It also ruins the livelihood of the farmers. Solve this problem. Solution 1 . Shoot the elephants?  No. These pachyderms are protected. Solution 2 . Guard your fields at night to scare off the raiders. No. This tires out the farmer, who then sleeps by day, and not farming. Solution 3 . Build a high sturdy wall around the field.  A non starter.  Too, too, too expensive. Factoid. It happens that elephants greatly fear the sound of swarming honey bees, and run from it.  Solution 4. Place a ring of bee hives around the crop fields separated but connected with trip wires to stir up the bees when breached by an elephant. It works!!  Also, this gives the farmers another crop. Honey. Lesson . When the tiniest of things defeats the largest, this is something like a David and Goliath st...