Up@dawn 2.0

Friday, January 31, 2020

Quizzes Feb 4, 6

T 4 - FL 5-6 (Scroll down to *Th 6)
LISTEN

Add your own quiz and discussion questions, comments, links etc. - you can claim a base for each.

1.What did Anne Hutchinson tell her congregants the Lord had decided?

2. What did Hutchinson say God had told her directly?

3. What made Anne Hutchinson "so American"?

4. Why is Hutchinson the Puritan with whom Americans today can most readily connect? 

5. Who was Roger Williams?

6. How was freedom of thought in early America different from that of Europe in the 17th century?

7. According to some Puritans, who were "Satan's soldiers" in America?

8. As the Age of Reason was unfolding in Europe, what was Cotton Mather preaching in America?

9. What "evidence" was the primary basis for judgments in the Salem witch trials?

10. Did most people in New England believe in witches, during the infamous Salem witch trials?

11. What's Protestantism's enduring influence?

Add your quiz questions in the comments section below (each earns you a base).


Discussion Questions:

  • Is predestined salvation fair, just, or believable?
  • What would you say to someone who claimed actually to converse with God, i.e., to hear and respond to a voice in their head they're convinced is the supernatural creator and master of the universe?
  • Does freedom of religion also mean freedom from religion, for those who are not religious?
  • How can Christians in America reconcile the way their ancestors treated the native Americans?
  • What do you think of modern-day Wiccans? Do you think they have any magical powers, or do you think they think so? **
  • John Dewey philosophized about "natural piety," recognizing our shared inter-dependence on one another and on nature at large. How does a "naturally pious" person express that piety, in terms of lifestyle choices and policy preferences etc.?
  • What traits of personal character, if any, do you think mirror the American character? Or is there even such a thing as a national character? Is it safe to generalize about what makes anyone "so American"?
  • Should someone apologize on the nation's behalf to native Americans for the shameful way in which European settlers robbed them of their land, infected them with fatal disease, villified them as Satanic, etc. etc.? Should we be talking about reparations for indigenous peoples everywhere?
  • Have there been other sorts of "witch trials" in American history than just those in Salem?
  • Is it possible, as a Protestant, to renounce all supernaturalism?
  • [The following questions are drawn from The Joys of Walking] Have you ever been on a "walking tour" of the sort Leslie Stephen praises?
  • What do you think Stephen means when he calls walking "the natural recreation for the [person] who wants to turn [his intellect] out to play"? 20
  • If walking saved JS Mill from becoming "a mere smoke-dried pedant," does that imply that all or most sedentary scholars are pedantic?  24
  • COMMENT: "I respect the cyclist, but he is enslaved by his machine." 31
  • COMMENT: "None of us can always be thinking over the riddle of the universe..." 37
  • Add your DQs

And what do you think of this? -
The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.



** Wicca is a modern-day, nature-based pagan religion. Though rituals and practices vary among people who identify as Wiccan, most observations include the festival celebrations of solstices and equinoxes, the honoring of a male god and a female goddess, and the incorporation of herbalism and other natural objects into rituals. Wiccans practice their religion according to an ethical code, and many believe in reincarnation... History.com
==
...I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . .”


In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil... NYer


*Th 6 - FL 7-8
LISTEN

1. The American Founders were what kinds of philosophers?

2. Who was known as The Last Puritan, and of what movement was he at the center?

3. What did the Holy Spirit produce in "respectable people," during the Great Awakening?

4. Who said dreams could be messages from God?

5. What "intense supernatural feeling" did George Whitefield implant [not "invent"] in American Christianity?

6. Early American Methodists put great stock in what?

7. What did Thomas Jefferson instruct his teenage nephew to do?

8. Why, according to Alexander Hamilton, did the framers omit God from the Constitution?

9. What, according to Kant, is the motto of enlightenment?

10. Enlightenment thinkers were sure that what would win in the "marketplace of ideas?"

11. What kind of questions "burden" human thought, but cannot finally be answered?

Add your quiz questions, in the comments section below.


