Comments (127)

101. Wah
     August 18th, 2008 | 22:38

     …but.. when u ain’t [I had to make some grammatical changes due to wordpress errors] only composin’ da

102. Wah
     August 18th, 2008 | 22:50

     … Encyclopedia

103. Wah
     August 18th, 2008 | 23:20

     …Britannica but inventing the disciplines and doing all the scholarship that the Encyclopedia studies, there’s only so much you can do…

104. Wah
     August 18th, 2008 | 23:34

     … 1,000 years from now …

105. Wah
     August 18th, 2008 | 23:54

     … we’ll have plenty of comparable reasons to “mock” Darwin or Galileo, …

106. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 00:07

     … and perhaps the 20th century will be painted at the idyllic era in which some thinkers finally broke the oppressive chains of modernist tyranny and finally started to “think for themselves” instead of trusting Enlightenment dogma (the mindset in which science is currently adopting — post-enlightenment naturalism.)

107. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 00:16

     H0pefully, my counterpart in that era…

108. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 00:37

     … will not be impressed …

109. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 00:41

     … with that kind of talk?

110. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 00:54

     Sorry for posting in fragments. Releaselog’s Wordpress engine seems to reject my comments, whether it was large or small. Even a simple sentence like the last one did not go through.

111. starAtNight
     August 19th, 2008 | 09:02

     If modernist tyranny is the worldwide collaboration of sceintific endeavour then I’m not sure how you would begin to describe religeous fraternity. It seems everyone is having disagreements these days about how to interpret the bible, some even to the extent as to take the most purist recourse and extract a literal letter-for-letter interpretation… then those who would claim to have the correct version would then be preachers… telling others how to follow their view of something that they did not witness (or create) over 2000 years ago… some of these prophets go on TV and preach for money, some make moral stances and try to ‘correct’ society. Some are content at making the elderly feel more comfortable about their nearing death… yes Religion has a place for those who want it just like Hollywood, but a World under Religious order is a more tyrannical idea for me. I’ll just stay put in my own paradigm enjoying scientific liberation!

112. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 14:22

     You’re talking about the ’science vs religion’ dichotomy but that’s not what I’m really interested in discussing since both are no more worse or better than the other under the post-enlightenment era. What I’m saying is that while “religion” is simply a “discipline” of the Enlightenment, it is “science” that serves as the main narrative of the Enlightenment, which produced a tyrannical society wherever it went. It’s difficult to see science as liberating if you can’t separate its current paradigm apart from its history of application in the context of Enlightenment. As it stands, you’ve got nothing.

     Now, the Enlightenment was all about the narrative “through reason/science, humans progress.” For instance, the promise of “scientific liberation” was disintegrated during the Hiroshima Bomb at the hands of reason and science. Both were not the savior-messiah they were promised to be; for just an instant we could see right through that rhetorical facade and we knew what the Enlightenment project of progress through “scientific liberation” meant.

     However, the primary examples of this narrative are Nazi Germany and the USSR, which were certainly characterized by the narrative “through reason/science, humans progress,” or “scientific liberation,” as you call it. These two examples turn out no better than the American or French Revolutions, which are two prime examples of what the Enlightenment was really all about — its Messianic narrative that is ultimately totalitarian.

     To contest these claims, you’ve got to show either that these four examples aren’t really characteristic of Enlightenment politics or that I’ve not presented the examples adequately [because if you do that then you can pull "science" away from it and therefore call "science liberating," and once you do that then you must give good reasons to support your claim (but you haven't.)] The former isn’t going to happen, because the two Revolutions are well-known as the prime examples of social contract theory, which is one of the most prominent examples of the Enlightenment in action, and the two 20th century regimes are well-known as the prime examples of human progress by science or “scientific liberation” (in politics). So what you’ve got to do is show that the over-arching narratives guiding these four things aren’t what I said that they were. But this isn’t going to happen because terms like “The Reign of Terror,” “Manifest Destiny,” and “The Holocaust” are so well-known to be representative of these regimes. I mention this because if we go point-by-point I hope it will be evident that most of the counter-arguments are arguing about details but not getting to the bigger picture.

