New Year's Eve

The past was sad , and the future looks dark and gloomy.

Absinthe

“After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that’s the most horrible thing in the world.”

Oscar Wilde. [ Absinthe ]

It’s God or Darwin

Tuesday's ruling by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, disparaging intelligent design as a religion-based and therefore false science, raises an important question: If ID is bogus because many of its theorists have religious beliefs to which the controversial critique of Darwinism lends support, then what should we say about Darwinism itself? After all, many proponents of Darwinian evolution have philosophical beliefs to which Darwin lends support.

"We conclude that the religious nature of Intelligent Design would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child," wrote Judge John E. Jones III in his decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover, which rules that disparaging Darwin's theory in biology class is unconstitutional. Is it really true that only Darwinism, in contrast to ID, represents a disinterested search for the truth, unmotivated by ideology?

Judge Jones was especially impressed by the testimony of philosophy professor Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Professor Forrest has definite beliefs about religion, evident from the fact that she serves on the board of directors of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, which is "an affiliate of American Atheists, and [a] member of the Atheist Alliance International," according to the group's website. Of course, she's entitled to believe what she likes, but it's worth noting...more here

Do You Love Me?

A lover asked his beloved,
Do you love yourself more
than you love me?



The beloved replied,
I have died to myself
and I live for you.



I’ve disappeared from myself
and my attributes.
I am present only for you.



I have forgotten all my learning,
but from knowing you
I have become a scholar.



I have lost all my strength,
but from your power
I am able.



If I love myself
I love you.
If I love you
I love myself.

by Rumi

Looking In The Wrong Place.

He who quotes others lacks the ability to think for himself.
That is an apt and fair description of me and my blog. I have no original thoughts. This blog is a commonplace book in which I write down quotations that struck my fancy. Anyone who looks for more here is looking in the wrong place.I enjoy reading authors who quote a lot, such as Montaigne and Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy.

The devil may not be as bad as he’s been painted

Of course few of us accept the literal truth of hell and, according to the survey conducted by Dr Eric Stoddart of St Andrews University, the majority of ministers feel the same way, although a third take refuge in the belief that the netherworld has taken on a new and appropriately modern image in which the agony of separation from God manifests itself as permanent mental anguish as opposed to corporeal pain...more here

The Problem with God

Interview with Richard Dawkins

The renowned biologist talks about intelligent design, dishonest Christians, and why God is no better than an imaginary friend...more here

Questions of faith

What can anyone tell us about God?" asks Sir Ludovic Kennedy, perhaps Britain's most distinguished atheist. "Nothing. The Church says God is Love but that is pure speculation. Jesus is the son of God? To me that's absolutely meaningless. God is a projection of the human imagination, a fictitious character who does not exist."...more here

An interview with Don Wise, creator of "incompetent design"

Don Wise, professor emeritus of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the nation's foremost proponent of ID. No, Wise isn't getting ready to testify on behalf of the school board in Dover, PA. Rather, he advocates for a different version of the acronym: "incompetent design."

Wise cites serious flaws in the systems of the human body as evidence that design in the universe exhibits not an obvious source of, but a sore lack of, intelligence. Seed asked him to chat about his theory, reactions he's received to it, and the anthem he penned to rally people to his cause...more here

Intelligent Design or Natural Design

I'm going to begin by taking you on a personal tour of my own thinking about intelligent design over the past 60 years.

It began in 1945 when I was a 14 year old at Mt Albert Grammar. Our Fourth Form English teacher decided we should learn the skills of debating. The topic chosen was "Creation versus Evolution". And I, as an ardent young Baptist, volunteered, along with a Seventh Day Adventist, to take up the cudgels on behalf of Creation.

But even before the debate began, I found myself cast in the role of devil's advocate.

While preparing, it dawned on me that the case against evolution foundered on an ambiguity between two meanings of the simple word "creation": the concept of general creation, and the concept of special creation.

To believe in the theological doctrine of general creation is merely to believe in a God who created the universe. Clearly, I could, without inconsistency, believe in general creation and also believe in the Theory of Evolution. I simply had to regard Darwinian natural selection as one of the laws of nature that God built into his creation...more here

My Refuge

Sadness and languor along the oak tables
Steady the minds of the sitters and readers;
Sleep and despair, and the stealth of hunters,
And (in the man at the end of the row) anger.

Books are the door of escape from the forest,
Books are the wilderness, too, for the scholar;
Walled in the past, drowning in fables,
Out of the weather we sit, steady in languor.

Which are the ones that belong, properly?
Which are the hunters, which the harried?
Break not the hush that surrounds this miracle --
Mind against mind, coupling in splendor --
Step on no twig, disturbing the forest.
Enter the aisles of despair. Sit down and be quiet.

E.B. White, Reading Room

[Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." I'd say that the reading room of the public library is that place. The reading room is my refuge.]

George Constanza's Words of Wisdom

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends.
I mean, life is tough.
It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it?
A death.
What's that, a bonus?!?
I Think the life cycle is backwards.
You should die first, get it out of the way.
Then you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.
You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for High School. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become little baby, you go back, you spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish off as an orgasm!!

Amen.

Without A Scalpel

For many people of different faiths, cutting up a corpse to figure out how a person died is an invasive, even offensive, procedure.

In some cases, as with Muslims and Jews, autopsies may violate their religious laws.

But technology companies are stepping in with a more acceptable alternative to traditional autopsies, using sophisticated scanning and three-dimensional computer systems.

Silicon Graphics Inc. manager Afshad Mistri demonstrated one such system on a recent morning in Mountain View, standing in front of a theater screen displaying the fuzzy image of a woman who was killed in a car accident in Sweden.

Another SGI engineer moved the cursor across the corpse, revealing the next layer, an image of the woman's skeleton clearly showing her broken bones...more here

Fascism then. Fascism now?

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

By exploring the disturbing parallels between our own time and the era of overt fascism, we can avoid the same hideous mistakes. At present, we live in a constitutional democracy. The tools necessary to protect us from fascism remain in the hands of the citizen. All the same, North America is on a fascist trajectory. We must recognize this threat for what it is, and we must change course...more here

Is God is Nothing

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, "I feel fine. After all, God doesn't want us to confuse our miracles with his."