Discussion Questions
  • The Founders were Enlightenment rationalists and pragmatists devoted to secular government and a "wall of separation" between church and state, but the myth persists among many Americans that they intended to establish "a Christian nation," a theocracy not unlike those in the Islamic world. Why do you think that is?
  • Why do you think Americans have been so obsessed with Hell? 
  • What do you think accounts for "the Affections" of some fundamentalist church services ("moaning, weeping, screaming, jerking, fainting" etc.)?
  • Was Jefferson's advice to his nephew good?
  • What do you think of Kant's motto?
  • Will reason eventually win out in the "marketplace of ideas"?
  • Do you have any significant philosophical differences with your parents? Do you discuss them? Do you want to?
  • Does "nirvana" (Enlightenment, personal liberation) have to be the same for everyone? What would be your personal definition/experience of nirvana?  
  • Matthieu Ricard has been called the happiest man in the world. Do you think eastern philosophies focused on the alleviation of suffering are a more promising route to happiness than its "pursuit" in the western/Jeffersonian tradition of individualism and personal liberty?
  • Is "Holy Spirit" something real and supernatural, or is it the name of a natural form of experience best studied and explicated by neuroscientists, and analyzed by philosophers?
  • Have you been "born again," or encouraged by faith leaders or peers to seek spiritual rebirth? Is that something real, metaphorical, or delusional?
  • Why did the founders omit reference to God in the Constitution, do you think?
  • Do you think it takes courage to think for yourself and invoke reason against superstition, tradition, etc.?
  • Max Beerbohm (in Joys of Walking) notes the "drawbacks" of London's environment that keep him from having to walk. What drawbacks exist in your environment and how do or might you overcome them?
  • What usefulness, besides exercise, do you think walking has?
  • Add your DQs...
What Is Enlightenment? 
by Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage [immaturity]. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind--among them the entire fair sex--should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts... (continues)
==

22929604 Our culture is obsessed with youth-and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up? she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is.

Why Grow Up? is a witty and concise argument for the value of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and all the more worth striving for.

“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.” 

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.” 

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” 

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.” 

“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.” 
― Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age



Susan Neiman at the Southern Festival of Books, Nashville - October 2019 - "Learning from the Germans"
==
Jefferson was a self-avowed Epicurean and materialist. "Spiritualism" for him is a term of abuse applied mostly to the Platonic tradition.  "Of Jesus he says, 'I am a Materialist; he takes the side of spiritualism.' [But] perhaps Jesus could be interpreted as an Epicurean after all."

In that spirit, perhaps we should all read our (Jefferson) Bible.


Thursday, January 30, 2020

The Good Place

Okay, I'll just get over my Ted Danson phobia and watch. Maybe not binge, though.
Michael Schur swears he didn’t name Michael, the avuncular architect played by Ted Danson on Schur’s metaphysical sitcom, “The Good Place,” after himself. The character was actually based on St. Michael the Archangel, who according to Christian tradition is involved in the final judgment of souls.
But the parallels are undeniable. Over four seasons on the NBC comedy, both Michaels spent their time devising elaborate, twisty fictions and trying to settle on a suitably just plan for the afterlife.
“That character is some sort of a showrunner — he’s writing scenarios and putting people in different positions,” Schur said recently. “I gave up trying to argue and have just accepted the fact that my subconscious will live on the show.”
“The Good Place” is ending this week, wrapping up Thursday night on NBC with the series finale followed by a live panel discussion, hosted by Seth Meyers, with Schur and the cast — Danson, Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D’Arcy Carden.... (continues)

How to post Google Book excerpts etc.

FYI-


  1. Go to Google Books. If the selection you want to excerpt has a Preview, click on it.
  2. Click on the link icon above the book.
  3. Copy ("Ctrl-C") the Embed code that just popped up.
  4. Paste ("Ctrl-V") that code into your post.
For instance,



How to post a snippet of text and link to the rest of it:
  1. Copy the selection you want to excerpt.
  2. Paste that into your post.
  3. If it doesn't display correctly, highlight it and click on the "Remove formatting" (Tx) icon 
  4. Type ("continues") at the end of the text ...
  5. Highlight ("continues") ...
  6. Paste the URL address onto ("continues")
For instance,

In a New Dystopian Novel, the Country is AutoAmerica, but Baseball Is Still Its Pastime
by Dwight Garner

The best thing about being God, Iris Murdoch wrote, would be making the heads. The best thing about writing speculative or dystopian fiction, surely, is updating human language, pushing strange new words into a reader’s mind.
Gish Jen’s densely imagined if static new novel, “The Resisters,” is set in a future surveillance state known as AutoAmerica. The ice caps have melted, and much of the land is underwater. A racial and class divide has cleaved the population... (continues)

"Do not go quietly into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Defy entropy!
 