     In addition, don’t forget about the Enlightenment societies and its application via the narrative “through science/reason, humans progress” or “scientific liberation.” I could mention about Foucault’s examples of how Enlightenment society moved from “good and evil” to “normal and pathological” as a subtle flex of power. Enlightenment societies use the power of discourse to set the terms of “normal and pathological,” which provide for a totalitarian society (since all must be “normal”). E.g., replace “acts of sodomy” with “the homosexual.” The point is that this is what Enlightenment, through the narrative of “scientific liberation,” society looks like: “us” and “them.” Certainly this is the kind of society that would be at home in a totalitarian meta-narrative. What’s so amazing about it is that because it wields power through discourse it is so subtle that we are easily tricked into failing to recognize its totalitarian nature. (cf. “doublespeak”)

     Enlightenment economics, or the “science” of economics, didn’t receive much attention, but, mixing both Enlightenment society and Enlightenment economy, the purpose of government schools is to make everybody “normal,” and it turns out that, with respect to the purpose of government schools, “normal” means something like “effectively pursuing the goals of the State,” or “ready to be fodder for the capitalist factory.” To repeat myself from the last paragraph, the Enlightenment, or this so-called “scientific liberation,” gave us a powerful machinery of social engineering to ensure that everybody who wasn’t “pathological” would be “normal” — a totalitarian society. And capitalism works on the assumption that everybody’s going to be out there “working for #1,” trying to dominate the market financially — encouraging a totalitarian ethos for each individual? The alternative to capitalism in the Modern period is communism, and presumably nobody fails to see how it is totalitarian (absolute centralization of economic power, class warfare).

     Coming to a final “discipline,” we’ve got “religion.” The religion of the Enlightenment proper was deism, but I’d rather discuss specifically what Christian religious movements did with the Enlightenment: as they split two ways, each as totalitarian as the other.

     So, to broad brush the forest once more, in no matter the discipline to which we turn (religion, politics, or economics,) wherever the Enlightenment went with the “scientific liberation” narrative by which “through reason/science, humans progress,” it brought something that was at base totalitarian. It didn’t have some accidental totalitarian lapses, a few misgivings, or a couple of misapplications. Instead, in whatever form the Enlightenment took, it was over-archingly totalitarian. There are two ways to challenge this. Perhaps you might say that my examples aren’t characteristic of the Enlightenment. This isn’t going to happen; capitalism and social contract theory, social engineering, Enlightenment religion, and so on — if you look at a list of the major Enlightenment movements, I’ve mentioned most of them.

113. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 14:29

     Currently, people are still holding onto the ‘naturalistic paradigms’ and virtues of science in today’s society. Ironically, these are still ideas of post-enlightenment modernism. Unless science can work with new ideas apart from the world views of naturalism and its “enlightenment” roots, then “science” can be called “liberating.” Until then, naturalistic paradigms within “scientific liberation” is a mere throwback of the Enlightenment, a rhetorical cover-up for dogmatic totalitarianism. And wherever the Enlightenment went, in whatever part of humanity it entered, it produced totalitarianism, whether I look at it from the angle of science or whether you see it from the lens of religion.

     This means that the place for argument is my particular examples of the Enlightenment in action. You’ve got to show how in a basic way the “scientific liberation” really produced meta-narratives that were actually centered around progress and goodness but were not totalitarian. For instance, you’ve got to show either that Nazi Germany was not totalitarian or that the “naturalistic paradigm” was not used to “scientifically liberate” the world from the “biologically inferior” via “natural selection,” thus the “scientific liberation” thus “human progress through reason/science” thus the Enlightenment.

114. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 14:51

     Likewise, “false prophets” and “Christian societies” are an indirect result of the Enlightenment’s influence on religious thought, and ‘Christians’ like Jim Jones or Warren Jeffs or ‘legalistic’ churches aren’t representative of who true Christians are or what the true Church should be, respectively.

     Let me give a quote from Wikipedia’s article on the Enlightenment that may have some explanatory value, then we’ll move on to point-by-point responses if you’d like:

115. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 15:08

     “It can more narrowly refer to the historical intellectual movement The Enlightenment, which advocated Reason as the primary basis of authority… Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, carried into the governmental sphere in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages, while many were religious.”

116. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 15:23

     Later on, “The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking of which it is the inheritor, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance…

     [quote continues on to next post]

117. Wah
     August 19th, 2008 | 15:50

     [quote continued from previous post]

     “This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point where Europe broke through what historian Peter G@y calls “the sacred circle,” where previous dogma circumscribed thinking… In this view, the tendency of the philosophies in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered to be the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.”

     That, I think, concurs with your views of the Enlightenment, which paradoxically coincides with your espoused idea of science and your “own paradigm under scientific liberation!” But then it proceeds in history (post-WWII) and gets to what I’ve been saying:

     “With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities – excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures – such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a penetrating critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and, through the domination of instrumental rationality tending towards totalitarianism.”

118. starAtNight
     August 20th, 2008 | 10:13

     Conspiracy theories always sound plausible in retrospect because once you set about looking at your World through rose tinted glasses everything starts to look rose. I am convinced by simple truths that don’t require inflammation and intellectualisation… but that can be understood through their transparent wisdom. If science were not beneficial to our society at large in its evolution and progression then it would not have made such an enduring positive impact. In the developed World compare life expectancy and infant mortality rates (with 100 years ago) as 2 key indicators of progress driven by scientific contributions to medicine, hygeine etc.

119. starAtNight
     August 20th, 2008 | 10:34

     Perhaps you have your own blog… to continue this charming discussion? as this is not really the right place for it (especially because WP is misbehaving)

120. Wah
     August 20th, 2008 | 12:18

     Increasing at about the same rate as Earth’s human population, which doubled (these are rounded numbers) from years 1 to 1500, then 1500 to 1800, then 1800 to 1925, then 1925 to 1975: 1500 years, 300 years, 125 years, 50 years. If we go with Ptolemy-Aristotle/Copernicus-Galileo/Darwin-Einstein (which is obviously simplistic, but still good enough for our purposes) then we’re following world population — not much need to bring an “Enlightenment mindset” into it?

     Again, I’m not saying that science isn’t “positive” or “progressive” but I’m showing what the effects of it are in history and what its narrative is really about in practice. Apart from the Enlightenment mentality, I’m sure science would prove to be the “brilliant light” it claims to be (and hopefully it will eventually free itself from the oppressive chains of Enlightenment tyranny, hence the reason why postmodernism came about — it criticizes the totalitarianism of Enlightenment metanarratives) but unless you can separate the ideals of Enlightenment from “scientific progress and contribution,” you are merely subscribing to a rhetorical facade of science.

     Granted, my skepticism of history may be a bit low but is there a good reason for me to ignore the atrocious things done in the in the name of “scientific liberation?” You are merely restating your position (so I think you might have the cart before the horse. I would argue that the emergence of scientific progress, as well as the redefinition of “science” are both effects of enlightenment) but you haven’t given me solid support for your arguments.

     And it’s not that science hasn’t had a positive contribution to society, because I agree it has, but why insist on masking a rhetoric that offers your interpretation when, historically, in reality, in practice it has also made foolish mistakes out of arrogance? However, you’ve haven’t given sufficient evidence why science is exclusively beneficial (immune to abuse.)

     As previously mentioned, science, like government, has to learn what it’s good at and what it’s bad at. When it doesn’t have a good enough edge — say, when a scientist doesn’t have nearly enough information — it should just admit that it doesn’t have a solution and move on. The need for tidy packaged solutions causes many problems. Unless science works in a worldview that has room for real mystery — not merely the categories of knowledge and ignorance — it’s always going to wind up making foolish mistakes out of arrogance.

     To disagree you’ve basically got to take the Enlightenment out of science entirely. I assume that you’ll now interpret the scientific contributions to medicine, hygiene etc as political/religious affairs free of scientific progress, given all the political/religious rhetoric involved?

121. Wah
     August 20th, 2008 | 12:22

     My blog isn’t currently working at the moment.

122. starAtNight
     August 20th, 2008 | 12:31

     World population growth is concentrated in the developing World and its not sceince that restricts drugs that would save lives and help these societies stabilise and its not science that stops the world taking an interest and investing in these countries to speed them on their way to a more developed civilisation, however this is not a quick process in any event. Point is that western-based democracy and globalised free market bring to bear their own pressures on world society and this is certainly not fueled by some scientific ideals as you seem to suggest! there are a lot of other things happening in the world that dont boil down to a science vs religion argument

     though in your world… the shutters/blinkers appear to be on.

