My personal choice:
20 Lines That Could Have Dramatically Changed The Lord of the Rings
Saruman: “On second thought, betraying the gods in Valinor who sent me to Middle Earth and forsaking an eternity of immortal bliss just so I can lord it up with a second-rate evil sorcerer doesn’t sound like such a good idea. Let’s breed an army of eagles instead and get that bitch to Mount Doom pronto.”
It comes as a bit of a surprise, although it should not, that some readers cast aspersions on the mental capacity of theists, while lauding the alleged mental superiority of atheists. As if differences in conclusions were caused only by differences in mental capacity, not differences in axioms, reasoning, judgments, experiences, evidence.
It occurs to me that we have at hand the means to perform a survey of almost scientific accuracy, and compare the thinking of a theist and an atheist of the exact came education, background, attitude, and intelligence: namely, myself at two different periods in time.
If we look back to some earlier posts of mine, before my conversion, and compare them with the later, we can see if we detect a sudden drop in mental coherence.
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/367.html
Compare it with this
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/55230.html
Now, to me, these look like the same arguments given in almost the same terms. One is written by an absolute atheist, who has no particle of supernaturalism in any part of his philosophy, one is written by a theist gladly submissive to the Will of God, and who has no earnest doubts about the dogma of the Church. If anything, thelater argument seems to be more honed and precise.
While we are looking at the past, here is an account of my intellectual journey toward a more traditional view of life:
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/1710.html
It is on this basis that I have little reason to be persuaded by wags who assure me I believe such-and-such only because I am religious. (If I could take seriously the testimony of strangers who claim to know my inmost thoughts, but cannot seem to read a sentence I write and get the meaning I put into it.)
The cause and effect is reversed. Logic and wisdom led me to certain conclusions: looking at the world around me, I saw only one group shared those conclusions: the Church. She and I differed only on the question of supernaturalism. Then I had a supernatural experience. Game, set, match.
(And thank God I was able to throw down my old burden of pride. What a loathsome burden to bear: like the fox hidden in the tunic of the Spartan boy, it just gnaws out your guts while you carry it. I may still sound like an fool when I talk, but a humble fool can be amusing, but a proud fool is insufferable. Particularly when he boasts about how smart he is.)
I am trapped in a logical paradox if I go back to my old ways of belief. If I am insane for believing in what I saw, if I never saw it, then either my wits or my senses are deranged. But my wits or my senses are deranged, on what grounds should I trust my conclusions in other areas, related or unrelated? In other words, if I have lost the capacity for logic, how shall I be secure in the conclusion that atheism is the only logical conclusion?
Statistic professor Charol Shakeshaft analyzed data from a survey by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation. She estimates that between 1991 and 2000 roughly 290000 students were subjected to physical sexual abuse by teachers or other school personnel (Domingo Ramirez Jr., ‘Teacher Sex Abuse Cases Soar’ Fort Worth Star Telegram (Texas), October 29, 2004) In her report for the U.S. Department of education, Shakeshaft says that about one in every ten American children has been sexually abused in some way at school. (see report here.)
Compare that with Catholic priests. A study by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said that 10667 allegations of sexual abuse of children were made between 1950 and 2002.
The ratio is roughly 200 per year for priests to 32,000 per year for educators.
And yet, for some reason, I have heard nothing about the Teacher-Student sexual molestation scandal either in the news, nor fictionalized accounts in popular movies and television.
When my sister discovered that I had joined the NRA, she declared that I must be insane. I asked her how a granny might defend herself if she were mugged by three men twice her size: my sister replied that the granny could know martial arts, and judo-chop them. I assume her evidence at to my lack of mental competence was that I did not regard ninja granny as a viable option in the grim situation of someone faced with a violent crime.
For an article on the relative merits between martial arts and fire arms, see this:
http://www.a-human-right.com/martial.html
I did not know that that Spanish Language edition of LAST GUARDIAN OF EVERNESS was in print.
Here is an image of the cover.
Just between you and me, I love this cover. Simple, elegent, nice: and the artist obviously read the book, because this is the heraldry of Everness depicted here.
Here are some letters from Englishman complaining about the dechristmasification of their once-great nation. The Holiday Whose Name None Dare Speak Aloud is slowly being shoved into the Memory Hole.
There will Always be an England. It’s just that, in forty years, it will be under Sharia law.
I do not care what you think of this current administration, or what your views on NASA, but every science fiction reader is hereby required to rejoice, or else turn in your card.
We are going back to the Moon! For Keeps!
