Simple Gifts

George Orwell's 1984 is classic dystopian literature, but it is also psychologically astute and prescient concerning the totalitarian tendencies of the 20th century's ideologies. With the rise of 21st century Wokism currently in vogue, its message is a clarion call for the present, too. Let us beware of embracing rather than opposing the lies that are being forced upon us, lest we find ourselves, too, living in a world in which we must guard our very thoughts, lest they betray us. Hold fast to the truth, no matter the consequences!

Enjoy ... and be vigilant!

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Rene Descartes' classic philosophical work, Meditations on First Philosophy, is a participative exercise in thinking. Join one of history's great philosophical minds in considering the nature of the world and how we think about it.

Meditation 3, "Of God: That He Exists," is an extended argument that God necessarily exists. His argument, a version of Anselm's ontological argument, was later powerfully critiqued by Immanuel Kant. The ontological argument rises and falls in popularity. Whether or not the argument "works" for you, it is worthwhile to enter into Descartes' participative reasoning process, to "feel" the power of the logic as it unfolds. I encourage all my listeners to participate with one of history's great minds as he seeks to "prove" God's existence. 

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A year into the war, and a month into the Battle of Britain, on August 20th 1940, Churchill addresses a nation resolute and prepared for the worst: 1 1/2 million men serve part-time as the "Home Guard," armed, patrolling the streets and beeches, armed in many cases by weapons from the United States. Field defenses were hastily constructed - anti-tank lines and trenches, pillboxes, and many other means to resist a German invasion effort of the islands. Civilian evacuations from urban centers intensified. C S Lewis and his brother Warnie hosted many children in their Oxford home, the Kilns, for instance.

The invasion, of course, would never happen, but the bombing of Britain intensified and the air battle raged until May 1941. Churchill paints in realistic colors, and praises those upon whom the defense of Britain predominantly falls:

"The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

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In conjunction with episode 52 of our Christian Atheist podcast, "Archaeology and Faith," in which we discuss the amazing discovery of a curse tablet on Mount Ebal in Israel. we present here an essay by C. S. Lewis that critiques the motivations behind much of the hostility toward biblical historicity. Here is a link to that episode:

https://wisewordsforyouroccasion.podbean.com/e/52-christian-atheist/

Lewis here attacks the underlying assumptions that motivate the "higher criticism," and which they don't acknowledge as motivations. He also undermines the arrogance that fails to recognize its own weaknesses and limitations, and yet constructs what seems to them an iron-clad interpretation through textual criticism that, at best, should be approached with a certain degree of incredulity:

"These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read ... the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

This does not mean, of course, that biblical criticism is always wrong, or that its skeptical approach has no value:

"We are not fundamentalists. We think that different elements in this sort of theology have different degrees of strength. The nearer it sticks to mere textual criticism, of the old sort ... the more we are disposed to believe in it. It is as we glide away from this into reconstructions of a subtler and more ambitious kind that our faith in the method wavers.... I could not speak with similar confidence about the circle I have chiefly lived in myself. I could not describe even the history of my own thought as confidently as these men describe the history of the early Church's mind. And I am perfectly certain no one else could.... It encourages a due agnosticism. For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively" to the biblical text. "Try doubting something else."

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We end this month of Spring poems with poetry tinged with love, beginning with:

1) "After the Winter," by Claude McKay

2) "Spring," by Gerard Manley Hopkins

3) "Feuerzauber," Louis Untermeyer. A fitting poem with which to end our Spring poetry, a poem I wish I had written for my wife:

Aye, you are touched; your singing lips grow dumb;

The fields absorb you, color you entire ...

And you become

A goddess standing in a world of fire!

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George Orwell's 1984 is classic dystopian literature, but it is also psychologically astute and prescient concerning the totalitarian tendencies of the 20th century's ideologies. With the rise of 21st century Wokism currently in vogue, its message is a clarion call for the present, too. Let us beware of embracing rather than opposing the lies that are being forced upon us, lest we find ourselves, too, living in a world in which we must guard our very thoughts, lest they betray us. Hold fast to the truth, no matter the consequences!

Enjoy ... and be vigilant!

If you'd like to support us, donate through Paypal at [email protected]

Rene Descartes' classic philosophical work, Meditations on First Philosophy, is a participative exercise in thinking. Join one of history's great philosophical minds in considering the nature of the world and how we think about it.

Meditation 2, building on the foundation of systematic doubt practiced in Meditation 1, is subtitled, "Of the nature of the human mind; and that it is more easily known than the body." Although the phrase does not occur in the Meditations, it is here that we find the explanation of Descartes' famous idea, Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. So long as I am doubting, experiencing, thinking, I cannot doubt that I exist. This Meditation also contains Descartes' famous musings on the piece of wax.

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A year into the war, and a month into the Battle of Britain, on August 20th 1940, Churchill addresses a nation resolute and prepared for the worst: 1 1/2 million men serve part-time as the "Home Guard," armed, patrolling the streets and beeches, armed in many cases by weapons from the United States. Field defenses were hastily constructed - anti-tank lines and trenches, pillboxes, and many other means to resist a German invasion effort of the islands. Civilian evacuations from urban centers intensified. C S Lewis and his brother Warnie hosted many children in their Oxford home, the Kilns, for instance.

The invasion, of course, would never happen, but the bombing of Britain intensified and the air battle raged until May 1941. Churchill paints in realistic colors, and praises those upon whom the defense of Britain predominantly falls:

"The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

If you’d like to support us, donate through Paypal at [email protected]

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Lewis begins his essay "On Futility" with the common misconception, derivable directly from Hegelian philosophy, that "Evolution simply means improvement.... There is thus lodged in popular thought the conception that improvement is, somehow, a cosmic law." This, he declares, is "a conception to which the sciences give no support at all. There is no general tendency even for organisms to improve. There is no evidence that the mental and moral capacities of the human race have been increased since man became man."

Next, Lewis properly collapses the distinction between scientific and non-scientific reasoning:

"The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels 'science' to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken. Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought..., if logic is discredited science must go down along with it."

Reason, then, can not be thought of as merely human:

"Where thought is strictly rational it must be ... not ours, but cosmic or super-cosmic. It must be something not shut up inside our heads but already 'out there' - in the universe or behind the universe.... Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated."

And the objectivity of reason implies the objectivity of Value:

"The prima facie case for denying a sense of values to the cosmic or super-cosmic mind has really collapsed the moment we see that we have to attribute reason to it. When we are forced to admit that reason cannot be merely human, there is no longer any compulsive inducement  to say that virtue is purely human."

"In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it. The more seriously we take our own charge of futility the more we are committed to the implication that reality in the last resort is not futile at all. The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative.... The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still."

The problem of futility, or Value, "is really the same sort of problem that meets us in science. The pell-mell of phenomena, as we first observe them, seems to be full of anomalies and irregularities; but being assured that reality is logical we go on framing and trying out hypotheses to show that the apparent irregularities are not irregular at all. The history of science is the history of that progress. The corresponding process whereby, having admitted that reality in the last resort  must be moral, we attempt to explain evil, is the history of theology."

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"Daisy Time," by Marjorie Pickthall is a sweet, airy poem for Spring time.

"To Daffodils," by Robert Herrick, as though to countermand the declarations from our first poet this week, Herrick reminds us, like Robert Frost in "Nothing Gold Can Stay," that beauty is transitory, and our lives, like the beautiful flowers, have but a short time to bloom.

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