123. Wah
     August 20th, 2008 | 22:46

     But you still haven’t given reasons to support your position.

     The population is rising much faster in the third world today and how much contribution do they make to scientific progress? (grant me “progress” here) That is not to say the third-world is the cause. There are more than twice as many people today in the US, Canada, and Europe as there were in the entire world in 1500 (five or six times as many as when Aristotle and Ptolemy were around). And considering their current economic resources (as compared to the entire world in 1500), it would be a crying shame if intellectual endeavors of all kinds didn’t advance several times the speed they did between Aristotle-Ptolemy and Copernicus-Newton.

     According to recent history, “scientific ideals” had been the narrative in politics and economics and we’ve observed what it was really about (in political science, economics, etc.) At any rate, the worship of science is long out-dated and currently we see some are barely catching on the act.

     At least now you see my point that it is unnecessary to address the science vs religion argument.

     Though in your world… the blindfolds and monochrome TC appear to be on.

124. starAtNight
     August 21st, 2008 | 23:08

     Population growth per-se is not a problem until resources become scarce. It just points to how successful our species is at surviving, especially when (in the developed world) babies are not dying and people are living longer. You have not countered this point very well. For all the faith you have in the mystic or the heavens… it can’t help you fight malaria like a vaccine.

     Be assured that great scientific acheivements are being made all the time… I mean yes Greek Philosophers enjoyed many World-shaping Eureka (thank you Archimedes) moments but they had the privilege of being first to the table. As more of the world around us is discovered and known to science in its nature… the earth shattering-ness of intellectual discovery may seem to lessen to a lay-person but then how can a lay person keep up with all the branches and sub branches of Today’s scientific community?

     I think you have overlooked the reason why ‘Enlightenment Theory’ came about. Human spirit needed saving from the dark Middle ages of Religious slavery, science challenged the farcery of Religious world-views and many people were murdered as heretics for challenging the Word of God.

     It was a catapult of innovative and challenging thinking and it was not a coincidence that the idea went viral… it was survival instinct, people came to understand that there was a way to understand the world outside the veil of religious dogma that had held back humanity for over 1000 years (5thC-15C).

     Yes we share this in our collective history… but would you go back to the middle ages and stifle it? would you prefer to be ignorant and live in a solipsism where your creative mind (and people’s inability to challenge you) could create any mystic fantasy and claim it as your reality?

125. Wah
     August 22nd, 2008 | 03:21

     Need I mention your counterpoints are not very tenable?

     This is exactly the difference between us! In your world, it is God OR man. In your world, if texts are the product of actual humans in actual history who have actual cultures and desires and contexts and so on then they cannot also be God’s texts. Chances are true that Christians are probably scouring the Internet looking for rationalizations of these texts to try to appease Reason, and it says something absolutely horrible about the Church. But to put a new twist on The Usual Suspects,

     “To a skeptic the explanation’s always simple. There’s no arch narrative of slavery to inheritance behind it all. If you find some slavery and you think it discredits the Bible, you’re gonna find out you’re right.

     However, I don’t deny our sinfulness, our faithlessness, or our whoring after so many false gods, not least of which are the self and self-righteousness. But to us the way down is the way up, the way to the mountain peak is in the depths of the valleys, and the way of victory is the way of the cross. You do not see the Bible the same way we do because our world is upside-down from yours.

     Of course when you set the structures for how the Bible is to be interpreted things will turn out badly for us — this is because our worlds are upside down! You would pick and choose disparate texts about slavery and think that, without further ado, you have gotten to some core evil within the Bible. But when a Christian looks at your presentation she should be so confused by its structure that she cannot understand it. The Christian looks not at isolated chunks carved out of the Bible but at a story that starts with a Garden and ends in a City, then a story that starts with condemnation and ends in self-sacrifice, then a story that starts in slavery and ends in inheritance. When a Christian sees these texts he should not be concerned with rationalizing them; instead, he should remember his place as a slave.