That's fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins...more here

The Problem of Evil

Some claim that only the intellectually defective can fail to be impressed by the inconsistency between belief in the existence of the theistic God and the recognition of suffering in our world – especially given the quantity and intensity of human suffering. An omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God would not allow his beloved children to suffer, and certainly not as often or as intensely as they do. A good God would not permit evils to relentlessly afflict human life within His creation. The ubiquity of suffering renders belief in the perfect God of theism irrational. So say anti-theistic proponents of the problem of evil...more here

The Second Space

-The Soul Hovering Over the Body-

The heavenly halls are so spacious!
Ascend to them on stairs of air.
Above white clouds the hanging celestial gardens.

A soul tears away from the body and soars.
It remembers that there's up and down.

Have we really lost faith in a second space?
They've dissolved, disappeared, both Heaven and Hell?

Without unearthly meadows how will one meet salvation?
Where will the gathering of the damned find its abode?

Let us weep, lament the enormous loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, disarrange our hair.

Let us implore, so that it is returned to us,
The second space.

Czeslaw Milosz

Intelligent design fight demeans religion

WASHINGTON - Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous - that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.

Newton's religiosity was traditional. He was a staunch believer in Christianity and member of the Church of England. Einstein's was a more diffuse belief in a deity who set the rules for everything that occurs in the universe.

Neither saw science as an enemy of religion. On the contrary. "He believed he was doing God's work," wrote James Gleick in his recent biography of Newton. Einstein saw his entire vocation - understanding the workings of the universe - as an attempt to understand the mind of God.

Not a crude and willful God who pushes and pulls and does things according to whim. Newton was trying to supplant the view that first believed the sun's motion around the earth was the work of Apollo and his chariot, and later believed it was a complicated system of cycles and epicycles, one tacked on upon the other every time some wobble in the orbit of a planet was found. Newton's God was not at all so crude. The laws of his universe were so simple, so elegant, so economical, and therefore so beautiful that they could only be divine.

Which brings us to Dover (Pa.), Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.

Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose "intelligent design" - today's tarted-up version of creationism - on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called down the wrath of God upon the good people of Dover for voting "God out of your city." Meanwhile in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.

Let's be clear. "Intelligent design" may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge - in this case, evolution - they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species, but that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science - that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution - or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " - natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and to science.

The school board thinks it is indicting evolution by branding it an "unguided process" with no "discernable direction or goal." This is as ridiculous as indicting Newtonian mechanics for positing an "unguided process" by which the Earth is pulled around the sun every year without discernible purpose. What is chemistry if not an "unguided process" of molecular interactions without "purpose"?

He may be, of course. But that discussion is the province of religion, not science. The relentless attempt to confuse the two by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions that lie beyond the material.

How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more brilliant, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education too.

Charles Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 Fifteenth St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20071. His e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.

Is atheism dying?

Science & Theology News asked some leading thinkers to share their views about the future of atheism...more here

Science needs God. Or does it?

Do you believe in God?

Some leading thinkers have strong opinions about God, while others are reserving judgment ...more here

Book of the Month

From the Publisher

A magisterial work of social history, Life After Death illuminates the many different ways ancient civilizations grappled with the question of what exactly happens to us after we die.

In a masterful exploration of how Western civilizations have defined the afterlife, Alan F. Segal weaves together biblical and literary scholarship, sociology, history, and philosophy. A renowned scholar, Segal examines the maps of the afterlife found in Western religious texts and reveals not only what various cultures believed but how their notions reflected their societies’ realities and ideals, and why those beliefs changed over time. He maintains that the afterlife is the mirror in which a society arranges its concept of the self. The composition process for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begins in grief and ends in the victory of the self over death.

Arguing that in every religious tradition the afterlife represents the ultimate reward for the good, Segal combines historical and anthropological data with insights gleaned from religious and philosophical writings to explain the following mysteries: why the Egyptians insisted on an afterlife in heaven, while the body was embalmed in a tomb on earth; why the Babylonians viewed the dead as living in underground prisons; why the Hebrews remained silent about life after death during the period of the First Temple, yet embraced it in the Second Temple period (534 B.C.E. –70 C.E.); and why Christianity placed the afterlife in the center of its belief system. He discusses the inner dialogues and arguments within Judaism and Christianity, showing the underlying dynamic behind them, as well as the ideas that mark the differences between the two religions. In a thoughtful examination of the influence of biblical views of heaven and martyrdom on Islamic beliefs, he offers a fascinating perspective on the current troubling rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

In tracing the organic, historical relationships between sacred texts and communities of belief and comparing the visions of life after death that have emerged throughout history, Segal sheds a bright, revealing light on the intimate connections between notions of the afterlife, the societies that produced them, and the individual’s search for the ultimate meaning of life on earth.

On Cheerful Books

I am an unabashed reader of books: all kinds of books -- good books and bad books, well-written and ill-written; books with a purpose, and books whose existence only the nicest sophistry could justify; books created by genius, and books built by talent standing on its head to attract attention; I even read books made to sell. I can and do read at all times and in all places -- standing up, and sitting or lying down; in chair or bed; on trains and 'buses or boats; in houses, gardens, theatres (when the play is dull); at concerts (reading to music is a discovery and not nearly so offensive to the musicians as talking to music); at meals (this is a delight which deserves an essay to itself) -- in short it would not be easy to name time or place inappropriate to the indulgence of this habit; and yet with all its catholicity and its complete indifference to the feelings of others, I can say with that self-satisfaction which comes only to those who admit being addicted to at least one habit which is no use to anyone but themselves that I could never bring myself to anything approaching enjoyment of an intentionally cheerful book. Cheerful books, or shall I say "cheery" books, make me sad: professional optimism reduces me to ashes.

