Probably of most interest as an anchor for finding a bit about excellent works by both Chesterton and Lewis, however useful in itself.
My favorite find from the book ... something I think I've heard before, but did not adequately understand:
In Augustine's sermon "On The Pure Love of God", he says:
"Imagine God appeared to you and said he would make a deal with you. That he would give you everything you wished, everything your heart desired except one thing. You could have anything you imagine, nothing would be impossible for you, nothing would be sinful or forbidden But you shall never see my face." Why Augustine askes, did a terrible chill creep over your heart, unless there is a love for God, a desire for God? In fact, if you wouldn't accept that deal, you really do love God above all things. You just gave up the whole world ... and more, for God."
A bit later: "Once again, love has instructed understanding. The fear of the Lord has been the beginning of wisdom".
To begin to understand the importance of the "Face of God", reading the "Face of God" by Scruton would be time well spent. Scruton covers the "subject / object" issue very well. Why is the experience of the face of another human so special? Through that "little i", our soul detects a glimpse of the ultimate "I AM".
Modern man's desire to "be God", through science, through technology, through "progress" to some ill-defined utopia (more likely to be Hell if he arrives) ... ANYTHING BUT GOD! Because in his heart he knows he loves God and his very nature desperately wants to year "well done, my good and faithful servant". However, like a 2 year old, he wants to "DO IT MYSELF"!
Even though his endless searching is increasingly obviously only getting him depression, addiction, suicide, broken families, hatred, tribalism, etc ... and at his life's end, the terrible separation from the only source of life and joy.
A worthy book, but I would recommend reading especially Lewis first, and also some key Chesterton. I'm fairly well versed on Lewis, this book convinced me I'm woefully ignorant on Chesterton,
This post contains links to a couple of books on the Russia Hoax. There is no question the Russia Hoax makes Watergate look like a grade school prank. The Democratic Party and the Media colluded to try to prevent Trump being elected, and then continued their collusion to attempt to overturn his election, and THEN, most amazing of all, THEY GOT CAUCHT and because of ??? changing the subject? continued media DNC collusion? the American people being so disinterested?????
It's like the magician making the rabbit disappear, only for many (a majority?) of Americans, the two years of hoax never happened. They not only don't admit a trick was pulled on them, they don't admit they were present for the show!
Sadly, as we have now all too requently seen, Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc are also part of the magic show. "We have decided to not allow any more posts exposing the Russia Hoax!
This is a documentary based on one of the best books written about the Russia hoax. It does a good job telling the story and giving it dramatic shape. It may be the closest we come to the administration of justice in the biggest scandal in American political history by far. Unlike just about everything that comes out of Hollywood, including documentaries, the story it tells is true.
When I sought to post my review, it was rejected with the following notice: “We apologize but Amazon is not accepting reviews on this product from this account.” I have written Amazon to ask why.
Much as in Quantum Mechanics giving the Newtonian view of the universe a lot of shivers, so mapping the genome and proteins folding are causing significant changes in the Darwin model. This from David Gelernter, one of the demigods of computer science in "Giving Up Darwin":
Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 1040 bacteria—yielding around 1040 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 1077 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 1040x(1/1077)—1040 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 1077—which equals 1 in 1037. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.
Steven Jay Gould, once one of the preeminent Darwinists was brave enough to look at the developing science of genetics and indicate major change was needed.
His [Gould's] challenge reflects a lively turbulence in the field, and more turbulence is sure to come over the next few years as discoveries from molecular biology flood into evolutionary theory. Gould himself is molding the pieces of the debate into a unified, hierarchical view of evolution that he believes will give scientists a framework for talking about the interplay of great events at the levels of species, populations, individuals and genes.
Isaac Newton created a model of a clockwork universe. In those days there was no reason to look for "why" -- God did it, and his reasons are beyond our comprehension. Biologists envied Physics with it's "perfectly" predictive equations, and no need for the "why" of intention. Darwin was no atheist -- his model was a "how" model like Newton's. "Why" was a question above his pay grade.
Einstein introduced some strange "details" to the Newtonian model that Heisenberg, Bohr, Feynman and others expanded on. Physics, at least at the very small, "rolled the dice" -- it wasn't a "clock", at least not all the way down.