NASA announced plans for a permanent base. Unfortunately international, and unfortunately not a private venture. So what? Back to the Moon! Rejoice!
For those of you too young to remember the Space Age, it was a time when men flew to other heavenly bodies. The Space Age ended with Apollo Seventeen. There then followed a period future historians will call The Dark Ages, when many (yawn) importent advances in astronautics (snore) were accomplished by robots (ho-hum), and we snapped many pretty pictures of places we were not going. However, the Dark Ages are ended, and the Space Age is about to resume.
Flying cars will be next, no doubt.
A rather well done bit of fan fiction, concerning Susan Pevensie who has grown too old, or perhaps too vain, to be bothered with dreams from other worlds.
Along the same lines, here is a poem from Papersky which I found here
The worst of it was that she’d quarrelled with them
And now they were dead, all dead, her parents too,
Nobody left but her awful aunt and uncle,
Their faces collapsed like their future.
Still she stood at the graveside, calm, composed,
Pale-faced, with folded hands, her shoulders back,
She’d been a queen once-in-a-dream,
She might be bereft but she knew how to behave.
If only they’d not quarrelled in these last few years…
They’d called her shallow and she’d called them babes,
They had not wanted to grow up: they never would.
She, more than ever, knew she had no choice.
The service droned, but something — she looked up
Saw cassock, surplice, and a lion’s eyes.
Finally, Synaesthete7 runs rings around Phillip Pullman, logically, and refutes that worthy author’s comically inept criticism of C.S. Lewis. Mr. Pullman has sex on the brain, and cannot interpret the serious matters of life save through this lens.
The door to the wardrobe may not be entirely shut — Once a queen in Narnia, always a queen in Narnia, so say we all — and I am sure that if she knocks, it will be opened. But the author shows the possibility is always present that she will be too proud to knock, not grown up enough to have the faith of a child.
Mr. Lewis, by raising this dreadful spectre, speaks of sober and adult things: deep magic, if we may borrow that term. To have Mr. Pullman criticize him on this point is something of a hoot.
Mr. Pullman wrote a good novel and a half. By the time he reaches THE AMBER SPYGLASS, hsi writing is dangerously close to winning the crown for the stupidest and most shallow ending of anything I’ve read. To free all the ghosts of the underworld, not to any new life, but merely to oblivion, strikes me as an odd, even sinister, choice for an heroic climax. Having the main bad guy, God Almightly, turn out to be a drooling idiot in a coffin who dies when he is dropped is not merely silly, it is pathetic: the writing of someone so wormeaten by hate that he cannot even present the object of his hatred as worthy of any dramatic tension or conflict with the hero. The lying little girl does not learn how not to lie, and the violent little boy does not learn how not to be violent. The drama of the arch-warlock seeking to overthrow the Throne of Heaven fizzles and comes to nothing. The homosexual angel I will pass by without comment, except to say that angels in Milton cannot have their bones snapped by a boy of no particular strength. The climax (pardon my use of that word) where the underage and unmarried couple couple with each other, and sexual liberation turns out to be the simple source and sum of all good in the same shallow fashion that religion turns out to be the source and sum of all evil… well, this is childish writing. It is childishness without the simplicity, innocence, or sweetness of a child. It is the bitterness and pouting and helpless anger of a child, one who thinks a great deal too much of himself.
No, Mr. Pullman, life is not all about copulation, and that is not the point Mr. Lewis was making. He was talking about loss of faith.
… “Sir,” said Tirian when he had greeted all these. “If I have read the chronicle aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?”“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”
“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says, ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'”
“Oh Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on growing up.”
“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race onto the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and stop there as long as she can.”
“Well, don’t let’s talk about that now,” said Peter. …
(Hat tip to Robert Sawyer) The Edge Foundation asked 120 scientists, thinkers, and futurists “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” SF fans will notice Gregory Benford, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling on the list.
The question is actually asking about hunches: what it is you believe that has not yet been proved, though it soon may well be?
I have not read each and every response, but none of the ones I did read contained a lawyerly thought, which is: before I answer the question, what is your standard of proof? Are we talking apodictic proof, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or merely a preponderance of evidence?
Of interest to me, even if not really on the topic, was this: the philosopher must note the difference between provability and truth.
Had they asked me, I would have answered that the rules of logic and the scientific method are true, but are not open to proof. Whatever cannot be doubted also, unfortunately, cannot be proved.
“Proof” in science is when two mutually exclusive explanations can predict the results, and one explanation can be ruled out if a given result obtains. “Proof” in logic is when valid deductions come from true axioms.