Holbrook Jackson, On Cheerful Books

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost, My November Guest

100 things

100 things that make us scream
After meticulous research, we have determined the 100 things that most make you quiver like a schoolgirl..more here

Violence/Desire

"Tell me what you don't like about yourself." That's the introductory line delivered to potential patients by the popular team of plastic surgeons, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), in FX's hit series, Nip/Tuck. With its explicit sexual content, including partial nudity and a penchant for threesomes, its depiction of the blood and guts of plastic surgery, and its violent confrontations between characters, Nip/Tuck approaches territory usually reserved for pay cable channels. Woven into its soap-opera plot lines is the suggestion of a hidden link between sexual license and the technological project of remaking the human body in light of individual wishes; indeed, the show depicts a deep connection between both of these and raw violence. The show's creator, Ryan Murphy, calls it a "modern day horror story with the plastic surgeons as dueling Dr. Frankenstein's."...more here

Evil and redemption at the box office

A tremendous depiction of evil," is the way William Peter Blatty, author of the best-selling novel The Exorcist, describes Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a film whose astonishing box-office success — it is now the highest grossing R-rated film ever and has just broken into the domestic all-time top-ten list — has surprised its fans and baffled its critics. Because it is an unprecedented film in so many ways, film critics and cultural pundits, at least those who have not mindlessly dismissed it as a snuff film, have been groping to put The Passion in some sort of comparative context.

On account of the controversy it has aroused, the film has been compared to Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, but the reception of that film matched critical acclaim with box-office indifference, thus making it the inverse image of The Passion. Classic Hollywood religious films, even those that are not afflicted with what Gibson calls "bad hair" and "bad music," provide no benchmark whatsoever. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffman had to go all the way back to Gone with the Wind (1938) to find comparable pre-release buzz about a Hollywood film. But that was not an R-rated religious film with dialogue in Aramaic and Latin...more here

Evidence that demands a verdict

For some, the existence of evil is one of the great arguments against the existence of God; for others, it is one of the great arguments in his favor. Many films about demonic possession and exorcism fall into the latter camp, and the film that defines this genre more than any other is, of course, William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). Based on the bestselling novel by William Peter Blatty, it draws a strong contrast between modern scientific rationalism—depicted as cold, harsh, and mechanical, a view of the world that reduces body and mind to a mere collection of parts—with a more traditional worldview that boldly affirms the supernatural. Ironically, while there is something dehumanizing about the medical treatment that a possessed young girl is subjected to, the demonic possession itself affirms her personhood, as well as the reality of a mysterious unseen world beyond what science can prove or explain. And Blatty's original novel makes a point of linking the cosmic conflict to more familiar forms of evil, reminding us that evidence of this spiritual battle is before our eyes all the time. The novel begins with a page that cites the Holocaust, the persecution of Christians, and similar examples of real-world cruelty, as if to say, Why do we need a "sign" such as demonic possession in order to believe that this struggle is real?...more here

Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Alfred Tennyson - Tears, Idle Tears

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Question: If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy?

A Little Quip: Support bacteria... it's the only culture some people have!

A Little Wisdom: A hug is a great gift, one size fits all. It can be given for any occasion and it's easy to exchange.

A Little Quote: "Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage." -- Jean Anouilh (1910-1987), French playwright.

Sorrow

The whole order of things fills me with terrible anguish, from the tiny gnat to the mysteries of incarnation. All is entirely unintelligible to me -- particularly myself. Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows my sorrow except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) Danish Existentialist philosopher

My Advice

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maugham

The Measure of God

Despite over a century of Gifford Lectures to draw from, we’re no closer to understanding God...more here

Even Less

Jonathan Swift observed that the problem with religion was that there wasn’t enough of it around: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Three centuries on there is even less of it around and we still hate each other.

Sad Moment

I still remember - so vividly I can smell the gentle fragrance of the spring air - the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem. It was in May, a May that was softly summery, with the flowers around my estate already in full bloom, their colors fading as the sun made its slow descent. Escorted by regrets and self-reproach, I walked among my few trees. I had dined early and was wandering, alone like a symbol, under the useless shadows and faint rustle of leaves. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a desire to renounce completely, to withdraw once and for all, and I felt an intense nausea for having had so many desires, so many hopes, with so many outer conditions for attaining them and so much inner impossibility of really wanting to attain them. That soft and sad moment marks the beginning of my suicide.

Fernando Pessoa

It's Hot

The Mod Club, as Paris Hilton would say " It's Hot ".

Life changes in the instant

Excerpted from THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING © Copyright 2005 by Joan Didion

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else...more here

So what do you have to do to find happiness?

Great writers from Freud — "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation" — to Philip Larkin — "man hands on misery to man" — have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive.

These are the conclusions of a burgeoning happiness industry that has published 3,000 papers, set up a Journal of Happiness Studies and created a World Database of Happiness in the last few years.

Can scientists tell us what happiness is?...more here

Mass Murderer

Mao: The Unknown Story is no ordinary book. Reaching for comparisons, one looks inescapably to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. His was not the first negative account of Soviet Communism, and Mao is not the first book to present Mao and his collaborators as criminals. But like the Gulag, Mao, while factual, is much more than that; resting on a mass of evidence, overwhelmingly accurate and well-supported, it conveys its story in the voice not of the bloodless scholar but of the novelist and the moralist. Already Beijing is terrified of this book, going so far as to ban an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review that contained an account of it. But we can be certain that pirated copies will soon be circulating in China, if they are not doing so already. Chang and Halliday may not be the first to expose Mao’s crimes, but their work, even with its limitations (of which more below), cannot be ignored. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, it delivers a death blow to an entire way of thinking...more here

The worst sin

"The worst sin - perhaps the only sin - passion can commit, is to be joyless."
- Dorothy L. Sayers

Music

O gracious Art, in how many gray hours

When life’s fierce orbit encompassed me,

Hast thou kindled my heart to warm love,

Hast charmed me into a better world.

Oft has a sigh, issuing from thy harp,

A sweet, blest chord of thine,

Thrown open the heaven of better times;

O gracious Art, for that I thank thee!

In 1817, Franz Schubert set these words of the poet Franz von Schober to music in his song “An die Musik”

I Decline

I decline to exist in the crazy house
of the inhuman.
I decline to go on living
in the marketplace of wolves.


I won't howl,
among the sharks of the field.
I won't swim beneath
the waves of squirming backs.
I have no need of holes for hearing
or seeing eyes.
To your crazed world there's
only one answer: No!