Spinoza's pluralism, Kant's humanism, Paine's common sense






Wednesday, January 29, 2020

The Last Time Democracy Almost Died

Learning from the upheaval of the nineteen-thirties.

The last time democracy nearly died all over the world and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it. “The future of democracy is topic number one in the animated discussion going on all over America,” a contributor to the New York Times wrote in 1937. “In the Legislatures, over the radio, at the luncheon table, in the drawing rooms, at meetings of forums and in all kinds of groups of citizens everywhere, people are talking about the democratic way of life.” People bickered and people hollered, and they also made rules. “You are a liar!” one guy shouted from the audience during a political debate heard on the radio by ten million Americans, from Missoula to Tallahassee. “Now, now, we don’t allow that,” the moderator said, calmly, and asked him to leave.

In the nineteen-thirties, you could count on the Yankees winning the World Series, dust storms plaguing the prairies, evangelicals preaching on the radio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt residing in the White House, people lining up for blocks to get scraps of food, and democracies dying, from the Andes to the Urals and the Alps.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson’s Administration had promised that winning the Great War would “make the world safe for democracy.” The peace carved nearly a dozen new states out of the former Russian, Ottoman, and Austrian empires. The number of democracies in the world rose; the spread of liberal-democratic governance began to appear inevitable. But this was no more than a reverie. Infant democracies grew, toddled, wobbled, and fell: Hungary, Albania, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia. In older states, too, the desperate masses turned to authoritarianism. Benito Mussolini marched on Rome in 1922. It had taken a century and a half for European monarchs who ruled by divine right and brute force to be replaced by constitutional democracies and the rule of law. Now Fascism and Communism toppled these governments in a matter of months, even before the stock-market crash of 1929 and the misery that ensued... (Jill Lepore, NewYorker - continues)

Trek

For my fellow Trek geeks, here's novelist and Picard show-runner (and former philosophy major) Michael Chabon on Star Trek's hard-won optimism for our long-term future:
Was there a conscious effort to include the sense of old-school optimism that’s so integral to Star Trek?The effort was to make sure that what we did felt like Star Trek. Part of something being Star Trek is not simply that it reflects the time in which it’s being made. EveryTV show reflects the time in which it’s being made. But Star Trek is unique in that it deliberately reflected what was happening when it was being made—it wasn’t just unconscious or automatic. And so, we tried to consciously reflect a coherent vision of our time.
I think that optimism is an easily misunderstood term. There’s this misconception that Star Trek was always sunshine and roses. But its optimism was hard-won. It was always fairly clear-eyed about the darkness in the human soul. The potential for violence, for greed, for criminality, for hatred. All of that felt very much present from the very first episode of Star Trek in ‘66. It’s just that people are working their asses off to overcome it, and it’s a constant effort. It’s always there, even in the episode titles: “The Enemy Within.” “The Turnabout Intruder.” That dark side of human nature is always waiting to emerge again.
So, is that optimism? It is optimism, but it’s a very sober optimism that understands darkness. It’s a deliberate, conscious optimism that goes hand-in-hand with the kind of clear-eyed vision that allows you to reflect the times that you’re living in... (Rest of the interview here)
Chabon recently wrote a New Yorker essay on his late father and Spock:

...In “Star Trek” ’s imagined future, amid the rocks and under the red alien skies of Spock’s home world, Vulcans called that unflagging effort a “philosophy,” enshrined its founder, Surak, and looked with cool condescension on those who did not submit to its regime. But, as I would discover as an undergrad in the halls of the Philosophy Department at the University of Pittsburgh, a redoubt far stauncher than the planet Vulcan of a logic far fiercer than Surak’s, the Vulcan way had little to do with philosophy and even less to do with logic, and there was certainly nothing alien about it. It was just good old repression, of the sort practiced by human fathers, among others, for many long and illogical centuries.
I love Mr. Spock because he reminds me of you, I said...
The Vulcans did have a philosophy, though: Stoicism plus IDIC...

