Hello everyone On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:51 PM, David Thomas <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/5/11 12:10 PM, "Dan Glover" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Do you have any evidence for this? There may indeed have been some >> atheistic thinking going on but I seriously doubt the Victorians >> accorded anyone a great deal of freedom to do so. > > [Dave] > Whether you take the "Word" as that of the narrator, Phaedrus, or Pirsig, > one must be careful not to take it as gospel. > > [http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html] > "In religion, the Victorians experienced a great age of doubt, the first > that called into question institutional Christianity on such a large scale. > In literature and the other arts, the Victorians attempted to combine > Romantic emphases upon self, emotion, and imagination with Neoclassical ones > upon the public role of art and a corollary responsibility of the artist. > > In ideology, politics, and society, the Victorians created astonishing > innovation and change: democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, > socialism, Marxism, and other modern movements took form. In fact, this age > of Darwin, Marx, and Freud appears to be not only the first that experienced > modern problems but also the first that attempted modern solutions. > Victorian, in other words, can be taken to mean parent of the modern -- and > like most powerful parents, it provoked a powerful reaction against itself."
Hi David Thank you for the website. I checked out the "atheism" link and found this: "Although almost all major Victorian authors experienced major crises of faith, some ending in agnosticism or idiosyncratic belief, few authors became declared atheists, like the poet James Thompson, though Ruskin and Carlyle both seem to have gone through an atheistic phase." Dan comments: This seems to confirm RMP's take and not yours. Why didn't more authors outright profess atheism? It was socially unacceptable to do so. > > [Dave] > The dogma that sons always rebel against their fathers seems to play itself > out in Pirsig's take on the Victorians. Even though most of the ideas he > develops in Lila are rooted in Victorians such as Darwin, James, Marx he > still bad mouths that society as a whole. His take is shallow and typical of > those write off the whole period out of hand with little understanding of > it. Dan: Armchair quarterbacking again, David? LILA wasn't written as a history of the Victorians, at least it didn't seem that way to me. RMP used a generalized notion to illustrate his philosophical ideas. Did he get everything exactly right? Probably not. But remember, he didn't have Google back then, either. >David: > [http://www.victorianweb.org/vn/victor4.html] > "For much of the last century the term Victorian, which literally describes > things and events in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), conveyed > connotations of "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." Although such > associations have some basis in fact, they do not adequately indicate the > nature of this complex, paradoxical age that was a second English > Renaissance." > > For those who might be interested this site seems have a more balanced > approach to the era. Dan: It seems like a good site, yes. But I don't think it detracts from RMP's work at all. Rather, it enhances it. Thank you Dan Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