Marina Tsvetayeva
1892-1941

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
- Heinrich Heine

The Lovers

The Lovers
will drink wine night and day.
They will drink until they can
tear away the veils of intellect and
melt away the layers of shame and modesty.
When in Love,
body, mind, heart and soul don't even exist.
Become this,
fall in Love, and you will not be separated again.

Rumi
(September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273 CE)

LINCOLN'S MELANCHOLY

President Buchanan is reported to have said to President-elect Lincoln as they rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on the latter's Inauguration Day: "My dear sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [Buchanan's Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed." But Abraham Lincoln did not expect to attain "happiness" in the White House or, as this intellectually energetic book shows, anywhere else. Lincoln's Melancholy sounds again the half-forgotten, minor-key background music of his life. Joshua Wolf Shenk rejects the notion that Lincoln got over his melancholy under the demands of the presidency; his Lincoln is never too busy to be gloomy. And, drawing on modern studies of depression, Shenk even has a reference -- humorous, I think -- to "happiness" as a mental disorder.

In 1998, Shenk (a young essayist who frankly mentions his own battles with depression) read a reference to Lincoln's melancholy in an essay on suicide and set about learning more. In his researcher's zeal, he read Lincoln scholars and also sought them out and interviewed them; he went to Lincoln's birthplace and Ford's Theater, stood where Lincoln delivered the "house divided" speech, held in his hand Lincoln's letters to his friend Joshua Speed, saw the fatal assassin's bullet and, since heredity is one ingredient inclining a person to depression, obtained the records admitting Mary Jane Lincoln, Lincoln's father's cousin, to the Illinois Hospital for the Insane in 1867. He even attended a convention of Lincoln impersonators, borrowed a Lincoln suit for himself and joined in. His book has page after page of acknowledgments, to the point that one may be tempted to say: No wonder a writer with this many friends could produce such a strong book...more here

Always In Demand

"Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgement will always be in demand under all conditions."
- Roger Babson

Dispense with God

I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God.

Blaise Pascal
--Pensees

The Great Majority

In the English-speaking world the great majority of books that have been published in philosophy in the twentieth century are like academic paintings: they show unmistakable talent and are professionally competent, the result of long processes of learning, application and work; everything in them is accurate, in its right place, and as it should be; but it makes not the slightest difference whether they exist or not.

Bryan Magee
--Confessions of a Philosopher

An Homage to Walter Benjamin: Arcades, Barricades, and Public Sex

The exiled German philosopher Walter Benjamin, 48 years old, portly and with a heart condition, joined a hiking tour group in Banyuls-sur-Mer on the French side of the Pyrenees on September 24, 1940. He had no backpack, only a briefcase. He let the group return without him and spent the night on the open hillside. The next morning, two women and a boy set out from the town in the early dawn and met Benjamin on the mountain. He had managed the previous day to cover the first half of the trip over the Pyrenees into Spain and now set off with the small group to complete the border crossing.

Benjamin's breath was short, and he needed to stop and rest every ten minutes. He did not let the briefcase out of his hands, though the others offered to carry it. One of his companions later recalled that his life seemed of less value to him than the briefcase. In the briefcase were his pipe, spare glasses, and a manuscript...more here

Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society...more here

This Week in God

At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and images—the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, imams, ministers,
priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority")—flash on the screen. Finally the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between holy water and Pepsi. Through it all he pokes fun at faith itself, sparing no religion and no holy man (in Blasphe "Me!!!" he takes on deities themselves, challenging, say, Quetzalcóatl to strike him dead by the count of five). Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a single evening...more here

I think, therefore I am an entrepreneur

What can philosophy tell us about business? Brian Bloch looks at how Germany is profiting from enlightenment

Philosophy and business have never been bosom buddies, or at least, that would have been the common perception. However, in recent times, businesses are being confronted by problems that can be understood or solved though philosophy...more here

What is Life?

And what is Death? is still the cause unfound?
That dark, mysterious name of horrid sound?
A long and lingering sleep, the weary crave.
And Peace? where can its happiness abound?--
No where at all, save heaven, and the grave.

Then what is Life?--When stripped of its disguise,
A thing to be desired it cannot be;
Since every thing that meets our foolish eyes
Gives proof sufficient of its vanity.
Tis but a trial all must undergo;
To teach unthankful mortals how to prize
That happiness vain man's denied to know,
Until he's called to claim it in the skies.

John Clare (1793 to 1864)

Lolita

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."

That's the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov's groundbreaking novel Lolita -- the story of a 37-year-old man's emotional and sexual love affair with a 12-year-old girl.

When the book was first published 50 years ago, it was considered by some to be obscene, to others a masterpiece of fiction. Over the course of five decades, the "masterpiece" vote has won out, more or less -- but even two generations later, there's still a lot of debate...more here

Absinthe

As the British journalist Jad Adams shows in his fascinating, richly detailed book Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (University of Wisconsin Press), the lore surrounding absinthe is far more important than its taste, which is similar to those of other anise-flavored drinks, or its special psychoactive effects, which remain a matter of dispute. In the emerald green liquid devotees see visions of poets and painters in Parisian cafés who stirred together genius and madness along with absinthe and water. And while La Fée Verte is right that some contemporary brands are closer than others to the original Swiss recipe, there has always been wide variation in formulas and production techniques—one reason the hazards and benefits of 19th-century absinthe are hard to pin down.

The question of absinthe authenticity is also complicated by the fact that even in its heyday, absinthe was often a deliberately chosen prop. For calculatedly unconventional figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Oscar Wilde, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, absinthe was a symbol as well as an intoxicant. By imitating the habits of such well-known nonconformists, second- and third-rate talents hoped to look the part of the cutting-edge artist...more here

Modern Man

A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Albert Camus
--The Fall

Readers

"Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all that
they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2.
Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for
the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the
dregs of what they read. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who
profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Donnie Darko

Originally released in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Donnie Darko sank like a stone. That was not a propitious moment for a movie in which a jet engine comes crashing through a suburban house. But DVD gave the film new life—so much so that it enjoyed a limited theatrical re-release in 2004 in a director's cut, now available on DVD as well. The film is particularly popular among college students. Like The Matrix trilogy, another campus favorite, Darko taps into the common adolescent experience of the falsity, the inauthenticity, of the external world. Unlike The Matrix, however, Darko maintains a certain ironic distance from its protagonist.