     And this is why your Bible is so different from ours — because where you see sadistic domination of others we see the humble submission of ourselves. Each day we turn from this task, each day we seek the way of the world, and each day we whore after false gods. We would have no time nor indeed liberty to have some self-righteous need to rationalize these texts if we were busy praying for our enemies. If we thought we were called to serve, not to be served. If we thought that Jesus came to set captives free and bring sight to the blind. If we were the meek who shall inherit the earth. Because our world is an upside down world where the meek shall inherit the earth, God can be made man, and something truly written by Mesopotamian men can at once be God’s very word. But your world is too right-side up for this to be acceptable.

     I have a narrative of redemption, not progress, and that narrative moves from slavery to inheritance.

     And I don’t think I have overlooked the reason why ‘ET’ came about since my previous criticisms were challenging the historical narratives of which your very reasons are based on.

     Basically, can you give us a reason for universalizing post-Enlightenment historical standards? The entire appeal of Enlightenment criticism is that it claims to be “reasonable” or “neutral.” But upon even an ounce of inspection it turns out not to be “neutral” at all.

     As a matter of fact, most of written history is incredibly unreliable, by today’s standards. And I’m not even including religious literature in this judgment. Distortion of copies is a relatively minor concern. More problematic is that up until the 1800s, most historians simply did not have the modern conception of history as objectively reporting the truth. They were more interested in reporting legends and tall tales and often outright deified their patrons/emperors.

     Though this statement has little affect on my view of history, it, however, has drastic consequences for your view of history considering the standards you just established, unless you’re not an extreme skeptic.

     Yet, how can you have knowledge about history? The only way is witness. There must be a body of witness that carries with it the memory and enduring reality of the history that was and is. This is the place of the Church, the Bible, and the Spirit. Of course the Enlightenment told us that we shouldn’t trust witnesses, that I the individual can prove for myself anything worth knowing. But I for one haven’t seen your Enlightenment’s bias against witness proven, and I’m certainly not just going to take your word for it.

     Perhaps it seems to you like the Enlightenment made the world a much better place, that before the Enlightenment people were persecuted in the name of religion for making scientific advancements (i.e. Galileo,) and that this isn’t a problem for us anymore, because the Catholic Church today, which teaches that science and religion shouldn’t contradict one another, is much more friendly toward science.

     Well, historically speaking, the secular state gained all its power by giving the word ‘religion’ its current meaning, so it’s not like it’s an insignificant issue. Christians already recognized the existence of other people on earth with strongly held beliefs — Jews and Muslims for starters, not to mention druids, some Greeks/Romans, even Persians, Hindus, and Babylonians. “Religion” came into existence because the secular state saw Christendom as a threat to its power and needed to write out that threat in the discourse.

     But this is the standard Enlightenment historiography — “religion” brought violence, but the Enlightenment brought peace — and it’s exactly the reason we should distrust Enlightenment history. E.g., Galileo was condemned more for opposing Aristotle than anything else (theologians of the time were actually divided over the issues raised by Galileo et al). Every society that has been founded on Enlightenment principles turned horribly vicious because the Enlightenment always pushes for totalitarianism, whether we’re talking about the Reign of Terror or the slaughter of Native American civilizations.

     This has also resulted in the “Constantinianization of the Christianity” — the marriage of Christianity with the state that has resulted in so much coercion. But for the first several centuries people did not have interest in Christianity because of coercion. Christians were people who, in a time before hotels, welcomed travelers into their homes, even strangers. Christians were people who set up free hospitals for the helpless, the sick. Christians were people who took care of not only their own poor but the other Romans’ as well. The complaint of Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate was that the “atheism” of Christians was catching on for these reasons, not because of coercion.

     Perhaps if we get rid of all the “fake” Christians, we can get back to what Christians are really good at.

     Of course Christian societies haven’t exactly been ideal either. One of the main reasons why our nation was established was because of religious persecution in Europe. And that’s to say nothing of all of the Christians who killed one another in the decades following the reformation. And I also think of the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem Witch Trials.

     So really who says that Christian societies are ideal?

