God is back in fashion among intellectuals

"The ostracised believer – stronger than all!" This was the title of a speech held in the Stuttgarter Literaturhaus and subsequently reprinted in a German newspaper. Its author was Feridun Zaimoglu, a German writer of Turkish origin, 40 years old and recently distinguished with the Chamisso Prize. Zaimoglu calls the species of non-believers who have been condemned to downfall by their proper name: the Enlightened. "The Enlightened pull angry faces when they hear that there's a higher power influencing the plight of mankind or the world's cycles. But God, declared for dead, considered a trap for those dumb enough to believe in the thereafter, survives every trial and every renewal. Maybe it's time to do a little reversal, to consider the Enlightenment as the opium of the bourgeois and thereby devalue every object that was and is not a ware."...more here

Fulfilment

“To study something of great age until one grows familar with it and almost to live in its time, is not merely to satisfy a curiosity or to establish aimless truths: it is rather to fulfil a function whose appetite has always rendered History a necessity. By the recovery of the Past, stuff and being are added to us; our lives which, lived in the present only, are a film or surface, take on body--are lifted into one dimension more. The soul is fed. Reverence and knowledge and security and the love of good land--all these are increased or given by the pursuit of this kind of learning. Visions or intuitions are confirmed. It is excellent to see perpetual agony and failure perpetually breeding the only enduring things; it is excellent to see the crimes we know ground under the slow wheels whose ponderous advance we can hardly note during the flash of one human life. One may say that historical learning grants men glimpses of life completed and whole; and such a vision should be the chief solace of whatever is mortal and cut off imperfectly from fulfilment.” —Hillaire Belloc, The Old Road

Call Me Digital

Imagine, at the end of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, that Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod kill the white whale instead of the other way around. That Ishmael is not alone in his escape. Steven Olsen-Smith, an associate professor of English at Boise State University, has reconstructed textual evidence that strongly suggests that Melville, whose 1851 novel stands as one of the great achievements of American literature and an enduring study of doomed monomania, entertained just such a scenario...more here

Sadness

Every so often, sadness leaks from the universe. *Because the earth cannot contain the sorrows we inflict on each other*.
We are overcome by waves of sadness, welling up from the earth, suffusing our beings, and we cry, seemingly without reason.

An Atheist Manifesto

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?...more here

Second Person

Some key moments in philosophical history illustrate the neglect or denial of the importance of the Second Person to philosophical thought with a resulting distortion of problem and available answers. Here are some examples.

(1) The Meno

In the Meno Plato produces one of the best known and least plausible of his arguments. He purports to show that 'we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection'. He demonstrates his point by eliciting geometric theorems from an uneducated slave boy by pure questioning. He invites Meno 'Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.' For good measure he uses the 'knowledge is remembrance' thesis to prove the immortality of the soul: 'And if there have been always true thoughts in him, both at the time when he was and was not a man, which only need to be awakened into knowledge by putting questions to him, his soul must have always possessed this knowledge, for he always either was or was not a man?.. And if the truth of all things always existed in the soul, then the soul is immortal.' ...more here

Poetry and the Science of Mind

Science has long been the dominant intellectual force in Western societies. Some fields of empirical enquiry, from the cosmos to the neurone, are necessarily scientific. In other fields, though, for example, concerned with the nature of our humanity and our relationship with the natural world, scientists also seem to have achieved more than have poets or philosophers or the social scientists who practise psychology and sociology. Perhaps, one reason for the dominance of science has been the willing submission to its ascendancy by academic disciplines that were once regarded as subject areas in the arts and humanities...more here

Poetry

" No man was ever yet a great poet,
without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge,
human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. "

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Today's word

ahimsa (uh-HIM-sah, uh-HIN-sah) noun

The principle of refraining from harming any living being.

[From Sanskrit ahimsa, from a- (not) + hinsa (injury).]

"As my conception of ahimsa went on maturing, I became more vigilant
about my thought and speech. The lines in the Anthem:
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall;
Confound their policies,
Frustrate their knavish tricks
particularly jarred upon my sentiments of Ahimsa."
M.K. Gandhi; The Story of My Experiments With Truth; 1927.

The Origins of Life

Twenty-five years ago, Francis Crick, who co--discovered the structure of DNA, published a provocative book titled Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. Crick speculated that early in Earth’s history a civilization from a distant planet had sent a spaceship to Earth bearing the seeds of life. Whether or not Crick was serious about his proposal, it dramatized the difficulties then plaguing the theory that life originated from chemical reactions on Earth. Crick noted two major questions for the theory. The first one—seemingly unanswerable at the time—was how genetic polymers such as RNA came to direct protein synthesis, a process fundamental to life. After all, in contemporary life-forms, RNA translates genetic information encoded by DNA into instructions for making proteins...more here

Eden and Evolution

Religious critics of evolution are wrong about its flaws. But are they right that it threatens belief in a loving God?



The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid . . .

-- Isaiah 11:6

What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature.

-- Charles Darwin

Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was true...more here