What Gould, Turner, Meyer and others have discovered is that in biology, there strongly seems to be "teleology" (intention / design) all the way down to homeostasis (maintaining a certain temperature, salinity, level of potassium, etc). But WHY? Perhaps we really are "special". The biologists covetousness of physics was really a very grave sin.
Much like the US debt, the definition of "lots" for time and odds has gone up dramatically. In the 1980's Sagan's "billions and billions" seemed like "a lot", now in the age of "trillions and trillions" and even MUCH larger numbers like "10 to the 80th" atoms in the universe, and "10 to the 500th" against us even being here, some wisps of humility have started to creep (slowly) into the "science". Real science was NEVER about "why" it was always about WHAT down to the gnats eyelash.
"Why did the chicken cross the road"? "Because his brain told his leg muscles to move in a pattern adaptively chosen for crossing the road". Or maybe he "wanted to"? A little "Voyage Home" may be instructive.
There is a tendency for many of us with technical / scientific leanings to be somewhat "emotion blind". Lots of exceptions -- Gelernter and Turner for example, but there is a definite bias for in science / tech for determinism, materialism, atheism -- for many in these fields, "something more" is very uncomfortable. It may not even be possible to develop "knowledge" (like an algorithm / equation) for it. Wisdom? That really doesn't compute! The sad truth is that science is proudly psychopathic.
On page 291 we see; "the voice that beckons Richard Dawkins to fulfillment is his own - it is not nature's. The edifice of of modern Darwinism, as magnificent an edifice as the most beautiful cathedral, an edifice as painstakingly built by generations devoted and skilled artisans, is hollow at its core. It is an echo chamber."
A bit later ... "the science of life has become disenchanted with itself". Which brings to mind a quite lengthy, but important book on that topic. "The Secular Age", the age we inhabit. Sometimes called the "Age of Anxiety", since anxiety, meaninglessness, suicide, and other pathologies are at record levels. The ancient world was "enchanted" with God, spirits, ghosts, telos. witches, demons, magic, etc" ... our world is "disenchanted" with numbers, formulas, statistics, random chance, and meaninglessness.
So Darwinian materialism has turned out to not be "adaptive" for human thriving as time has moved on. If you are convinced that you CAN'T believe in intentionality, why not? If you assume you are a random accident, why can't a random accident have a random thought and courage to look at intentionality?
Page 253; "Homeostasis demands certain things however -- among them some form of cognition and intentionality. This leads to the very strange thought that the origin of life is tantamount to the origin of cognition and intentionality. Even stranger cognition and intentionality have to have preceded the origin of cellular life."
Note, this in no way requires the Hebrew/Christian God, it just indicates that there is SOME intelligence required. It could be space aliens, other dimensional creatures, demons, furies -- any number of things that modern man finds more acceptable than God. For the creation of Western civilization, it is very clear that the Hebrew/Christian worldview was far more adaptive than other models. It worked to vastly improve the material quality of life, however life became so materially comfortable, the civilization lost God and meaning.
Hey, Trump has negotiated a peace deal in the Mideast! Who knew? The link at the top points to an old blog entry about the Obama "deal" with Iran, which the press fawned over. It was indeed a "deal" ..; for Iran ... who can forget pallets of cash!
I'm so old I remember the REALLY heavy duty breathless joy in the media over the Jimmuh Carter "Camp David Accords" which was much noise signifying nothing. Carter's "Desert Classic" ... 8 soldiers killed, bunch of expensive equipment abandoned/destroyed, "nothing" accomplished except for a devastating loss of respect for US. "Priceless" for the hate the US crowd at home and abroad.
The media did actually "report it" to maintain the fiction that they are not TOTALY biased!
It's just a worthy video to help understand why it is very costly to do things like lockdowns. How costly? We have very little idea -- almost certainly "Trillions", and LOTS of lives through delayed treatments suicide, depression leading to death, addiction, etc
It is also VERY hard to determine cause of death in many cases. According to CDC, in the deaths they have attributed to Covid, in only 6% of the cases, was Covid the only factor. So the "real number is somewhere between 12Kish+ and 200K+. Thus, "reasonable people" are likely to have wide disagreement on the risk.
A book that is sadly very necessary for our time, especially for Christians. We are being coddled into a soft totalitarianism where compliance is seen as a virtue to be signalled, and the "memory hole" is openly exposed.