The film starts and culminates in Donnie's house with a jet engine dropping directly into his bedroom. But the result is not a standard flashback, ending exactly where it began. For example, Donnie's location is different in the two crash scenes. Donnie's fascination with time travel suggests an explanation for the altered ending. And the possibility of time travel turns out to be a clever way of posing the issue of divine determinism and human freedom...more here

New Orleans

Don’t be shocked at the sad fate of the Big Easy. Our history is littered with ‘eternal’ cities brought down by flood, pestilence or man-made disaster, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto

THE SURPRISING THING about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring...more here

Guilty

Blameless, shameless. The more desperate the eroticism, the more hopelessly women show off their heavy breasts, opening their mouths and screaming out, the greater the attraction. In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook. I find this unbearable and soon returned to insolence and erotic vomit - which doesn't respect anybody or anything. How sweet to enter filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop - sweet, shy, heartbreakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes.

Georges Bataille
--Guilty

Find Blogs

The race is on to become the Google of blogs.

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.The new sites are gaining traction with users looking to sample what people are talking about online, from the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to silly celebrity gossip. As free tools make it easier for even the most technophobic to publish online, there's a growing demand for services to sift through the clutter...more here

Undoing Darwin

On March 14, 2005, The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin wrote a front-page story on the battle that is “intensifying across the nation” over the teaching of evolution in public-school science classes. Slevin’s lengthy piece took a detailed look at the lobbying, fund-raising, and communications tactics being deployed at the state and local level to undermine evolution. The article placed a particular emphasis on the burgeoning “intelligent design” movement, centered at Seattle’s Discovery Institute, whose proponents claim that living things, in all their organized complexity, simply could not have arisen from a mindless and directionless process such as the one so famously described in 1859 by Charles Darwin in his classic, The Origin of Species...more here

Guess which side George Bush is on?

A SIGN in the Natural History Museum proclaims that the dinosaur skeleton in the foyer is a century old. This is odd, because it looks much more ancient. And of course, it is. The 26-metre-long fossil remains of the Diplodocus may have been gifted to Britain in 1904, but the creature – a long-necked, long-tailed vegetarian – lived around 150 million years ago, which is bad news for creationists labouring under the biblical belief that the Earth is just 10,000 years old. While the planet spins on and the United Nations warns that the great apes will be extinct within a generation, Britain is on the brink of a major ideological battle over whether mankind came down from the trees millions of years ago, or was created by a divine force with a handful of dirt and a spare rib just a few millennia past.

Ever since Galileo was imprisoned for successfully arguing that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the question of man’s origins has been a breeding ground for scientific controversy. In the battle of the Bible against science, however, the evolutionists had always won hands down. Now, however, in America, more than a century of scientific orthodox evolutionary theory is being challenged in an evangelical fight for the souls of the nation’s children...more here

A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT

A Little Bumper Sticker: Save the whales. Collect the whole set.


A Little Quip: Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

A Little Confusion: A hungry baby in a topless bar.

Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
Drive carefully. It's not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
Never buy a car you can't push.
Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won't have a leg to stand on.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Since it's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
So : "Life is short. Enjoy it!"

What would you tell him?

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?"
"I...don't know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

— from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Be Drunk

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Charles Baudelaire
(1821 - 1867)

"Inside Deep Throat" Reexamines a Smut Classic

Mafia porn flick or avant-garde legend? A documentary takes a new look at the 1972 pornographic film "Deep Throat" -- which made the name Linda Lovelace a household name. The cultural wars that the film sparked at its release are still raging three decades later...more here

Birth, death, balls and battles

IN 1951, AFTER READING War and Peace for the twelfth time, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin (1873- 1954) noted in his diary that he felt, at last, that he understood his life. Like all great works of art, Tolstoy’s masterpiece has the capacity, on each successive reading, to transform our understanding of the world.

On any first reading, War and Peace is bound to dazzle with its immense panorama of humanity. The whole of life appears to be contained in its pages. Tolstoy presents us with a cast of several hundred characters. Yet to each one he brings such profound understanding of the human condition, with all its frailties and contradictions, that we recognise and love these characters as reflections of our own identity. ...more here

The seduction

Vladimir Nabokov (left) in September 1958. ''L'Affaire Lolita,'' as the French had christened it, was just beginning its long career. THE ELOQUENCE OF EVIL? James Mason as Humbert Humbert (top right) in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film version of ''Lolita.'' Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (bottom right), in confinement in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann's disgust with ''Lolita'' raises the unsettling question of how to read the novel.

N THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family's first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country's best butterfly hunting.

On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: ''Lolita."...more here

Every Day

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
US author & journalist (1890 - 1957)

Solitude

At last! Alone! No sound but the rattle of a few belated, worn-out hackney cabs. For a few hours silence will be ours, if not rest. At last! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I will suffer no more, except from myself.

Charles Baudelaire, À une heure du matin (At one o'clock in the morning)

Reading

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, chap. 9

In the House of the Hangman

Defining Defeat
May 8, 1945

The surrender of the German military to Allied forces took place at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims in the early hours of May 7, 1945. On April 30, Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide, leaving Grand Admiral Dönitz as head of state; on May 1, the last remaining German forces in Italy capitulated; the following day General Weidling surrendered Berlin to Soviet general Chuikov, though Weidling stalled as long as possible to allow Martin Bormann and others to escape from Hitler's bunker; on May 3, Hamburg fell to the British. By the first week of May, the endgame was played out, as had been inevitable all spring...more here

Inside the North Korean Slave State

The charm of dictators has been known to reduce the hardest men to jelly. I remember a tough-minded Japanese photographer returning from Pyongyang in the nineteen-seventies still aglow from the experience of Kim Il Sung's “warm handshake.” Similar reports have come from some of those allowed into Hitler's mesmerizing presence: warm handshakes and piercing eyes appear to go with the position.

