Proposing Publicity Leaving Church Apolitical Piety

This article seeks to release the Church from the false dichotomy of piety vs activeness in political issues, so that church members can optimally actualize piety and public responsibilities simultaneously. Apolitical piety has been running in GKS since its establishment on January 15, 1947, as the Dutch Reformed Church's evangelism legacy. Apolitical piety places the piety only as an individual's internal affair, not covering the public sphere. This discourse is a direct influence of Pietism, which began to develop in Europe in the 16th century. And Pietism itself was present as a response to Secularism, which originated in European society since the end Middle Ages. Like Pietism, Secularism also places the Church/religion and mystical aspects as personal human affairs because it doesn't want state life to be governed by or based on religion. But ideally, I view apolitical piety as the distorted discourse that should be abandoned and embrace new discourse: politics as an integral part of Church piety.

The false dichotomy: a refutation of the Neandertal indistinguishability claim

In the debate about the demise of the Neandertal, several scholars have claimed that humanity’s nearest relatives were indistinguishable archaeologically, and thus behaviorally and cognitively, from contemporaneous Homo sapiens. They suggest that to hold otherwise is to characterize Neandertals as inferior to H. sapiens, a false dichotomy that excludes the possibility that the two human types simply differed in ways visible to natural selection, including their cognition. Support of the Neandertal indistinguishability claim requires ignoring the cranial differences between the two human types, which have implications for cognition and behavior. Further, support of the claim requires minimizing asymmetries in the quantity and degree of behavioral differences as attested by the archaeological record. The present paper reviews the evidence for cognitive and archaeological differences between the two human types in support of the excluded middle position.

Freedom and Responsibility in Context

Freedom and Responsibility in Context argues for a contextualist account of freedom and moral responsibility. It aims to challenge the largely unarticulated orthodoxy of invariantism, by arguing that contextualism is crucial to an understanding of both freedom and moral responsibility. The argument for contextualism regarding freedom and moral responsibility focuses upon their respective control conditions. Abilities are argued to be central to an understanding of the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. A unified ability analysis of control is developed, which supports the thesis that attributions of freedom and moral responsibility are context dependent. The resulting contextualism offers a rapprochement of compatibilism and incompatibilism. By going beyond the false dichotomy of invariant compatibilism and invariant incompatibilism, it is argued that both positions can be given their due, since there is no ‘right’ answer to the question of whether or not determinism undermines freedom and moral responsibility.

The standardization of clinical ethics consultation and technique’s “long encirclement” of humanity: a response to Brummett and Muaygil

In their recent article, Brummett and Muaygil reject Bishop et al.’s framing of the debate over standardization in clinical ethics consultation (CEC) “as one between pro-credentialing procedural and anti-credentialing phenomenological,” claiming that this framing “amounts to a false dichotomy between two extreme approaches to CEC.” Instead of accepting proceduralism and phenomenology as a binary, Brummett and Muaygil propose that these two views should be seen as the extreme ends of a spectrum upon which CEC should be done. However, as evidenced by several inconsistencies within their article, they have failed to fully appreciate the concern animating Bishop et al.’s proposal. Additionally, because of this failure, they do not seem to realize that credentialing ethicists for CEC will only create different problems in Saudi Arabia even as it possibly solves some of the current problems they identify. In this commentary, we highlight and clarify Brummet and Muaygil’s five misunderstandings of Bishop et al. This leads us to conclude that while they claim to be advocating a middle way between proceduralism and phenomenology, in fact they would like for us to standardize another proceduralism, albeit one that incorporates some of the “qualitative” values of American bioethics.

Decipherment of the Easter Island script

The article reviews different approaches of deciphering the kohau rongorongo script, and gives various standpoints for further analysis, by arguing that the glyphs represent genealogies and mythological events. A methodology of analysis is proposed and tested by deciphering which glyphs represent which tribe names of Easter Islands. The main argument put forth is that the question of whether kohau rongorongo is a mnemonic tool or a phonetic script is a false dichotomy – it can be both.

Apocalyptic and the Passions: Overcoming a False Dichotomy in Pauline Studies

This article deals with how to conceive of sin in Romans 5–8. Currently there are two main views concerning the understanding of sin in these chapters. The apocalyptic school describes sin as a power extrinsic to the person. The moral philosophical interpretation, by contrast, contends that sin is a representation of action or the passions. While these schools are usually opposed to each other, this article proposes that the major concerns of the apocalyptic school – to understand sin as a reality that is universally determinative, that precedes human action and exceeds human strength, and from which only God can deliver humanity – are compatible with the interpretation of sin as action in some passages and as the passions in others. There may therefore be space for further collaboration between two views that are often opposed.