‘One man is a convinced realist, another a convinced idealist and teaches his children accordingly. In such an important matter as the existence or non-existence of the external world they don’t want to teach their children anything wrong.’ (LW)
Monthly Archives: September 2006
TBTM20060914
A bit blurred today; I was experimenting with a different setting on the camera.
Wittgenstein: “the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God?… Practice gives the words their sense.”
Dennett on religion
American Scientist Online – Escaping Illusion?: “Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine”
This is a mistake. The man needs to read Pirsig. (And Wittgenstein – ‘why can’t God act in accordance with a calculation?’)
The real problem with reviews such as these – and the books being reviewed – is that the material is vitiated by a profound ignorance of what religion actually is (or, better, what Christianity, Buddhism, Islam are). The debate is conducted within a bubble of late Protestant Atheism, and all dissonant material is bracketed out. For example, the understanding of ‘supernatural’ used in the review is wholly philosophically Modern and has no application to classical Christianity, ie that governing the formation of the faith for the first 1500 years.
Once upon a time I spent many hours writing a book aimed at trying to persuade this sort of culture of its error. I’ve lost all enthusiasm for the task, almost certainly because of my experience on MoQ.org with ‘the missing you’ (let the reader understand), and more substantially because other things have taken the foreground rather dramatically (Peak Oil, and Christian life in general) – but also because the intellectual foundations for this approach have been removed. It’s a paradigm shift, in the specific and strictly Kuhnian sense. Things will change once this present generation, without the emotional strength to embrace the change, has died out. The surface structure will take time to collapse, but collapse it will. The Twin Towers could stand as a metaphor for this – Babel towers, created and emodying a confident atheism; toppled by the Other, not taken account of in their philosophy.
Very excited
Got James Alison’s latest book delivered today, which I’m really looking forward to devouring. By the way, I also downloaded his talk at Greenbelt, which was up to expectations. Have you read Judges 19-21 recently?
Also delivered was Helen Bannerman’s ‘Little Black Sambo’ which (for obvious reasons) was my favourite book when I was just beginning to read. I’m looking forward to sharing it with my kids.
20060913 (cheating)
This is cheating because it’s actually a photo from a few days ago, in the afternoon.
Today I awarded myself a bonus lie-in and I slept until 9:15(!) – quite an achievement – so beloved took boys to the beach (with Ollie of course) for breakfast. So it’s what I thought it might have been like, whilst I was still in the land of nod. 🙂
OK Wittgenstein quote for today:
“Russell’s books should be bound in two colours: thsoe dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.”
The Mein Kampf of Islamism
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The age of horrorism (part one)
Good article by Martin Amis, looking at many things, but Sayyid Qutb in particular.
8 Mile
I always used to believe that rap was spelt with a silent c at the beginning, but I’ve been softening of late, and recognising that there is something of Quality here; principally lyrically (of course).
Anyhow, this was engrossing and enjoyable – a world away from the one I inhabit, which was what I needed last night. Might just have to get an Eminem album to explore further.
Joy for British Headline Writers
Wunder Blog : Weather Underground: “Tropical Storm Gordon”
This is a great blog by the way, for those of you who aren’t aware of it (if you’re interested in this sort of thing).
TBTM20060912
“I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.”
(Wittgenstein to Drury, c 1930)
And if he walked past a bookshop in Cambridge today, doubtless he’d see pictures of Paris Hilton.
The World in 2031
Hmm. Go read this (go quick, it’ll be behind a paywall in the next 24 hours).
The sort of idle prognostications that I enjoy. Only one analyst talked about the energy crisis, and there clearly without a full appreciation of the implications. None of them talked about global warming.
I think by 2031 we will be in a radically different world. We’ll either have sorted out the energy issues, powered down, and be on a sustainable path – or we won’t, in which case we can expect increasing disorder, and probably an Islamic worldwide caliphate.
More likely, I think there will be several interlinked crises; nuclear war in the middle east (probably the end of Israel); a return to a multipolar world; hugely increased localism and regionalism; a drop of population (10% maybe); a lot of nervousness; a lot of human migration. Yet for the survivors, something positive to hope for.