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eternalstoke
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Name: Tommy
Country: United States
Metro: Honolulu
Birthday: 6/21/1982
Gender: Male
Interests: Surfing, Literature, Philosophy, Depth Psychology, Mythology, Roman Catholic moral theology, Natural Law tradition, medical ethics and bioethics.
Expertise: I can make you a perfect cup of coffee, discuss the classical fourfold causation in Thomistic action theory, and give you a complete physical exam!
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
3/3/2005
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| I have always been somewhat nervous and hesitant in discussions of 'post-modernism' and its influence on my generation's incapacity for propositional reasoning. Lewis confirms me in my suspicion that the whole idea is a distraction from the real work that ought to be done. Since our schools have left off teaching the young how to think, it is the responsibility of Christians to lead our society out of its ignorance. Is that beginning to happen?
'If we had noticed that the young men of the present day found it harder and harder to get the right answers to sums, we should consider that this had been adequately explained the moment we discovered that schools had for some years ceased to teach arithmetic. After that discovery we should turn a deaf ear to people who offered explanations of a vaguer and larger kind--people who said that the influence of Einstein had sapped the ancestral belief in fixed numerical relations, or that gangster films had undermined the desire to get right answers, or that the evolution of consciousness was now entering on its post-arithmetic [or 'post-modern' !] phase. Where a clear and simple explanation completely covers the facts no other explanation is in court. If the younger generation have never been told what the Christians say and never heard any arguments in defence of it, then their agnosticism or indifference is fully explained.' - C. S. Lewis 'On the Transmission of Christianity' | | |
| 'Another source of strength in the Myth [the popular belief of Evolutionism, or the Evolutionary picture of reality] is what the psychologists would call its 'ambivalence'. It gratifies equally two opposite tendencies of the mind, the tendency to denigration and the tendency to flattery. In the Myth everything is becoming everything else: in fact everything is everything else at an earlier or later stage of development--the later stages being always the better. This means that if you are feeling [reductionistic] like Mencken you can 'debunk' all the respectable things by pointing out they are 'merely' elaborations of the disreputable things. Love is 'merely' an elaboration of lust, virtue merely an elaboration of instinct, etcetera. On the one hand it means that if you are feeling what the people call 'idealistic' you can regard all the nasty things (in yourself, or your party, or your nation) as being 'merely' the undeveloped forms of all the nice things: vice is only undeveloped virtue, egoism only undeveloped altruism, a little more education will set everything right.'
'The Myth [of popular Evolutionism] also soothes the old wounds of our childhood. Without going so far as Freud we may yet well admit that every man has an old grudge against his father and his first teacher. The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend. How pleasing, therefore, to abandon the old idea of 'descent' from our concocters in favour of the new idea of 'evolution' or 'emergence': to feel that we have risen from them as a flower from the earth.'
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| I attended a clinical lecture this morning by an esteemed neurologist, who, in evaluating a case of ciguatoxin poisoning, elaborated on the history of the toxin in Hawaiian culture. The toxin comes from reef fish that feed on reef algae, where the dinoflagellates grow- but the Hawaiians did not know this. When they dipped their weapons in the wading pools infested with the toxin, to make them more lethal, they thought that immoral persons had drowned or been slain there. But now we know better.
In contradiction to this, from G.K. Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy':
"But we cannot say why an egg could turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As ideas, the egg and the chicken are further away from one another than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken; whereas some princes do suggest bears... Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there myst be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, where there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country."
So... while there is a connection between dinoflagellates and ciguatera poisoning, the connection is no MORE sensical than if an immoral Hawaiian had been slain there. While it is true that the Hawaiian makes a 'category mistake' in giving a moral explanation for a natural event, this is no sillier than what modern scientists do, which is to give a physical explanation for a moral event. (Your conscience is a product of survival + heredity, etc.) If there ever was a 'category mistake' to poke fun at- let's poke fun at that one. | | |
| Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. And the natural way to learn a language, is to first speak it, then worry about grammar later on. This book accomplishes just that, easing you into grammatical understanding, but not before offering rich dividends. This is probably the most prayed prayer in all of human history, speaking worldly, judging from Christianity's overall numbers, and widespread monasteries. This is also the language it has been most commonly prayed in:
Pater noster, qui es in coelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum,
fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimmite nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimmitimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,
sed libera nos a malo.
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A leftie I caught last week.
Also, my first ever surfing photo courtesy of my beautiful bride. | | |
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