Good and the Reinforcement of Hope

I am reworking aspects of the website for the Good Decision Project starting with the homepage. While “The Conversation” or blog dimension of the site has shown signs of life, the website has been underwhelming in terms of response and following. Following the publishing of Introducing a better way to make decisions for ourselves and democracy in…

I have recently found the general political landscape in such chaotic shape as we lurch and sway toward the November elections that I was recently pleasantly surprised to encounter a piece news that might even suggest hope.  The New York Times ran an article on an effort to conserve and distribute water in the Yakima…

In my routine scan of this nation’s Sense of Democracy I had to stop this morning while scanning the commentary in The Fulcrum to think about about the term ‘core belief’ and the politicians who have compromised or abandoned their core beliefs. The question becomes what is a “core belief” . This might be another…

I developed The Good Decision Project on the understanding that humans were subjects and had to directly deal with their own subjectivity when making decisions.  A subject differs from an object in that a subject can never be fully described or known 360 degrees and in complete depth.  The experience of being human, and therefore…

I once had someone say to me after feeling the consequences of making what they felt was a ‘bad decision’; “I regret that. All I know is in the future I will do no harm”. During that same period of time I had occasion and reason to study young children who apparently had little to…

One’s religion is a profoundly subjective experience and expression at once very personal and at the same time inextricably communal. Religion is so much more than just a a personal experience. Religion resides in us acting more as a living internal presence linking the personal and social experience of life while hosting the expression of…

You would have thought the Prohibition on alcohol could have taught us an important lesson as a nation regarding prohibitive law and the decisions people make at the physical and moral levels of personal identity. Legislating morality has been historically in this democracy at very high risk to be the on-ramp to chaos and violence. …

We live in times of certainty, hence division and conflict. With certainty comes righteousness. The first cousin of righteousness is all too often cruelty. In this post I will address cruelty of two kinds; intentional and ignorant. Intentional cruelty is in some ways the lesser evil. With outright intention, the intentionality forces the cruel person…

How many people do you actually know personally who are raising their children to be overtly cruel, exploitive, cold hearted pragmatists?  How many of your close friends, in quiet moments  of reflection, perhaps after a shared meal, have casually disclosed:” you know I could care less about other people and their suffering.  Let their children starve.…

With this project called The Good Decision I have found myself deeply wound up in the profound, frequently contradictory difficulties presented by the word ‘good’. In my own journey I hold within me a conscious commitment to three attributes; forgiveness, mercy and grace. These are for me aspirational attributes. I am not there yet and…