>And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether >anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of >approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse >race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at >any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a >critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a >mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for >everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it >had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and >with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a >pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back >of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like >these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that >religion is, I don’t know, dumb.<
David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.” (from his review of On the Origin of Everything ‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss in the New York TIMES book review, 3/25/2012) there are two main way to argue with religion, that of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, _et al_, and the abstract and metaphysical way. It doesn't matter if god(s) exist if those who speak in their names oppress people (while claiming to know something that's unknowable). -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