No possible experiment can be set up to see whether or not we live in a universe where the experimental method is true. If we lived in a universe–let us say we are all sleeping in the Matrix or deceived by the Demiurge of Descartes–where experimental results were unrelated to truth, no experiment could detect that. In such a universe, the consistency of experiments so far in our experience could be coincidence or deception, something that happens to be the case without necessarily being the case.
Likewise for logic. If a skeptic does not believe the law of non-contradiction, how is one to prove to him that it does? In order to set up a proof in formal logic, the rules are a given.
There are numberless things that are true but are not open to proof, some large, some small. Some cannot be proved merely because the machinery of proof is not in place, as in detective stories when the negatives are burnt. Some cannot be proved because they deal with matters that cannot be reproduced before the eyes of witnesses, such as certain metaphysical axioms. It is true beyond any reasonable doubt, for example, that tomorrow time will continue to run from past to future at one second per second: but I cannot prove it.
I cannot prove that justice exists, albeit nothing is more obvious when it has been denied you. Even my three year old knows the difference between saying: “I want that!” and “It’s not fair!”—The former is a reference to a subjective desire only, the latter has no meaning outside a reference to an external, that is, real, standard of comparison.
I cannot prove to you the sun will rise tomorrow, or that my self-awareness exists. Perhaps a telepath could detect what the experience of my self-awareness feels like to me, but then the medium he uses for his ESP is as open to doubt as eyesight or sound waves. (after all, there may be mirages to confuse the telepath in the same way atmospheric distortions confuse the eye above a desert: embarrassed telepaths of the future will be pointing at post boxes and lumber yards, vowing that there are thoughts and ideas issuing from these areas, when actually it is psychic reflections from the heavy-side layer picking up the thoughts of Mrs. Vinolent Mugwump of Tenafly, New Jersey.)
For that matter, I cannot even prove, within the narrow confines of this comments box, that I am not a dog with a keyboard.
No, the relation between proof and truth is a negative one. We know that things which have been finally disproved are not accurate. Phlogiston theory is not accurate, as it predicts outcomes not confirmed by experiment; the Ptolemy model is not accurate, as it assumes entities beyond what is needed, such as epicycles; the Newtonian model is not accurate, as it does not predict something a model with greater predictive ability, Relativity, does predict, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
(But, in these cases, of course, the inaccurate model is perfectly accurate and useful in any circumstances where the specialized cases do not appear: Newton is accurate for any billiard game played under normal gravity and below the speed of light; Ptolemy can be used for navigation on the Earth’s surface reliably.)
In terms of religious or philosophical material, of course, the inability to cross examine ghosts in a witness box or have saints perform miracles before television cameras leaves the matter very much in dispute.
Personally, I think the unreliability of religious eyewitnesses has been exaggerated for partisan purposes. We have no historical authority, for example, which says Thomas a Becket was murdered in the Cathedral of Canterbury, which does not also mention a knight’s wife who prayed to his ghost two days later and received a miraculous cure, or that a man blind for years was cured by this saint. The chroniclers who wrote the matter down for us found the one as reliable as the other. I am not saying a reasonable skeptic cannot doubt that the cures of St. Thomas existed; I am merely saying a reasonable skeptic can also doubt (and why not?) that the murder occurred. No reliable eyewitnesses are still alive to contradict the matter.
There are cuckolds who believe in the faithfulness of their wives with far less evidence than this; there are ball teams who believe that they will win the pennant this year; there are, somehow, impossibly, still committed Marxists in this world, even though no doctrine can be shown false more easily and simply than this crackpot millennialism.
There are people who believe, without proof, that capital punishment deters crime; and people who believe, without proof, that it does not. There are people who believe, without proof, that aborticide kills an innocent human child who has a right to live; and people who believe, without proof, that it does not.
That OJ Simpson was found not guilty of a grotesque murder by a jury of his peers is a matter of fact; as far as the law is concerned, the case is closed and his guilt has not been proved: in the case of double jeopardy, the machinery for gathering and examining proof is shut down after a case is closed, even if a wrong verdict might have been reached, because the American Constitution fears, and has grounds for to fear, endless re-examination of a re-opened case would be used as an instrument of oppression. This does not prevent reasonable people from having a belief about this case, and it is reasonable for them to be firm and vocal in their opinions.
Proof means very little in these cases. Either we are dealing with metaphysical or legal propositions, which by their nature are not open to proof; or cases where the machinery of evidence is unavailable or has been shut down; or cases where the proof is ambiguous.