Several years ago Chabon wrote a wonderful essay for the Long Now Foundation about Star Trek, parenting, and the future called The Omega Glory:
Image result for starship enterpriseWhen I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.
"Betting on the future" for our kids and theirs (et al) has a particular environmental resonance in these Greta/Green New Deal days - as I'm sure to mention when I give my little Climate Change talk on Monday.


Climate Change - Spring 2020 Lecture Series

Midterm report presentations

Identify your group (3 or 4 members each) and topic by Feb 6, in a comment below this post. 

If you haven't identified classmates to work with but do have a topical preference, go ahead and indicate that in a comment below; if you're interested in a topic someone else has posted an interest in, find them and get together in class to discuss your collaboration. Make sure to coordinate with your colleagues and avoid redundancy.

A bonus run to each member of the group in each section that volunteers to go first, on Feb 11. 

Prior to your scheduled presentation date, a member of your group will post a brief summary of what each of you will be presenting along with a short quiz (3-4 questions) over the contents of your presentation and/or anything you've assigned for us to look at in advance, AND at least a couple of discussion questions. Go over your quiz and discussion questions at the end of the presentation. Lead discussion. Tell us something more about your topic than we've read in our assigned texts. Good sources include the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia. (See "Look it up" in the sidebar.) Better still, check out the philosophy section up on the 2d floor of the library.

Each of you should speak for about five minutes on your topic. You may prepare audio-visual aids (powerpoint etc.) if you wish, but please be prepared to take us outdoors if it happens to be a nice day.

Have fun!
==
Section 5
T 11 -  Religion in 19th century America, from Cane Ridge to Joseph Smith (see FL 9-10) - Ben, Sydney, Matthew
OR Cosmic philosophy - Matthew Findley, Erika Renfroe

Th 13 - Pseudoscience and magical thinking (see FL 11) -  Erin, Jordan. Monica, Malachi

OR Pre-Socratic philosophy (Thales to Democritus) - Jason, Carson, Ashley

Bring treats to celebrate Valentine's Day (and somebody's birthday), and earn a bonus base!

T 18 - Socrates and Plato - Michael, Granville, Anthony,jasmine

Th 20 - Aristotle - Joey and Zack, 
OR Peripatetic philosophy - Frank and Edwin

T 25 - Skepticism - madelyn and daniel, Ty
OR Atheism/Agnosticism/Secular Humanism - Darohn

[Th 27 - NO CLASS, I'm at a conference] 

MAR


T 3 - Epicureans and Stoics - Matt and Hamdi

Th 5 - Machiavelli and Hobbes - tate, zach, jake 

SPRING BREAK

T 17 - Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal - 

Th 19 - Spinoza, Einstein, and pantheism -nakiya, sydney 

---


Section 6
T 11 -  Religion in 19th century America, from Cane Ridge to Joseph Smith (see FL 9-10) - 
OR Cosmic philosophy -

Th 13 - Pseudoscience and magical thinking (see FL 11) - Aubrey Salm

OR Pre-Socratic philosophy (Thales to Democritus) - 

Bring treats to celebrate Valentine's Day (and somebody's birthday), and earn a bonus base!

