Praying for particular things,’ said I, ‘always seems to me like advising God how too run the world. Wouldn’t it be wiser to assume that He knows best?’ ‘On the same principle’, said he, ‘I suppose you never ask a man next to you to pass the salt, because God knows best whether you ought to have salt or not. And I suppose you never take an
umbrella, because God knows whether you ought to be wet or dry.’ ‘That’s quite different,’ I protested. ‘I don’t see why,’ said he. ‘The odd thing is that He should let us influence the course of events at all. But since he lets us do it in one way I don’t see why He shouldn’t let us do it in the other.’
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And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between
Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you
start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the
pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started
by knowing that there were no crocodiles then the various stories about
dragons might be helpful to confirm your disbelief. But if the truth or
falsehood of Christianity is the very question you are discussing, then
the argument from anthropology is surely a petitio.
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The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are
preaching Christianity soley and simply because you happen to think it
true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or
think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly
maintained distinction between what the Faith actually says and what
you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you
personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to
realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by
the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you
like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed
is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and
points of view.
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The bones were the same, nothing had changed. But people started to look at the dinosaurs differently. Same fossils. New ideas... People keep forgetting that paleontologists are really limited. We have a bunch of bones and teeth — for the most part — to work with. So really it's the ideas that drive the science. The ideas, of course, are driven by the biases of that particular moment. So we went from a lizard bias to a bird bias, and now the pendulum is actually swinging, once again, back to the middle.
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One of the striking things in the study of perpetrators is how they live with themselves morally. It's not that difficult because this really isn't a moral issue for them. They've removed the victims from their universe of moral obligation. What they're doing to the victims isn't really a moral problem because the victim's not part of their moral universe in the way that for some of us a bug or an insect isn't. Killing it is just not a moral problem for us because we don't feel that moral obligation.
Window down, transmission in neutral, he was gliding along, exhausted, under stars and sinking moon, driving at swimming speed, otter speed, watching the same moon-silvered riffles and silent glides she’d navigated moments before. And when he pictured again the way she’d watched him — one small, rounded ear up, listening to his babble, the other ear down, listening to the world beneath the asphalt, crushed and alive, two worlds at once — it touched something in him, unlocked something, and he felt himself fall through a kind of false bottom, felt he was driving now, down, into a vast, dark pool. A pool of sorrows, it seemed at first. And not just his own, not just crushed otters and lost Tashas. The stuff of small and large losses, and of recent and ancient ones — poxed kakiutl and napalmed Asians, leveled cities and leveled minds, lost tribes and understandings, broken bridges between worlds — it was all somehow suspended here. Immense sadness on all sides, yet immense depth — there was room down here for all of it. And in his exhaustion he didn’t panic, didn’t try to escape, didn’t close his mind around any one hurt. He just kept easing the Olds down through it all, thrashing on a gurney, Natasha laughing in a cloudburst, the one good paw scrabbling at the road. No matter how much he saw, more kept coming. Sorrows were endless; he’d always known this. But so, he discovers as he kept sinking and sinking, was the spaciousness of this great black pool.
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If it were desirable upon the part of God to send his son to save the
world from eternal perdition, why was it that, when he did arrive, so
many nations were kept in ignorance of his mission? Even the Jews,
God's chosen people, had no knowledge than an incarnate deity was to
expire on the Cross. If the regeneration of the world had been the
object of Christ, would it not have been better, instead of ascending
to heaven, for him to have remained on earth, teaching practical
truths, and showing by his own personal example how the world could be
rescued from that moral and intellectual darkness and despair to which
it had been reduced by the influence of a degrading theology?
Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend — man can sympathize with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.
You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water, inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation
has to do with marriage.
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How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the
contingent capacities of a biological species whose very existence
appears to be radically accidental, should have access to universally
valid methods of objective thought? It is because this question seems
unanswerable that sophisticated forms of subjectivism keep appearing in
the philosophical literature...