Religion has been singled out to the great exception to the principle that one should believe a proposition only insofar as proof can support it. This is nonsense. The humility that is silent on every question not open to proof is an exception, not the rule. The exception applies to physics. Everything else in real life is believed because it seems true, not because it has subjected to elaborite and artificial proof processes.
The majority of propositions by which people live their lives are accepted with a level of certainty not sustained by proof, everything from the paternity of their children (how many fathers checked the baby’s DNA?) to the honesty of the reports they read in the press to the wisdom and morality of war and peace, capital punishment or abortion, women’s rights or race relations or global warming, or any other hotly-debated topic.
I know more people who have seen ghosts than who have seen sharks: nonetheless I hold it to be far more reasonable to believe in sharks than to believe in ghosts. I would venture to say even a healthy proportion of religious folk would agree with me. This is a belief not open to proof: I cannot proof that it is unreasonable to believe in ghosts, this is merely a proposition I take on the authority of the general consensus of the people and age in which I was born.
What is really going on with religion is that, in matters of faith and doctrine, it requires an act of will to believe propositions not open to proof. That they are not open to proof may be due to a fallen nature, something we have brought on ourselves or in which we continue due to a corruption of the will. A prelapsarian man would not doubt his clear intuitions from an immediate God.
In our case, we are like a man who checks himself freely into a sanitarium for the insane: he takes on faith, he accepts on the authority of friends and family, that his judgment is distorted by madness, or his perception by hallucination. In such a case, the insane man has no choice but to accept matters on authority: because the sane thing for a sane man to do it not to trust his own judgment.
Christianity proposes, fundamentally, only two basic propositions. The first is the doctrine of the Fall, which says that man is innately and radically wicked. This first doctrine is pessimistic and cynical beyond the imagination of a Schopenhauer or a Diogenes. A person might believe that all men are kind and beautiful and good, but such a person cannot really call himself a skeptic. Of all religious doctrines, it is the only one with clear, even overwhelming, empirical evidence.
The second is the doctrine of the Redemption, which says that anyone, regardless of merit or demerit, can be saved from sin and death, can become the Son of God and inherit the kingdom of Heaven, and live forever in such bliss as cannot be imagined or described. This doctrine is optimistic beyond the imagination of Leibniz. The main obstacle to believing it… is that it is too good to be true. Like any discussion of infinite or ultimate realities, it is not open to proof at all: no matter how many times the Hindu has been reincarnated, that his next death will not be his final is still a matter of faith. No matter how many blessing a man receives in life, or what prophecies he hears about life after death or the fate of the universe, it cannot be proved to him that the future, or the future world, will be one thing as opposed to another any more than it can be proved the sun will rise tomorrow or that his wife is faithful. He believes it because it does not seem reasonable to doubt.
The much maligned faith of the faithful is not merely the gullibility Voltaire and his epigones would have you take on faith he says it is. My experience is that secularists are more gullible, in general, than religious folk—perhaps I have met too many Marxists to believe in the skepticism of the skeptics, or people who think some quota will stop race hatred, or that the next election will usher in the utopia. I cannot tell you how many people take their newspapers on faith, when they know newspapermen are mortal, men who tell lies for pay, but scoff that I take the Bible on faith, when I have firm reason to believe the authors thereof were inspired men, serious enough in what they believed, some of them, to die for it.
No, the faith of the faithful is that act of the will which refuses to consent to unreasonable doubt, irrational doubt, doubts that have no roots and are supported by nothing.
Such doubt as these do not come from the awake and clear-headed ponderings of philosophers on some ethereal mountain peak, high above the ordinary concerns of man. Such doubt as these come when you are alone and weary and walking in a graveyard and you walk between two crooked, dripping trees; and a spiderweb touches your face and vanishes.
Even a man who talked to an angel has doubts of this kind; even Christ on the cross had doubts. We are not talking about the hard-headed skepticism of a someone from Missouri, who says ‘Show Me’: we are talking about the soft-headed skepticism of someone who believes what is basically a conspiracy theory: that inanimate natural processes distort our reasoning to give all humans (alone out of all the life on the planet) a universal predisposition toward religion, that priests invented all rites and doctrines cynically to exploit that predisposition, that martyrs died in order to assist this deception of the gullible, that the vast majority of men for all of time are gullible fools, fools, self-deluded fools.
The only miracle in the atheistic view of the universe is the ongoing miracle that historical figures of such renown and mental power, expert and excellent in all other fields of endeavor, should continue to believe such an obvious fraud and imposition on their credulity. That is one miracle they cannot explain without resort to unconvincing ad hoc explanations. It is something they believe without proof.
