Category: books
-
Philosophy for the people
I see religion as philosophy for the people. I guess it’s more like religion is philosophy for the people with added spirits to spice things up. Cause, well, philosophy can be very boring and people forget what you’ve said. I’ve felt this for a while but had little to back it up. But it seems…
-
Truth
Some things strike me immediately as making sense. What I know to be false, is that there is ‘the Truth’. You can get very close in maths and physics but they’re not nearly so messy as all of what mother nature cooked up. I’ve been reading through Bear Grylls’ “Soul Fuel”, as a way of…
-
No doubt Jesus laughed a lot
No doubt Jesus laughed a lot – Soul Fuel, ch. 21, Bear Grylls Can we keep it that simple please? Not wrap it up in happiness/joy/“really-fun-guy”. He laughed. I mean I like and understand the good intentions of happiness and Joy but then there’s lots of questions about what is happiness and joy. Laughing, is…
-
The eternal law of the animals
Tolstoy explains beautifully as ever, the hypocrisy of Christians at war. “There are in Europe twenty-eight millions of men under arms,” says Wilson, “to decide disputes, not by discussion, but by murdering one another. That is the accepted method for deciding disputes among Christian nations.…either Christianity is a failure, or those who have undertaken to…
-
The Dry Salvages – T. S. Eliot
(PDF Download) (The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks,with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.Groaner: a whistling buoy.) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree,…
-
Sea of thermodynamics
Reading about Ernest Shackleton stuck in a boat (the James Caird)… … the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which men never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. —…
-
Reason and love
Following on from Informers. Tolstoy tells us (Kingdom of God ~p264) that we are brought from an eternity of nothingness and bequeathed with reason and love. Hinduism’s Krishna says: Without contemplation there cannot be peace – Bhagavad-Gita #66 I take reason and contemplation to be the same. Further I take them to be the opposite…
-
Steelmanning the strawman – John Stuart Mill
Lean on meI won’t fall overI’m made of steelAnd stone cold sober — Lean on me, Carter USM I discovered On Liberty (free to read via gutenberg.org) from John Stuart Mill , whilst reading about steelmanning. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. — On Liberty, John Stuart…
-
The Kingdom of Delusion is Within You
I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You alongside Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I agree with almost all that Dawkins has to say, yet in my eyes he says it without any of the grace or weight or feeling of Tolstoy. They’re both attacking the church, but Dawkins chooses to attack all…
-
UK priests sent people to burn
The priests and bishops in the UK sent people to burn, the highest priest in the land, the Archbishop of Canterbury very willingly went first. These new powers allowed the bishops to arrest and imprison all preachers of heresy, all schoolmasters infected with heresy, and all owners and writers of heretical books. On refusal to…
Ian's Philosophy 