     Actually, I’m not at all denying that Christians are capable of violence. Instead, I’m saying that the Enlightenment claim that “religion” brings violence while “reason” brings peace is very wrong. The examples you’ve used are some of the most common examples used to forward this claim, and their interpretation has been so ingrained into textbooks that most people don’t realize the spin that’s been put on them. But if you ever really delve into them (this is where historical scholarship of the last 20-50 years has gone) you start to discover that, for instance, the Spanish Inquisition was more a political power play by the monarchy than religious fanaticism, and the “Wars of Religion” that followed the Reformation would have Catholics fighting alongside Lutherans just as often as against them, meaning that again this was really just a string of wars fought for political reasons.

     One would hope that if your were right that the Enlightenment shined light amidst backwards, barbaric dogmatism then it would have rid us of the evils of backwards, barbaric dogmatism, bringing in a golden age or at least the inklings of it. But like I said many times before that didn’t happen, because the Enlightenment was just a rhetorical cover-up for dogmatic totalitarianism. Again, wherever the Enlightenment went, in whatever part of humanity it entered, it produced totalitarianism.

     To take it a step further, I certainly wouldn’t say that atrocities on the scale of the Reign of Terror, Manifest Destiny, Third Reich, or Soviet Union were common before the Enlightenment. Even Genghis Khan would be impressed.

     Hence, a better view is, at the very least, to say that people are violent.

     There are some decent things to say about Christian influence on societies, of course. For instance, the Mosaic code is the only Law of its time that in any way protects slaves, which it does so many times over. Where Greeks, Romans, and the Chinese have tended to view human life as quite expendable, from the earliest days Christians were willing to take in victims of attempted infanticide into their own homes, and were known for being the only people willing to care for lepers. And as Western society pushes itself further and further from any Christian influence, virtues like humility, self-sacrifice, and love are fading from social consciousness.

     There are a lot of different explanations of how and why the New Science formed as it did and I don’t understand things nearly well enough. But it’s clear to me that the story of the Enlightenment — i.e., that we slumbered through the Dark Ages of dogmatic ignorance for centuries between the Greeks and the Renaissance — is false, but I don’t have a better story to explain it.

     Later you raised the issue: Does religion tend to stagnate? In your words, the problem with dogma is it arrests the process. It prevents us from asking the questions, and ultimately criticizing the problems we see in our societies and our morality and our conception of reality, because it tends to say “This is the law of God so this scroll is true forever and can never change” (as per Dt. 4) or, “this book is the final revelation from God; you can add nothing to it and you will never ever top it, no matter how hard you try (as per the Quran). Therefore, it says “you can go here and no further.”

     Of course, you know my view that the notion of “religion” we have today was a construction of the modern secular state that saw the Church as a threat to its power, so perhaps you won’t mind if I rephrase this as, “Does theology tend to stagnate?” or “Does Christian theology tend to stagnate?” Those are both still, in my mind, inexact, but I think they at least point us to what we’re really talking about.

     Now, there are two ways of framing this question that I can see. Number one, we might be thinking about the ancient Greek question of Being and Becoming: Does this endanger Becoming? Number two, we might be thinking about what you might call “religious fundamentalism.” I realize that the term ‘fundamentalist’ has lots of uses and historical variance behind it, but I’m basically thinking of a kind of unthinking dogmatism that totally stifles imagination. They’re related but distinct, and I think they’re both worth discussing, so let’s talk about both in turn. (I’ve even got nifty bold words to separate them.)

     One – Being and Becoming. There is this worry that if anything “is” (being) then it is less or not real because it can’t change. But there is a counter-worry that if anything “becomes” then it isn’t “being” yet so it is less or not real. So, if we’ve got something like the Shemah or the Nicene Creed that “is” — in other words, that is non-negotiable — do we have a problem?

     First we should think of some other “non-negotiable” truths, like 2+2=4 or “all bachelors are male.” People in the West generally get out of this problem by consigning them to the “abstract,” a world that has nothing but “being” and thus doesn’t cause problems for our world of change. When they connect it’s by instantiation — these two apples plus these two apples equal four apples, or this bachelor is male.

     There are some really huge holes in this solution that go back as far as Plato, but one thing is undeniable — somehow we’ve got to allow non-negotiable truths into our changing world. The attempts to consign everything to change (becoming) or everything to timeless realization (being) have always failed. Americans seem to be very fond of some sort of pragmatism because of their penchant for “becoming,” but even there they allow for some non-negotiable truths.

     Presumably you know that I totally reject this picture, but it’s worth mentioning to direct what I’m saying. A text starts to stagnate when it takes a snapshot of “becoming” and turns it into “being.” When you try to act like a timebound statement is timeless, you end up with lots of trouble. That’s why the West tries to make 2+2=4 totally timeless, since if it becomes an idyllic snapshot of anything in time then it hurts change, it hurts “becoming.”

     Christian texts avoid this problem in at least two ways: the church and the narrative character of the texts. This is pretty noticeable when you check out the most stagnant Christian fundamentalisms of the day, because they have no significant doctrine of the church and downplay or deny that the texts are narrative. (They turn the Bible into something like an ethical rulebook, a timeless call to positive thinking, or an unsorted systematic theology. OT narratives become moralistic fables, and the story of Jesus becomes a timeless, legal transaction about getting me to heaven when I die.)

     How do the church and narrative texts keep us from turning a “becoming” into a “being”? The Church helps because she herself is “becoming” and she is the one entrusted with these texts. For instance, the doctrine of creation out of nothing “became” in debates with Greeks, even though in has roots in the non-negotiable Biblical texts. Similarly, narrative texts help because they are not timeless. (Again, I reject all the above attempts at turning the Bible into a timeless book.)

     Narrative texts don’t tell us flatly to rip one context out of the Bible and naively push it upon our own day today. Instead they give us something more like a trajectory, and a trajectory is well within the world of change and “becoming.” The Nicene Creed says that I believe certain narratives about the Father (creating), Son (living), and Spirit (working), their involvement in the world (forgiveness of sins and the church), and direction for the future (judgment, resurrection life). The church is helpful here because she provides a hermeneutic for the reading of that trajectory, a living entity who helps to correct the course.

     So, after building up the issue, my argument is that Christian theology does not turn a “becoming” into a “being” (which would create huge problems and cause everything to stagnate) because its texts, while non-negotiable, are not put in the timeless, abstract realm of “being.”

     Two – Fundamentalism. My discussion of number one was very long, mostly because I had to set up the issue at length in order to provide what I take to be a pretty short answer, so I’ll try to keep this one short. Does theology have an especially pronounced penchant toward “fundamentalism”?

     The last 100 years have seen Nazis, Soviets, and US political pundits — anything political can go fundamentalist. In my opinion, “religion” is only capable of “fundamentalism” because it is political at its core. Anything political can easily become fundamentalist, and religion is fundamentally political, therefore religion can easily become fundamentalist. So the phenomenon of fundamentalism says something about people and politics, not uniquely about religion.

     What about the alternatives to religion? “No theology” or “atheology” can turn fundamentalist just as easy as “theology.” Richard Dawkins is known by scientists as a man who turned evolutionary theory into a fundamentalist religion. Similarly, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens yell in voices as acerbically ignorant as their “theological” counterparts. They’re engaging in politics, therefore they can easily turn into fundamentalists. The problem is humanity, and here political humanity, not uniquely “Christian theology” or “religion.”

     I wish I had more time to write about this, but I have to go to work in like ten minutes. But I think this is very true. The metaphors you’ve got that define your world will define how rich and broad your world can be. The more languages I learn the more I discover how reliant language is on metaphor, and certainly there is a correlation between what you can articulate in language and what you can think about, therefore know or imagine.

     I’ll try to come back to this post when I have time. (I’m going out of town for a wedding this weekend.) Until then…

     1. I think that the kind of technology we can engineer depends on the kind of imagination we can have, which depends on what metaphors we’ve got in our language. So engaging in the discipline of science (which I’m assuming you’re identifying very closely with technology here) depends crucially on possibilities of imaginative that already exist.

     2. This is why I take narrative to be so important. The narratives underneath our lives define and shape us by the trajectories and metaphors they use.

126. BehnaM
     September 3rd, 2008 | 08:49

     please help me
     I need english subtitle for “Earth The Biography 2008 DVDRip XviD-NTXViD”
     Can you help me?

127. mishmish
     November 17th, 2009 | 13:18

     earth-the.power.of.the.planet.720p.hdtv.x264-sfm

     Episode 1

     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841682/E-TPOP.01.720p.part01.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841763/E-TPOP.01.720p.part02.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841717/E-TPOP.01.720p.part03.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841861/E-TPOP.01.720p.part04.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841933/E-TPOP.01.720p.part05.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841928/E-TPOP.01.720p.part06.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841950/E-TPOP.01.720p.part07.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305842035/E-TPOP.01.720p.part08.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305842840/E-TPOP.01.720p.part09.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305842874/E-TPOP.01.720p.part10.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843014/E-TPOP.01.720p.part11.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843013/E-TPOP.01.720p.part12.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843037/E-TPOP.01.720p.part13.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843115/E-TPOP.01.720p.part14.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843109/E-TPOP.01.720p.part15.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305842909/E-TPOP.01.720p.part16.rar

     Episode 2

     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843319/E-TPOP.02.720p.part01.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843257/E-TPOP.02.720p.part02.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843822/E-TPOP.02.720p.part03.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843859/E-TPOP.02.720p.part04.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843844/E-TPOP.02.720p.part05.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844018/E-TPOP.02.720p.part06.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843956/E-TPOP.02.720p.part07.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305843977/E-TPOP.02.720p.part08.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844103/E-TPOP.02.720p.part09.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844074/E-TPOP.02.720p.part10.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844298/E-TPOP.02.720p.part11.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844297/E-TPOP.02.720p.part12.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845005/E-TPOP.02.720p.part13.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844983/E-TPOP.02.720p.part14.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845078/E-TPOP.02.720p.part15.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305844901/E-TPOP.02.720p.part16.rar

     Episode 3

     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845040/E-TPOP.03.720p.part01.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845174/E-TPOP.03.720p.part02.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845200/E-TPOP.03.720p.part03.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845285/E-TPOP.03.720p.part04.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845378/E-TPOP.03.720p.part05.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845441/E-TPOP.03.720p.part06.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305845925/E-TPOP.03.720p.part07.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846051/E-TPOP.03.720p.part08.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846068/E-TPOP.03.720p.part09.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846141/E-TPOP.03.720p.part10.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846251/E-TPOP.03.720p.part11.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846285/E-TPOP.03.720p.part12.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846245/E-TPOP.03.720p.part13.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846387/E-TPOP.03.720p.part14.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846537/E-TPOP.03.720p.part15.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305846339/E-TPOP.03.720p.part16.rar

     Episode 4

     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838182/E-TPOP.04.720p.part01.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838161/E-TPOP.04.720p.part02.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838130/E-TPOP.04.720p.part03.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838108/E-TPOP.04.720p.part04.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838173/E-TPOP.04.720p.part05.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838163/E-TPOP.04.720p.part06.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838168/E-TPOP.04.720p.part07.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838167/E-TPOP.04.720p.part08.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838186/E-TPOP.04.720p.part09.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305838162/E-TPOP.04.720p.part10.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839445/E-TPOP.04.720p.part11.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839287/E-TPOP.04.720p.part12.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839429/E-TPOP.04.720p.part13.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839394/E-TPOP.04.720p.part14.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839561/E-TPOP.04.720p.part15.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839050/E-TPOP.04.720p.part16.rar

     Episode 5

     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839400/E-TPOP.05.720p.part01.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839528/E-TPOP.05.720p.part02.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839544/E-TPOP.05.720p.part03.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305839538/E-TPOP.05.720p.part04.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840341/E-TPOP.05.720p.part05.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840572/E-TPOP.05.720p.part06.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840641/E-TPOP.05.720p.part07.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840739/E-TPOP.05.720p.part08.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840661/E-TPOP.05.720p.part09.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840751/E-TPOP.05.720p.part10.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840828/E-TPOP.05.720p.part11.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840668/E-TPOP.05.720p.part12.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840795/E-TPOP.05.720p.part13.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305840741/E-TPOP.05.720p.part14.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841466/E-TPOP.05.720p.part15.rar
     http://rapidshare.com/files/305841399/E-TPOP.05.720p.part16.rar

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