As events would have it, we don’t need an American Caesar or the theatrics of a Rubicon crossing. Our political institutions and public consciousness can be, and are being, transformed from the inside out, without any melodrama. The result, says Dreher, will be a comfortable servitude, a “soft totalitarianism,” run by a technocratic, progressive elite, and supported by Big Data and a compliant capitalism. Everyday life will be far closer to the sunny brain-scrub of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the shabbiness and goon-squad brutality of Orwell’s Airstrip One.
When you worship only comfort, distraction, avoiding suffering, and getting more "clicks" on social media, "truth" is extremely fungible.
The chapters in Part One on “Progressivism as Religion” and “Capitalism, Woke and Watchful,” are especially strong. Anyone imagining big business as instinctively conservative need only remember the speed with which corporations jumped on the same-sex marriage and “gay rights” bandwagon. The lavish business support showered on the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is also revealing, since — beneath its calls for racial justice — the BLM agenda is toxic to what most Americans believe. The lesson here is simple: Absent a grounding in broadly biblical principles, corporations follow profits, wherever they lead. In Part Two, the chapters on cultural memory, families as resistance cells, and “the gift of suffering,” make for essential reading.
The book makes a good case that "soft totalitarianism" is more dangerous than the Gestapo/KGB versions because it is harder to spot -- and in the everything digital world, much easier to enforce!
Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.
Putting on a mask to walk into a restaurant, then taking it off as you sit down shows that "common sense" is dead. Decrying any maskless gatherings of "normal people" (and even making them illegal, and then celebrating maskless riots and massive funerals for George Floyd and John Lewis makes it plain that POWER is what "makes sense" today -- and the "common sense" population needs to get their minds right!
Jonah has largely let his hatred of Trump corrupt his reason, but apparently there is still a spark of sentience his hatred corrupted mind. How he has fallen from when he once allegedly wrote the extremely cogent "Liberal Fascism"! The darkness of hatred is indeed powerful.
A ray of hope beckons in this column. Apparently the erasing of history has awakened a weak ember of his once reasonable rather than hate filled thought!
Yesterday morning, Amy Coney Barrett used the term in its colloquial sense. She said she had “never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.” As Noah Rothman ably lays out, this set off alarms among the cadres of progressive activists and thought police, seeking to paint it as a “dog whistle.” A writer at Slate insisted this cannot be “dismissed as a poor choice of words.” Barrett had let the mask slip, showing her desire to “condemn gay Americans to second-class citizenship once again.” This, despite the fact that the plain meaning of her statement was a full-throated rejection of said desire.
The calumny of being able to label things "Racist Dog Whistles" is a great example of current left wing power - it's a "dog whistle" if the left says it is!
So, the left now displays it's power in real time! If history needs to be rewritten, they can get it done in the nearly "present" -- in the age of total digital, "reality" might be on a "2 min delay" to make certain nobody sees "the man behind the curtain"!
By the end of the day, Webster’s online dictionary modified its definition of “sexual preference” to tell people it was suddenly offensive. Senators who would not have blinked at the term when they read it in the morning paper were, by the end of the day, deeply troubled by Barrett’s bigoted use of a term she employed to renounce precisely the bigotry they claimed was in her heart.
Not a bad book, but I suspect mired in "fighting the last war". I would highly recommend "After Google" as a better alternative read that is more pointed toward tomorrow than the past and one view of today.
My biggest takeaways from the book came from pages 148 and 149. The "Five Eyes" (USA,UK,Canada,Australia and New Zealand) that share the vast intelligence taken off the internet.
The UK came up with the program to take all the digital data off the light pipes. "Tempora". The US program, "Prism" got all the data from Apple, Google and FB, but Tempora got it ALL!
Ball tells us that the totality of the data is "only kept for three days", and they metadata (who sent, where to, IP @s and "similar data" is "only kept for up to a month"! If you believe that, I'm sure you believe that the FBI did not run an op called Crossfire Hurricane to spy on Trump before and after the 2016 election!
The bottom line here is that if you make a non "Davos elite, Democrat, Deep State" (but I repeat myself) post or even "like" somewhere, you may well have everything that you have done by cell or internet since 2003 or so sitting on a Five Eyes server somewhere.
Winston Churchill would be happy to hear that "the English Speaking Peoples" are banded together, however I think he would be appalled by the loss of privacy.
