Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy

The Pope’s Praise Of Agnostics

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I consider myself an agnostic, but not in this sense:

In addition to the two phenomena of religion and anti-religion, a further basic orientation is found in the growing world of agnosticism: people to whom the gift of faith has not been given, but who are nevertheless on the lookout for truth, searching for God. Such people do not simply assert: “There is no God.” They suffer from his absence and yet are inwardly making their way towards him, inasmuch as they seek truth and goodness. They are “pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace.” They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it. But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others.

These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible. Therefore I have consciously invited delegates of this third group to our meeting in Assisi, which does not simply bring together representatives of religious institutions. Rather it is a case of being together on a journey towards truth, a case of taking a decisive stand for human dignity and a case of common engagement for peace against every form of destructive force.

That doesn’t really describe me at all. I don’t think that I “suffer” from God’s absence, and I’m no seeking Him in any way (other than in my religious belief that it is humanity’s teleological duty to bring life and awareness to the universe). I’m functionally an atheist, in the sense that I live my life as though there is no God — I’m an agnostic only in the sense that I know that I can’t know whether or not there is a God, so I’m not an evangelist of the belief that He doesn’t exist, as people like Dawkins and Hitchens are.

General, Philosophy, Social Commentary

Connections

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…some meditations:

I’m thinking: no dog, no bag hoarding instincts, no barf-containment. No iPod location mystery, no sorting through the glove compartment, no instantly-available barf bag. The reason this day didn’t end with a stinky car can be directly traced to the moment I walked past a pet shop in Uptown in April 1996, looked in the window, and saw my dog.

Wife took him for a walk later. He was slow. Very slow. “He’s not going to be with us much longer,” she said. Resigned. Then hopeful: “But I’ve been saying that for three years.”

“You saw him when the food showed up. Annoying as a puppy. Where did he take you tonight?”

“Well, I let him go where he wanted, and we went up the hill to the water tower, and then back down, and when we got home he didn’t want to go up the steps so he went down the street, and I thought he would go up the back steps, but he looked at me, like ‘I’m not done,’ and we walked east and around the neighborhood again. But it was dark and he can’t see anything.”

“But he can smell.”

Nearly deaf and nearly blind, and the world is still a story, every scent a character, every strong odor a twist in the plot. The dog walks outside and the world is his iPod, and it’s always set on shuffle. So it is for us all, really. If you have a dog you know how they come to the door and stand there waiting for you to let them out. Standing at the glass door. The wall that keeps the odors out. They can see, but they can’t smell. Daily life for us is just like that. If you’re lucky someone opens the door and all the glories rush over you.

It’s days like these that you realize how much you miss. For once, you saw all the connections. You suspect there are just as many threads between the now and the then every other day. Probably more. Would you go mad if you considered them? Would you exult to discover how everything braids itself together, fear for the action ten years gone that will explode down the road, anticipate the bloom that grows from a casual act last month? Sure. All of that. All these things. You can’t act if you remember everything. You shouldn’t act if you remember nothing.

What a writer. And he does it almost every single day.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Good Life

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Why does it end?

When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.

Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.

Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.

Yup.