T 18 - Socrates and Plato - kaylee, Mary Grace, Sydney

Th 20 - Aristotle - Kirolos, Connor Coughran, Jacob Wagner, John Lasseter
OR Peripatetic philosophy - Bailey Enoch, Farrah Roberson, Isaac Ibarra 

T 25 - Skepticism - Matthew, Leo, Lennon
OR Atheism/Agnosticism/Secular Humanism - Daniel Fisher, Anna Snodgrass, Sydney Schettler ,miguel angel

[Th 27 - NO CLASS, I'm at a conference] 

MAR


T 3 - Epicureans and Stoics - Hayden, Max, Olivia

Th 5 - Machiavelli and Hobbes - Malcolm, Trey, Geoff, Iykemroy

SPRING BREAK

T 17 - Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal - Conner & Ethan

Th 19 - Spinoza, Einstein, and pantheism - Zabuloni, Andrew

---


Section 11
T 11 -  Religion in 19th century America, from Cane Ridge to Joseph Smith (see FL 9-10) - mario zaky, Muad Saeed, and Guillermo 
OR Cosmic philosophy - Drake Barcroft

Th 13 - Pseudoscience and magical thinking (see FL 11) -  DeJah and Helena, Krysta

OR Pre-Socratic philosophy (Thales to Democritus) - 

Bring treats to celebrate Valentine's Day (and somebody's birthday), and earn a bonus base!

T 18 - Socrates and Plato - Daniel Leftwich, Jasmine Whitaker, Michael Eckard

Th 20 - Aristotle - Pau, Jaylan, Lexie 
OR Peripatetic philosophy - 

T 25 - Skepticism - 
OR Atheism/Agnosticism/Secular Humanism - 

[Th 27 - NO CLASS, I'm at a conference] 

MAR


T 3 - Epicureans and Stoics - Joey and Zack

Th 5 - Machiavelli and Hobbes - tate, zach, jake 

SPRING BREAK

T 17 - Montaigne, Descartes, & Pascal - 

Th 19 - Spinoza, Einstein, and pantheism - 

---

==
??? Pau, Jaylen, Lexi ???

More peripatetic philosophy



Do you live in a cave? Cave-dwellers (including the screen-obsessive sort, and excessive patrons of sports bars) need to get out more. The open air is a great place to think and philosophize... Peripatetics reject Wall-e World...

"Right now we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy." Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

"Walking exposes us to the constant flux of a changing environment, providing us with an endless array of new and unique experiences, which combined with our past memories may, through serendipity alone, provoke new associations and give birth to new ideas." Paul Snowden

22750456 The case for getting back on our feet

The humble act of putting one foot in front of the other transcends age, geography, culture, and class, and is one of the most economical and environmentally responsible modes of transit. Yet with our modern fixation on speed, this healthy pedestrian activity has been largely left behind.

At a personal and professional crossroads, writer, editor, and obsessive walker Dan Rubinstein travelled throughout the U.S., U.K., and Canada to walk with people who saw the act not only as a form of transportation and recreation, but also as a path to a better world. There are no magic-bullet solutions to modern epidemics like obesity, anxiety, alienation, and climate change. But what if there is a simple way to take a step in the right direction? Combining fascinating reportage, eye-opening research, and Rubinstein’s own discoveries, Born to Walk explores how far this ancient habit can take us, how much repair is within range, and guarantees that you’ll never again take walking for granted.

“Every day can be a pilgrimage, if the goal is a deeper sense of your small role in the revolving world.”


Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane)
Word of the day: "inscendence" - the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core. (Thomas Berry) pic.twitter.com/u7XsX7nC4q

“My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.” Bruce Chatwin


Monday, January 27, 2020

Kobe Bryant





nyt

Sunday, January 26, 2020

More cosmic philosophy




TPM Philosophy Quote (@tpmquote)
Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity. All things are petty, easily changed, vanishing away.--Marcus Aurelius

Too small


“We have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe...

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small...

A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us...

The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy... And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion..."
― Carl SaganThe Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God


38745914 Klein sees in a single rose the sublime interdependence of all life; a day of stormy weather points to the world’s unpredictability; a marble conjures the birth of the cosmos. As he contemplates the deepest mysteries—the nature of reality, dark matter, humanity’s place among the galaxies, and more—Klein encourages us to fall in love with the universe the way scientists do: with a grasp of the key ideas and theories of twenty-first-century physics that bring to life the wonders of, really, everything... g'r

"Over two millennia, the air Julius Caesar exhaled at the moment of his death has spread evenly over the whole Earth..." So, every liter of air including the one you just ingested contains one of those molecules.

See Sam Kean, Caesar's Last Breath





The antidote to cosmic despair:



"Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things." Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian