modern.gods

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan.  Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware .  Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree.  They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die.  If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality. In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity.  But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty.  The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the ...

Since returning to the States, I've looked over my blog site and discovered a draft that I never finished, began just over a year ago. It seemed like an interesting topic, so I decided to revive it. I had a short conversation recently (that is, over a year ago) with some friends about logic and about where it is 'located', in the world, in our minds, or maybe just in the minds of a particular class of educated Western males. Now of course I was was the one to suggest the possibility of the later (not that I even hold it to be true, although some feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Nye, in fact, do) and was immediately harangued for it. It was as if calling someone illogical implied they were irrational! Now logic, particularly symbolic logic, is a field that has been developed primarily by Western males. But it also claims a universal and atemporal status over everything that could be considered true.  The Logical Positivists even claimed that if you couldn't think about ...

So I was reading MacIntyre on incommensurability and untranslatability, summed up: "Where two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement...there is and can be no independent standard or measure by appeal to which their rival claims can adjucated, since each has internal to itself its own fundamental standard of judgment. Such systems are incommensurable, and the terms in and by means of which judgment is delivered in each are so specific and idiosyncratic to each that they cannot be translated into the terms of the other without gross distortion." One need look no further than the U.S.'s politics in the Mid-East to see the ramifications if this were even potentially the case. Even with a likelihood of incommensurability being total, and no possibility of debate succesfully crossing the systems in any meaningful way, we must continue as if this were possible. We must act on the potential that there is something constructive to be gained, bec...

One critique that I would have of Harry Guntrip's theory of ego, as well as with all object-relations theory, is that it places too much emphasis on the very early mother-child relationship. Certainly, as any parent will attest, a child's personality is in development from the very start. Object-Relations effectively holds the view that if something goes wrong here, you are doomed to a life of ego-failure, but if everything goes well, you develop an iron-clad ego, able to withstand any problem that comes your way. There are several problems with this, not the least of which there are several important personality elements (*cough*sexdrive*cough*) which develop later through biochemical means. Ego development may be hampered early on, but it may also be hampered or disrupted by later environmental effects. Even with the best mother-child relationship, because of the nature of our individual existence, there is no such thing as an un-failable ego. I imagine that child sol...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070809/ap_on_re/religion_today Long story short, the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Nashville is establishing an MA in homemaking and "traditional" women's roles. Quoth the president, "We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family." The funny thing is, no matter what your cultural or hermeneutical background may be, you would be hard pressed to find any actual examples of this "Biblical model" in the Bible. What sort of families and gender roles does God's word describe? My guess is the the Southern Baptist Convention would abhor any of the actual families in the Bible (let's see, we've got adultery, murder, rape, theft, incest, driving tent-stakes through people's heads, etc.) Sure, there are shining examples of women in the Bible (Ruth and Esther for example), but none of them look like the "Biblical Wife...

I overheard a conversation today with a student who was deeply trouble by a suggestion in class (probably not a strong one) that the stories in the Bible never really happened, but are important because of what they represent. What is the response of someone who believes that the things in the Bible did happen? Is inerrancy the only way (either it did or didn't happen the way it says it does)? I feel that much of this problem arises from some combination of modernity attaching independent ontological significance to the sort of statement, "E happened", and the romantic notion that there could be some inner quality or essence which may never be revealed by outside action. Together these lead one to the conclusion that true significance comes from an event happening, and the meaning of the event is derivative from this first fact. Now that we have dissolved ourselves of an ontology based on formal logic, we may more clearly see that there is no such thing as "just ...

The theory of quantum mechanics is no more friendly to top-down causation (a seemingly necessary process for upholding both volition and physicalism) than Newtonian determinism. First, volition. The notion of free will has become such a burdened term that arguing for its existence requires much more than top-down causation. Volition, on the other hand, is more readily apparent to ourselves. Basically, it is the idea that when I move my hand, I am causing the muscles to contract, etc.; rather than my hand moving because of an ancient series of events, and the thought "I am moving my hand" being drug along after. Top-down causation is the process by which "moving my hand" actually moves my hand. Within a Newtonian paradigm, there is really no room for top-down causation. Any apparent "TDC" can be dissolved with an appeal to a larger system. A bouncing ball moving "ball particles" can be explained by the history of effects on the indiv...