brilliant essays about "man's search for meaning"

[sisyphus]

you know what francis bacon said about atheism, right?

just picked up "where can wisdom be found" and "the american religion" this morning.. will commence reading shortly...

[Rit]

here is a quote from the opening preface to that book:

"Wisdom, whether esoteric or not, seems to me a Perfection that can either absorb or destroy us, depending on what we bring to it"

[Rit]

and what did Bacon say about atheism?

[Rit]

coz i'm in a listless aimless mood, here is a sequence of lists to waste my time.
some faves of mine... they challenged me most at crucial times in my near futile attempt to read every bloody 'classic' and 'must-read' book i ever heard of

3 POETS:
William Blake
Arthur Rimbaud
Emily Dickinson

3 PLAYWRIGHTS:
William Shakespeare
Christopher Marlowe
Goethe

3 NATURAL PHILOSOPHERS (or scientists):
Lucretius
Sir Francis Bacon
Issac Newton

3 PHILOSOPHERS:
Plato
George Berkeley
Soren Kierkegaard

3 POLITICAL THEORISTS:
Thucydides
Thomas Hobbes
Edmund Burke

3 THEOLOGIANS:
Thomas Aquinas
Blaise Pascal
Jakob Boehme

3 ROCKERS:
Bob Dylan
Syd Barrett
Captain Beefheart

[sisyphus]

I can't remember the exact quote, but i think it was something like "A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind toward atheism, a lot of philosophy bringeth man's mind back 'round to religion." From the Divine Human I think...not certain.

[sisyphus]

"A little philosophy leadeth men toward atheism, but depth in philosophy leadeth a man toward religion."

[Rit]

i can believe that

[Kensterberg]

sisyphus said:

"A little philosophy leadeth men toward atheism, but depth in philosophy leadeth a man toward religion."

I'm not buying this. I'm not exactly in the shallow end of the pool re: philosophy and science, and I am more skeptical of claims of religious truth today than at any point since my early twenties.

I am more inclined to think that it is exhausting to believe that there is no "divine," no higher power to appeal to or take comfort in. As a person gets older, I submit to you that they are more and more likely to grow tired of that burden, of the uncertainty of life, and so are more inclined to give religious claims some creedence. So the (apparent) correspondence between depth in philosophy and religion is really a matter of older philosophers simply covering their asses, hoping that maybe it's true.

Lately, I'm awfully inclined to put religious belief into the category of wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. The only meaning in any human's life is that which we create for ourselves.

[Rit]

this is probably one of my most favourite paragraphs in all of literature:

(*from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino*)

"..And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, and then make them endure, give them space."

[Rit]

kenholzman said:

sisyphus said:

"A little philosophy leadeth men toward atheism, but depth in philosophy leadeth a man toward religion."

I'm not buying this. I'm not exactly in the shallow end of the pool re: philosophy and science, and I am more skeptical of claims of religious truth today than at any point since my early twenties.

I am more inclined to think that it is exhausting to believe that there is no "divine," no higher power to appeal to or take comfort in. As a person gets older, I submit to you that they are more and more likely to grow tired of that burden, of the uncertainty of life, and so are more inclined to give religious claims some creedence. So the (apparent) correspondence between depth in philosophy and religion is really a matter of older philosophers simply covering their asses, hoping that maybe it's true.

Lately, I'm awfully inclined to put religious belief into the category of wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. The only meaning in any human's life is that which we create for ourselves.

in defence of Francis Bacon, who i did praise to high heaven so i guess i ought to , i think he means that going far enough into wisdom seeking (as he did with his inductive science) leads one to MORE mystery and awe and a deep appreciation at the boundless energy and discovery and invention to be found at the ends of creative reason.

he doesn't mean a strict monotheistic religion (as some suspect he was an atheist or an agnostic himself)... he meant simply that one gets a deeper sense of things and a kind of spiritual growth, even if all you are doing is nothing more than quantum physics or microbiology.

in fact, that so many scientists working in fields of high-end theoretization become (or espouse) a kind of spiritual outlook as a result of their probings into the depths of nature is proof of the validity of Bacon's aphorism.

[sisyphus]

kenholzman said:

sisyphus said:

"A little philosophy leadeth men toward atheism, but depth in philosophy leadeth a man toward religion."

I'm not buying this. I'm not exactly in the shallow end of the pool re: philosophy and science, and I am more skeptical of claims of religious truth today than at any point since my early twenties.

I am more inclined to think that it is exhausting to believe that there is no "divine," no higher power to appeal to or take comfort in. As a person gets older, I submit to you that they are more and more likely to grow tired of that burden, of the uncertainty of life, and so are more inclined to give religious claims some creedence. So the (apparent) correspondence between depth in philosophy and religion is really a matter of older philosophers simply covering their asses, hoping that maybe it's true.

Lately, I'm awfully inclined to put religious belief into the category of wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. The only meaning in any human's life is that which we create for ourselves.

i don't agree with him either. i just quoted him.

[Rit]

the mistake in interpretation here arises because you're assuming that Bacon means embracing wholeheartedly some kind of Catholic dogma (or Protestant or Muslim or whatever).

he's not. nor has any of the "wisest" theologians ever meant such a thing in the history of mankind.

[Rit]

one of the things the finally made me get over my sheer digust of reading actual theologians was my realization that the best and brightest of them (Aquinas, St Bernard, John of Salisbury, etc) were men first and foremost.. men of law, politics and science. The faith was only a superficial marker of healthy and vibrant intellects concerned with the whole broach of humanity.

[sisyphus]

ritalinpants said:

kenholzman said:

I'm not buying this. I'm not exactly in the shallow end of the pool re: philosophy and science, and I am more skeptical of claims of religious truth today than at any point since my early twenties.

I am more inclined to think that it is exhausting to believe that there is no "divine," no higher power to appeal to or take comfort in. As a person gets older, I submit to you that they are more and more likely to grow tired of that burden, of the uncertainty of life, and so are more inclined to give religious claims some creedence. So the (apparent) correspondence between depth in philosophy and religion is really a matter of older philosophers simply covering their asses, hoping that maybe it's true.

Lately, I'm awfully inclined to put religious belief into the category of wishful thinking, if not outright delusion. The only meaning in any human's life is that which we create for ourselves.

in defence of Francis Bacon, who i did praise to high heaven so i guess i ought to , i think he means that going far enough into wisdom seeking (as he did with his inductive science) leads one to MORE mystery and awe and a deep appreciation at the boundless energy and discovery and invention to be found at the ends of creative reason.

he doesn't mean a strict monotheistic religion (as some suspect he was an atheist or an agnostic himself)... he meant simply that one gets a deeper sense of things and a kind of spiritual growth, even if all you are doing is nothing more than quantum physics or microbiology.

in fact, that so many scientists working in fields of high-end theoretization become (or espouse) a kind of spiritual outlook as a result of their probings into the depths of nature is proof of the validity of Bacon's aphorism.

and i can agree with that, too.

[sisyphus]

rit,

started reading both The American Religion and Where Shall Wisdom Be Found. As a former Mormon, and given Bloom's focus on Mormonism, I think I'm most interested in the former so far. However, I really like where Bloom is going in W.S.W.B.F., with the Greek cognition vs. Yawehistic spirituality thing...kind of revealing our society to be almost schizophrenic in it's drastically divided tendencies with regard to the secular and the spiritual.