Occam’s father shares a rite of passage with his son, who’s now of age to shave with a straight razor. As Occam learns the intimate art of holding the blade at an acute angle while performing short strokes against the grain to match the sharp curves of his face, he opens up about life choices….
Category: Beauty, Family, JESUS, Literature, Morality, Politics, Polity, Psychology, Science and Religion, Scripture, Short Stories, Suffering, Theology
No sooner than he closes his eyes, he feels a sharp pain in the frontal cortex of his brain. His training has begun. The pain remains in the frontal lobe for over three hours with fluctuating degrees of intensity. Mentally, physically, and emotionally, he’s depleted of energy and patience to the point of insanity. He feels conflicted, wanting to proceed with his transhumanist project in order to be perfect and live forever, but his suffering is unbearable.
This short story plays off Kierkegaard’s parable of “The Happy Conflagration” with assistance from Douglas Groothuis’s book Philosophy in Seven Sentences, primarily his focus on the Dane’s extrapolation of sin in its two forms.
The silence—a ceaseless chiseling. There’s a child screaming. I run to the window to look outside only to find the relentless tinkling of rain ricocheting off the top of metal cars. I come back inside. I hear it again. This time I run out the front door not caring that my favorite shoes are getting…
The first masked man provokes the captive: “Any last words before I separate your skull from your body?”
Nathanael grabs the spear. He shuts his left eye to place his prey in his cross-hairs, then releases the javelin with Odyssean accuracy. But the creature parries. The spear gets stuck in the heart of a warrior in a painting that the king had commissioned 15 years prior.
A woman coughs up blood in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where her husband stands next to her bed, rubbing her back, helping her expel pink phlegm into his handkerchief. At a table for two, at nearby diner, a deep voice punctuates the greasy air that smells of Saturday Night’s Special:…
Before there was time, before there were gods, before there were blood sacrifices, before there were written words, Light spoke and split the atom of nothing. Time was dragged into existence, filling empty space. Some call “nothing” chaos, but chaos is disorder, which is something. It’s not even darkness, for darkness is a black top…
Vampires as a whole mock the celebration of Christmas on December 25th, knowing that it’s merely a placeholder on the Julian calendar. But don’t mistake these vampires for blood-sucking atheists. They believe wholeheartedly in the power of Jesus’s blood. They observe Maundy Thursday as the most important day of the year. Conversely, on that day, true believers partake of the sacrament of communion as Christ showed them what it truly means to be devoted to God and to each other. But for these hideous creatures, the body and blood of Christ are a means to an end of survival. They believe Jesus to be the last prophet in “the order of Cain” these last 1,500 years, to save them from one called “the Impaler.”
The day of his release from The Farm she took him to his favorite po’ boy establishment where she presented him with a possible solution to permanently crush the source of his agonizing quandary about the existence of providence and freewill by performing a radical surgical procedure, which could theoretically remove the part of his brain responsible for the freedom of the will to make autonomous choices, according to the Cartesian view that the pineal gland is the hub where the mind and body unite and interact, making decisions that could’ve been otherwise. By removing this gland, as well as the adjacent midline region of the brain, the corpus callosum, which is responsible for connecting left and right cerebral hemispheres, and then replacing it with an A.I. Vertex database housed inside a silicon neuromorphic chip with 1,000,000,000 times more dense “neurons” than the corpus callosum, Griffin would be the first walking humanoid robot, able to process information faster than any computer and able to react faster to both the rational and emotional sides of his brain, simultaneously thinking and feeling like no other person alive. Griffin was in favor of the innovative procedure. The date was set. He was made aware of possible complications, including a high percent chance of mortality. The neuro-surgeon who performed the operation was paid handsomely for his time and discretion.