Comments on: Can Atheists Appreciate Chesterton?

By: grendelkhan

grendelkhan — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:52:00 +0000

Sounds like the oceanic feeling. I didn’t know what that really meant until I read “Oceanic” (short story, available at the link, very much worth it), and I wondered about how I would have reacted if I’d been faced with that experience as a child.

As it happened, when I reached my late teens I was surprised to hear about people talking about their religious belief bringing them great happiness (I thought it was just something that made you feel guilty about sex), and I spent my formative years reading Hofstadter and internalizing reductionism, so even if I did have that kind of experience, it’d be some kind of mushy one-with-the-universe thing, which I sort-of got reading The Ancestor’s Tale anyway.

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By: Diogenes Teufelsdrockh

Diogenes Teufelsdrockh — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 05:03:05 +0000

Someone should rewrite “Thursday” so it’s about a group of reactionaries who are all secretly liberals.

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By: Kaj Sotala

Kaj Sotala — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 09:10:04 +0000

The idea of talking about what goes on in the individual soul, of having strong opinions about it, isn’t a very modern sensibility at all.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?

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By: Randy M

Randy M — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 22:34:37 +0000

Yes, you see this on the right when a terrorist leader dies, or the left when well known marginally sucessful right-wing politicians die.

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By: Sniffnoy

Sniffnoy — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 21:50:39 +0000

Yes, agreed.

Also, this is entirely tangential, but Razib Khan makes the interesting point that in some contexts, the notion of “dominance” (in the genetic sense) is a social construct. (Specifically, this occurs when the possible values of the affected trait are binned in socially-constructed ways.)

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By: Gilbert

Gilbert — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:56:51 +0000

Yup, but that trend doesn’t start at the printing press, it starts somewhere in Old Testament times and then gains steam at Golgotha.

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By: amuchmoreexotic

amuchmoreexotic — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:57:44 +0000

Are you aware of Strange Notions? It’s a Catholic run site that bills itself as the premiere meeting place for atheists and Catholics, but then weirdly runs all Catholic articles (with a single atheist article once). When challenged on this, the proprietor claims that he can’t get atheists to contribute (among other reasons, like “the Speaker of the House has to belong to one of the parties” and “Catholics are presenting the positive case so the atheists just have to rebut in comments”).

Would you consider putting this excellent article forward for publication on Strange Notions, Scott?

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By: The What-You’d-Implicitly-Heard-Before Telling Thing « Random Ramblings of Rude Reality

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:47:06 +0000

[…] K. Chesterton, whom I praised yesterday, is also famous for the argument of the “truth-telling […]

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By: Brett

Brett — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:32:53 +0000

And I do hope you check out Tim O’Neill! He writes about medieval history like you would expect from, say, a Westerner writing about Confucianism: like a historian, rather than a partisan. I’ve learned a lot of good history and got some good book recommendations from him.

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By: Brett

Brett — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:26:37 +0000

Yes, people were executed for heresy, often in quite nasty ways. I do not dispute this. But I do not believe you have a proper understanding of what was and was not considered to be a heresy. Questioning the literal interpretation of Scripture, in particular, was never considered a heresy. As I said, St. Augustine wrote three books on how to interpret Genesis.

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