Bradley K. Martin, whose “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty” (St. Martin's; $29.95) is the heaviest tome to appear in English on the subject, has spent decades penetrating the mysteries of North Korea. He paints a grim picture in exhaustive detail, backed by many first-person accounts. But, though he is no apologist, he is perhaps fair to a fault. “There might be two sides to the story,” he cautions. Kim Il Sung possessed “considerable personal charm that only increased with age and experience.” The same goes for his son: “I would describe him as an often insensitive and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and—increasingly as he matured—charming.”...more here

The Quiddity of Bullshit

Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” He did find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided, was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying. (A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition. The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more than a matter of degree...more here

Beyond belief

Near the end of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote these words to a correspondent who had asked the great imponderable:

"As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect that it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some cosmic all-embracing libretto or God are, believe me, pathetically mistaken."

It's time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense. I do not deny the good work of religious people, nor the cultural effects of religion, nor its deep penetration into our consciousness, but what I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and responds to our plight. As AJ Ayer said, if God has constituted the world in such a way that he cannot resolve the phenomenon of evil, logically it makes no difference whether we are believers or unbelievers...more here

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

All plants and animals, including humans, are essentially societies of cells that vary in configuration and complexity. As Darwin's theory made clear, these multitudinous forms developed as a result of small changes in offspring and natural selection of those that were better adapted to their environment. Such variation is brought about by alterations in genes that control how cells in the developing embryo behave. Thus one cannot understand evolution without understanding its fundamental relation to development of the embryo. Yet "evo devo," as evolutionary developmental biology is affectionately called, is a relatively new and growing field.

Sean B. Carroll, as a leading expert both in how animals develop and in how they have evolved, is ideally placed to explain evo devo. His new book on the subject, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom (the title borrows a phrase from Darwin's On the Origin of Species), was written, he says, with several types of readers in mind—anyone interested in natural history, those in the physical sciences who are interested in the origins of complexity, students and educators (of course), and anyone who has wondered "Where did I come from?" Carroll has brilliantly achieved what he set out to do...more here

Evolution vs. Religion

President Bush used to be content to revel in his own ignorance. Now he wants to share it with America's schoolchildren.

I refer to his recent comments in favor of teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution. "Both sides ought to be properly taught … so people can understand what the debate is about," Bush told a group of Texas newspaper reporters who interviewed him on Aug. 1. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."...more here

Written in the Flesh

The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is really coming to life, is really rising from the tomb.
-- Lady Chatterley's Lover

D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel of adultery, scandalous in its time, is a kind of template for Edward Shorter's Written in the Flesh. Buried deep within the neural pathways of our brains, argues Shorter, is the desire for sexual pleasure -- and for what he calls "total body sex." What, you might want to know (or be afraid to ask), is that? For Shorter, a University of Toronto professor of medical history, it means the expansion of erotic focus from face and genitals to include the sensual delights of the entire body. This biological drive can be channeled underground for a time -- in the case of Medieval Europe, for over a millennium -- by a combination of social control (religion) and social conditions (hunger, disease, lack of privacy). But in the end, desire will out...more here

Film, Violence, and Stardom

The existence of famous serial killers in contemporary American culture brings together two defining features of American modernity: stardom and violence. Not surprisingly, therefore, film is unique among popular cultural media in its potential to shed light on the reasons why we have celebrity serial killers because it is a medium defined by the representation of acts of violence and by the presence of stars...more here

George Bataille and the philosophy of vampirism

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I."

(Friedrich Nietzsche The Gay Science, 125)

The function of myth is to express dramatically the ideology under which a society lives: not only to animate its conscience, the values it recognises and the ideals it pursues from generation to generation, but above all to express its very being and structure, the elements, the connections, the balances, the tensions which constitute it; to justify and reinforce the rules and traditional practices without which everything within a society would disintegrate. Some myths are drawn from authentic events and actions in a more or less stylized fashion, embellished and established as examples to imitate; others are literary fictions incarnating vital concepts of the ideology in certain personages and translating this concept into the connections between various figures.

The Vampire legend operates mythically, that is, as a series of narratives that serve to explain why the world is the way it is. In this sense Myths also exist to provide solutions for eternal questions; – the creation of the world, the relationship between men and women and beasts, the notion of the other. The myth provides solutions to these problems by positing an initial pair of binary oppositions such as life and death, nature and culture. This initially irreconcilable opposition is mediated by the introduction of a third term, which in some way partially inherits the nature of each opposed term. The third term, however, invokes its own opposed term, but this new binary opposition is not as completely intractable as the first. The process repeats, each new opposition being a little closer together than the previous one, until a set of oppositions that can provide some kind of cultural modus vivendi is reached. The vampire legend clearly illustrates this process...more here

"The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place."

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

...A death angel stands in the middle of my room.
Yet I dance till I'm out of breath.
Soon lying in the grave I'll be
And no one will snuggle up to me.
Oh, give me kisses up till death.

Emmy Hemmings

Literature encourages tolerance - bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

— the Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye

The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

— Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

All Joy

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Soren Kierkegaard
--Either/Or

Epidermal Macabre

…I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.


— the last lines of "Epidermal Macabre," Theodore Roethke's lament for having "“fleshy clothes"

Religion itself is the fount of most evil

Muriel Gray argues that it’s all very well blaming fundamentalism, but religion itself is at the core of the world’s problems. It’s time for us to free ourselves from its shackles and draw a clear line between all churches and the state.

What’s the definition of a Conservative? A liberal who’s been mugged. I’ve kept this gag close over the last few weeks, lodging it as a reminder that immediate responses to the London nightmare are unlikely to be reasonable or helpful. But it’s been hard.

As the body parts of the murdered commuters were being bagged, and Iraqi children were blown apart for taking sweets from an American soldier, I sat by our daughter’s intensive care bed where, for the second time during her regrettably eventful 10 years, medical geniuses had saved her life. A pair of surgeons who shame Michelangelo with sculpting skills in flesh and bone, an anaesthetist possessed of the magic to rekindle glowing embers of life back into flame, and a team of tireless doctors and nurses grafted and toiled or her behalf in the sweltering temperatures of the Edinburgh heatwave, and then carried on grafting and toiling on behalf of all the other tiny mites and scraps of existence passing through their care...more here

Banality Of the Bombers

"The deeds were monstrous, but

the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."

