Word: materialist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Addiction," about a gay Singaporean student in London named Alistair. Parts of it are smartly observed, but structurally Poon draws too crude a contrast between London and Singapore to power her plot of a young man's journey of self-discovery. Alistair's parents are caricatured embodiments of lowbrow, materialist Asia. Because she uses the abbreviation k to denote a thousand, we are asked to believe that Alistair's mother has "a barbaric attitude towards money - reducing something vast to a small, inconsequential syllable." His father makes bawdy comments about the breasts of "these Western women" while Alistair, rather prissily...
...European civilization, technology, and culture. One of the stated goals of the French colonial policy in Africa was cultural assimilation—to better the primitive Africans by transforming them into little dark Frenchmen and women. Now there are Western-educated aid workers, politicians, professors, and organizers pushing the materialist religions of free-market capitalism and Marxism (both ideological descendents of Hegel), the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of modern technology and the American way of life. One of the unstated goals of globalization seems to be the cultural assimilation of poor Africans into the American...
...many think the mind is only in there--existing somehow in the physical relationship of the brain's physical elements. The physical, say these materialists, is all there is. I fix bones with hardware. As physical as this might be, I cannot be a materialist. I cannot ignore the internal evidence of my own mind. It would be hypocritical. And worse, it would be cowardly to ignore those occasional appearances of the spirits of others--of minds uncloaked, in naked virtue, like David's goodbye...
...multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the--nondivine--origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described "atheist-reductionist-materialist" biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan's unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties...
...seed, into the drab citys earthy crevices. He looks down from his new height and thinks that to the insects unseen in the grass he would be, if they had a consciousness like his, God. In the year past he has grown three inches, to six feetmore unseen materialist forces, working their will upon him. He will not grow any taller, he thinks, in this life or the next. If there is a next, an inner devil murmurs. What evidence beyond the Prophet's blazing and divinely inspired words proves that there is a next? Where would it be hidden...