Ball has been shocked to find that the internet generation doesn't care about the loss of privacy. They have been indoctrinated to have full faith in the Deep State and tech elite. They have Twitter, FB,YouTube, free porn -- what kind of an ingrate thinks they ought to have privacy as well? That is so old school! If they could take some ADHD drugs and at least skim "The Stakes", they might at least experience a mild shiver -- but then there are drugs for that as well, so why experience the pain of learning when pleasure is what you worship?
It is indeed a "love story", and not only a metaphorical one -- which will likely make it much more accessible to some readers. It is also the true story of a philosopher falling into "book heaven" in the White Mountains in the form of the abandoned library of William Ernest Hocking. Having gotten engaged on a rock in a mountain stream in the White Mountains, there was a an emotional connection for me.
While I am an inveterate page tabber, there were only two in this book -- it turned out to be more recreational than serious.
My summary of the philosophy of James is that -- "We the Pragmatists believe it is no longer possible to accept the transcendent after Darwin, but find the fact of a meaningless life based on the random effects of materials sloshing around completely undirected to be existentially so depressing as to to make suicide the only viable option. However, that prospect doesn't seen so grand either, so we have decided to muddle on -- perhaps beauty, perhaps love, perhaps mere stiff upper lip determination will suffice for us to carry on to the inevitable annihilation of death. We live in the hope that something will turn up!"
Kaag seems to have gone somewhat on the path of Charles Sanders Peirce, likely with "love" being the breakthrough vs a "religious experience".
p154,
"and he (Pierce) never tells us what happened in his religious experience at St Thomas's or exactly what his communion with the Absolute was like. All he tells us is that he was radically, irreversibly changed: "I have never been a mystic before, but now I am".
On and around page 226, "it wasn't some deus ex machina that would save me from my situation".
"deus ex machina", "God from the machine" a term typically associated with film or writing, where "all of a sudden", something completely unexpected shows up and saves the day.
Shortly after he quotes Plato "Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophical thought has done it's best, the wonder remains".
A less brilliant thinker than your typical philosopher might just substitute God for "wonder", and say something like "The fear [knowledge, respect. ...] of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10)
A more current thinker might say that after Heisenberg, CRISPR, and other genetic and physics discoveries, Darwin is dead, so we are back to God and "wonder".
Naturally, modern man is REALLY driven to reject the God hypothesis, no longer because he not only "has no need for it" (Laplace), he can't possibly allow it, because it would force him to reconsider his worship of self and pleasure, and THAT is something he simply can't countenance!
The book is an entertaining read, and Kaag has an easy style. Hey, "William James" and "Pragmatism" sound more impressive than "a shallow cotton candy romance novel", so many moderns will love it. It also makes adultery into a courageous, morally imperative life growth event -- so there is that!
The NYT review is adequate. What strikes me about this book and the other Kaag book I've read recently is the great length that thinkers at the end of the 19th century were going to in order to try their best to survive in a world where they firmly believed that intellectuals were required to believe there was no God -- or eternity. As the title indicates, they were still somewhat desperately clinging to the idea of a "soul".
Perhaps the reason James remains beloved by so many readers more than a century after his death is that his pragmatism often shaded into self-help. He believed in the power of positive thinking, in bucking up; he counseled action, and not just philosophizing, in the face of uncertainty; he may have even, from time to time, turned his frown upside down. But he expressed all of his (and our) struggles and their potential solutions in the smartest possible ways, and never pretended that a revised mood was a settled state of affairs. He knew that living is a continual process, and that perhaps the best we can hope for is just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis.
Abandon God, and with him the foundation of anything beyond the dogma of "change", and the "best" to be hoped for is "just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis". Somehow, daily devotions and weekly/regular Holy Communion sound rather appealing in contrast.
The undercurrent of my life up to retirement was "getting through it in anticipation of ...". You know -- "when I graduate from college", "when I get a good job", "when I get married" ... etc, etc. Never considering that realizing that I was living in The Kingdom of God NOW! I was already "there", having died to this world in Baptism, and now haltingly taking infant steps into my eternity with Christ.
So I'm certain this book will not eternally "save your life", and may even proffer false palliative comfort preventing you from allowing Christ to TRULY save you in this life and the next. However, it is a nice short somewhat fluffy intro to Pragmatism.