-- Hannah Arendt,

"The Life of the Mind"

The banality of evil that Hannah Arendt glimpsed in Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann lives on in this visual age. It emerges from surveillance photographs of four terrorism suspects in London that were splashed across the world's television screens, Internet sites and newspapers earlier this month.

Those police photos, as did Eichmann's words and appearance during his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, show the face

of evil as all too human and surprisingly mediocre -- a face not of mysterious supernatural forces that we cannot comprehend or combat, but one of petty criminality and hatred that we can easily recognize. In that sobering reality are reasons for comfort, and for anguish...more here

The Paranormal, Miracles and David Hume

Is parapsychology a pseudo-science? Many believe that the Eighteenth century philosopher David Hume showed, in effect, that it must be. In this article, Terence Penelhum explains and endorses Hume's arguments concerning testimony of the miraculous, but also explains why he believes there is now evidence of sufficient quality concerning the paranormal to make further investigation scientifically worthwhile...more here

Love's Philosophy

A mighty pain to love it is,
And 't is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
-from Abraham Crowley's "Anacreon

Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle;—
Why not I with thine?
— from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Love's Philosophy";

"What then is the nature of man...? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection.... We think for the sake of thinking; love for the sake of loving; will for the sake of willing — i.e., that we may be free."
— the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach

The job

The job of a porn star is not a calling -- or even an option -- for most women. However, if you make the right decisions and set the right boundaries for yourself, it can be a great living, because you'll make a lot of money while doing very little work. And you'll get more experience in front of the camera than a Hollywood actress. Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it's one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being. So fuck Gloria Steinem.

Jenna Jameson is a porn star. Perhaps even the porn star. And despite the title and the occasional pointed advice, How to Make Love Like A Porn Star is not a manual, it's an autobiography. Co-authored with rock writer extraordinaire Neil Strauss (The Dirt with Motley Crüe and The Long Hard Road Out of Hell with Marilyn Manson) Jameson's book is stylishly executed and well paced, a fascinating look at the Jennasis of a beautiful teenager from Las Vegas into the woman with perhaps the most famous breasts -- and other bits -- in the world...more here

Joy

There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death.

Soren Kierkegaard

Jesus story 'gets it 97% right'

It is 97 per cent certain that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead - based on sheer logic and mathematics, not faith - according to Oxford professor Richard Swinburne.

"New Testament scholars say the only evidence is witnesses in the four gospels. That's only 5 per cent of the evidence," Professor Swinburne, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion, said last night.

"We can't judge the question of the resurrection unless we ask first whether there's reason to suppose there is a God, second if we have reason to suppose he would become incarnate and third, if he did, whether he would live the sort of life Jesus did."

Professor Swinburne, in Melbourne to give several seminars and a public lecture at the Australian Catholic University last night, said the mathematics showed a probability of 97 per cent.

This conclusion was reached after a complex series of calculations. In simplified terms, it began with a single proposition: the probability was one in two that God exists.

Next, if God exists, the probability was one in two that he became incarnate. Further, there was a one in 10 probability that the gospels would report the life and resurrection of Jesus in the form they do.
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Finally, the clincher: the probability that we would have all this evidence if it wasn't true was one in 1000.

He argued that any evidence for the existence of God was an argument for the resurrection, and any evidence against the existence of God was an argument against the resurrection.

"Does he have reason to become incarnate? Yes, to make atonement, identify with our suffering and to teach us things, " Professor Swinburne said.

Even Jesus' life is not enough proof, he said. God's signature was needed, which the resurrection was, showing his approval of Jesus' teaching.

The mathematical equations appear in the book, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (OUP, 2003).

The Black Book of Religion

A Black Book of Religion, documenting the grievous offenses perpetrated in the name of God. The suicide bombers who have sown mayhem in Iraq, the Islamists who last year shredded railway passengers in Spain, or the demented Muslim who recently shot and stabbed a Dutch filmmaker, then pinned a note to his bleeding body boasting of his deed, are but current examples of an uncomfortable paradox. Few humans stoop lower, seemingly, than those whose gaze is fixed on heaven. The same transcendent epiphany that animates saints can perversely transform others into devils. Just how and why Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde surely deserves keener attention from the devout of all faiths, or so it seems to me.

What follows is a prospectus, humbly submitted by a troubled secularist...more here

Who's Soren Now?

A battle is raging between two Danish scholars over the status of a prize-winning biography of Søren Kierkegaard that appeared in English translation in February of this year. Princeton University Press has called Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography “the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life”. Publishers Weekly calls it “monumental and magisterial”, and an American Kierkegaard scholar writing in The Wall Street Journal called it “superb”. Another scholar, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, said that while it was hard to imagine what a new biography of Kierkegaard might consist of, this most recent work had solved that problem “masterfully”. Danish reviewers have been similarly extravagant in their praise. A reviewer for the Danish newspaper Politiken asserted that no other biography “would ever even approach it, much less surpass it”.

The biography received the prestigious Georg Brandes Prize and the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen 's literary prize. It is in its fifth Danish edition. Since its publication in Denmark in 2000, it has been translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, and now English. The George Brandes prize selection committee said they chose the work because of its “academic thoroughness” and because of the “rigour of the standards of verification to which it adhered”...more here

Immerse Yourself

I thank God that I am not dictator of the world. There would be perks. All of that sex, and being able to watch the opera from a seat at the front rather than standing at the back. But to spend one's life surrounded by flunkies and cronies, terrified of one's power and yet trying to feather their own nests – how awful! All a bit like the upper echelons of university administrations.

However, if I were world dictator, I know what would be my first action. It would be to abolish undergraduate degrees in philosophy. I would allow some courses – I might make it a necessary condition of getting a degree to take a course or two – and I might even allow minors. But there would be no one majoring in philosophy.

Given the fact that I am just completing my fortieth year as a philosophy professor, this must sound like a severe case of self hatred. You may think that I have so little regard for myself and my subject that I want to eliminate it from the curriculum, and hope eventually to starve it to death. This is far from being the case. Indeed, I am right there with Plato in thinking that philosophy is simply the most important subject there is. The unexamined life indeed is not worth living. There are times indeed when I do wish I were a man of action – an orthopedic surgeon or a firefighter – but I like to console myself by thinking everything and everyone else exists to make philosophers possible. We are at the peak of humankind...more here

Put your sweet lips . . .

