The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.” —- Soren Kierkegaard

1 year ago  /  4 notes

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. -Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, and musician (1875-1965)

1 year ago  /  1 note

While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight — ​I’ll fight to the very end!

2 years ago  /  21 notes  /  Source: commonprayer.net

The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called “generalized scarcity,” by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of “the old filthy business”—or, in less tasteful translation, “the same old crap.” Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.

2 years ago  /  2 notes

You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.

2 years ago  /  1 note

If the questions don’t make sense, neither will the answers.

2 years ago  /  42 notes  /  Source: blogforarizona.com

A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

2 years ago  /  208 notes  /  Source: news.ycombinator.com

Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety. Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.

2 years ago  /  2 notes  /  Source: newyorker.com

Analogy is an inextricable component of any cognition which seeks to understand and judge phenomena that are not the objects of direct perception. It is a response to the problem of how something distant and long gone is thinkable for us, in which past paradigms are transposed into the present, just as the present serves as the movable frame through which we capture the past. Yet an analogy’s capacity for illumination cannot be neatly separated from its ideological effects. Here, the method of the historian cross-cuts his status as a citizen of his time, and as a participant in that time’s struggles.

2 years ago  /  16 notes  /  Source: us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com

Writing about science poses a fundamental problem right at the outset: You have to lie. I don’t mean lie in the sense of intentionally misleading people. I mean that because math is the language of science, scientists who want to translate their work into popular parlance have to use verbal or pictorial metaphors that are necessarily inexact. Here is where the art of science writing for the public truly lies. Choosing the proper metaphor can make all the difference between distorting science and providing an appropriate context from which nonscientists can appreciate new scientific findings and put them in perspective.

2 years ago  /  2 notes  /  Source:

In this vein, when I say that we use ‘reference’ as a metaphor, what I mean is that we take our everyday use of the word ‘refer’ and then use it as a metaphor for understanding how language works. For example, we say “words get their meaning by reference to…” In this, we are trying to make a claim about how language works by understanding it (metaphorically) in plain terms. Like Wittgenstein before me, I think this is a misleading metaphor. Let me make underscore that no where in this piece was I equating reference to metaphor. I am saying that, in philosophy, its use is metaphorical. Moreover, I’m arguing (or beginning to, in this brief post) that referential models of language — while intuitively appealing — are inherently the wrong approach to take to language. (Donald Davidson has some wonderful essays problematizing the approach as well; his work on malapropisms, in particular, is what led me to Wittgenstein and then into cognitive).

2 years ago  /  2 notes  /  Source: scientopia.org