In what must still be the longest single work devoted to the kiss — Opus Polyhistoricum . . . de Osculis — the German polymath Martin von Kempe (1642-83) assembled 1,040 closely packed pages of excerpts from classical, biblical, legal, medical and other learned sources to form a sort of encyclopaedia of kissing. He listed more than 20 types of kiss. These included the kiss of veneration, the kiss of peace, the kisses bestowed by Christians on images and relics, and by pagans on idols, the kissing of the Pope’s foot, the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies, the lovers’ kiss, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss exchanged by couples sealing their marriage vows, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss carrying contagion, the hypocritical kiss and the kiss of Judas...more here

It's a thing that happens to you

"It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.... You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

— wisdom from the Skin Horse in Margery Williams Bianco's children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real

The Sexual Politics of Breasts

It’s not often that you can accuse the Sun of sensitivity. But it did display unexpected tact the day the front page was devoted to Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer: it dropped the Page Three pin–up. Presumably they didn’t want to offend readers with any reminder that those pert, cheeky playthings can also harbour sinister hidden routes of dangerously connective hormones.

In fact, the Sun doesn’t savour any association with breasts other than titillation. A couple of months ago it ran a campaign to get Britney Spears to wear a bra because now that she’s pregnant hers are beginning to sag. And that’s disgusting.


The extent of this division between the breast’s erotic and nurturing functions seems an acute barometer of a culture’s well–being. In America, the spiritual home of the breast fetish, the separation has reached massive proportions. Women are so castigated for breastfeeding that determined mothers have resorted to forming associations like the Militant Breastfeeding Cult and Inciteful Mamas...more here
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Celebrity Psychos

Our celebrities are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They’re on a dangerous rampage, and no one is safe. Christian Slater grabbed a woman’s bottom outside an Upper East Side deli, and Russell Crowe had a tantrum lengthy enough for him to rip a phone out of the wall, take it down the elevator, and throw it into the face of a clerk at the city’s most exclusive hotel. Dave Chappelle beat a quick path from his final Comedy Central tapings to South Africa, explaining he needed to go visit a friend, and Brad Pitt dyed his hair platinum (he got it done by Jen’s hairdresser!), played public footsie with Angelina Jolie, and paid the price with viral meningitis. Courtney Love, the patron saint of celebrity craziness, has been quiet lately, but getting larger. Who knows when she may erupt again. This summer, all outbreaks are only sideshows to the concurrent breakdown of Michael Jackson during his trial and the more recent mania of Tom Cruise, two of the biggest and most mysterious stars in the world unmasked as stark-raving lunatics. (The reeducation of Katie Holmes, the Manchurian Fiancée, continues apace.) Attack or be attacked: The other week, Leonardo DiCaprio was hanging out at a house party in the Hollywood Hills when one of the female guests hit him in the face with a bottle...more here

Possibility

"When you give someone a book, you don't give him just paper, ink, and glue. You give him the possibility of a whole new life." - Christopher Morley

Franz Kafka

The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923

The Greatest Sentence

I move my lips when I read a well-written sentence. It surprises me that this is considered a hallmark of stupidity, as though I were still trapped in a regressive state where I had to sound out syllables to discover meaning. I am mouthing the words as I consume them so I can assimilate them, to make them my own. I am relishing the taste of good words...more here

Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life

Richard Linklater's 2002 film Waking Life is all about dreaming, and how we can sometimes control our dreams when they're lucid. Yet it's also about some broad philosophical issues, including one of the oldest philosophical conundrums, the distinction between appearance and reality. When René Descartes sat at his stove and meditated on the world and on whether an evil demon controlled everything he perceived, he wondered, what's more real, dreams or waking life? The diverse collection of characters in Linklater's film ask the same question. Yet they ask it not just in a literal sense, but also as a metaphor for the nature of modern culture and for the human condition as a whole - in what ways do we fall asleep even while awake? How can we lead a life that is more awake, more aware of people and things, more authentic? The film provides the outlines of three wake-up calls to three more-or-less separate ways in we sleep too easily.

This issue is not new. It goes all the way back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave: what if you were chained in a dimly-lit cave your whole life where you saw only the shadows of real things passing by the entrance to your cave reflected on its back wall? Suddenly, you're freed, and come into the sunlight. Would you recognize this new world as more real than your cave? And would you be able to convince those still enchained in the cave that there was a greater world outside their dwelling? Would you be able, in Plato's terms, to wake up to reality?...more here

Nonsense in vogue

Students of language have long argued that common usages of words are as important as official definitions, since words often soak up assumptions of the day. This causes problems when commonplace usages of words override all other possible meanings. As Francis Bacon observed, language can trick us into uncritically accepting assumptions associated with particular words--a fallacy he called the "idol of the marketplace."

Consider the common advice that "we must be careful not to generalize." This adage implies that generalization is inherently wrong and we should take special care to avoid it. Yet generalization is needed to understand the complex world we live in, and science and rational thought would be impossible without it. In addition, note the paradox that the statement "we must be careful not to generalize" is itself a generalization, so we would disobey the advice if we followed it! Clearly, words like generalization carry unstated cultural assumptions that confuse rather than clarify discussions...more here

Why Marx is man of the moment

A penniless asylum seeker in London was vilified across two pages of the Daily Mail last week. No surprises there, perhaps - except that the villain in question has been dead since 1883. 'Marx the Monster' was the Mail's furious reaction to the news that thousands of Radio 4 listeners had chosen Karl Marx as their favourite thinker. 'His genocidal disciples include Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - and even Mugabe. So why has Karl Marx just been voted the greatest philosopher ever?'...more here

Nabokov's Pale Fire

John Shade's "Pale Fire" opens with an extraordinary series of images whose initial impact lingers in the mind as it expands in implication throughout the poem:


I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.


As we learn more about Shade's lifelong attempt to understand a world where life is surrounded by death, we realize the full resonance of these opening lines: that he is projecting himself in imagination into the waxwing, as if it were somehow still flying beyond death, and into the reflected azure of the window, as if that were the cloudlessness of some hereafter, even as he stands looking at "the smudge of ashen fluff" of the dead bird's little body... more