It has been a while...

I think I'll restart this blog, but it's time to change the focus. It will not strictly concern itself with philosophy (as it was in the early days) nor a travel log (as it served while in Chile). Afterdoxy will turn to general writing of any subject matter; in short, it is going to be more of a blog than ever before. Here is an old post of mine on Facebook. An oldie but a goodie. Enjoi...

This is a paraphrase of David Hume's Natural Religion excerpt on axiomatic religion, which I will assume none of you will read and if you do you will blithely ignore its content because it disturbs you. But why would I post this? Simply because I know you care about religion because it is important, and I think these things are important to consider. It is only blissful stupidity to ignore it. I want you to have an opinion and an apology because I have always thought your opinion was important.

The Fundamental Axioms of Religion:


1. These Axioms are True. This is the Prime Axiom of the axiom sets of all religions, and of course always a handy one to have if you wish to be able to derive the truth of your beliefs (oxymoron city) from your principle axioms.


2. God exists, is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibeneficient.


3. God has kindly revealed by various prophetic means this set of Axioms, which are axiomatically True (see Axiom 1), Complete (omniscient), Mandatory (omnipotent), and Good (omnibeneficient).


4. All other (possibly competing) sets of Axioms are False, except maybe ones that are later revealed by God, presuming that we don't have as an Axiom the following Axiom:


5. These Axioms are Complete. (Seal of the Prophets, "Closed Canon", the Warning of Revelations, et cetera; Mohamed should have had a talk with Thomas Jefferson, see below.)


6. Anyone who fails to accept these Axioms as Their Axioms in their deepest heart of hearts is a Bad Person, and this will be known by the omniscient God, who will then omnipotently cast you into an eternity of Eternal Torment out of the goodness of His (emphasis intentional on masculine anthropomorphism) omnibeneficient heart at some unspecified point after your miserable death.


7. Now, let's get down to important things, like tithing the priesthood, how to pray and where, and just how infallible the priesthood really is when conveying divinely inspired interpretations of these Axioms to the less Holy...

There is a marble quarry about twenty minutes north of here. About fifty years ago the island was strip-mined, which has left a massive pit where a large hill once sat. The pit is filled about fifteen feet deep or even more with water, and the rocks are sharply, steeply cut, making ridiculous, double flip dives a breeze.

There are a lot of quarries around here like the one I went to today. Some have stagnant water that have become disgusting mosquito mating grounds. Others look okay but swallowing the water will get you Hepatitis. Nearly all of the quarries have the gigantic mining trucks, cranes, cars and barrels in the middle of these pools, yet the water is so deep they are barely visible. New England miners discovered it was cheaper to simply leave the equipment in the pit when the waters came rather than haul it out.

One pit is exceptional in that it lacks any of that. Half a century ago, a miner decided to get the equipment out of the pit before it flooded fully and opened a junk yard about 300 meters away. The junkyard is still owned and operated to this day, now by the man's grandson - a man in his late twenties who enjoys smoking a small bowl of marijuana on the cliffs and admiring the sunsets.

Ugh, whenever I'm writing an article I ALWAYS GET INTERRUPTED! Okay, I gotta go. DANG IT!!!

From The Economist

Rather disturbing if you think about it.

Feel free to comment on this...

Is Aquinan scholarship dualist or strangely materialist? Alvin Plantinga, now 30 years famous at Notre Dame University, asks the question,

...there is also the important but obscure view of Thomas Aquinas and his followers. Is this a form of dualism? The question is vexed. According to Aquinas, a human person is a material substance with an immaterial part, the soul. Aquinas says, of this immaterial part, that it itself is a substance. Furthermore the soul, this immaterial part, has the property of possibly thinking (believing, desiring, hoping, deciding, etc.), and after death, does think. But Aquinas also says that the soul is the form of the body. A form, however, at least as far as I can see is or is like a property; and a property, presumably, can't think. If the soul is a form, therefore, how can it be capable of thinking?

~Alvin Plantinga's article Materialism and Christianity in Persons: Human and Divine, 2007

Very telling video from Regent University

Quotables with Jerry Fodor, Heraclitus

Two years ago, in an interview conducted by Anglican-priest-turned-agnostic Mark Vernon, Rutgers philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor had this to say,

I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a Ph. d. in philosophy.

Frenchman Pierre Hadot recently published a new translation of Heraclitus' aphorism which I believe bears consideration; the Greeks always had the most poetic philosophies,

What is born tends to disappear.

Questions in the Imperative, or A Recent Return to Borges

I was about a year back and twenty miles north of Boston when I realized my final paper for a class needed some extra citations and I took to the college's library in order to add a few sources. After an hour I found myself off track, merely flipping through books for pleasure rather than task. It was during this idleness that I discovered a particularly interesting book titled The Heretical Imperative. The book itself would be difficult to find even by reference; in the library's basement, fallen behind a small stack of fictions. I would not have cared to open the book had I not remembered that a professor of mine then abroad in Italy had once before given me an excerpt of it.

The Heretical Imperative was written by a certain Peter L. Berger, and most printings range around 200 pages in length. The particular book I held in my hands happened to be the tool of a sleight of tongue. Beside the front flap is a brief note,

Gift of Mary Frances Nagley
Dec. 16, 1979
on the occasion of the
Ordination to the Priesthood
of
Mary Jane Nestler

The sense of humor of this Mary Nagley intrigued me, and I copied her dedication onto a piece of paper and read the rest of the book that day. The theme of the book, if I understood Berger correctly, was this: As our culture increasingly becomes more and more scientific, more cutting, more splicing, a belief in God will continue to become less normative and more arabesque - fanciful but ridiculous. Any belief in God (or any rejection of modernity), therefore, is heretical; a definition of heresy as any choice away from the standard. In other words, heresy is the only route left.

I rather enjoyed the book. The prose was tight and connected, and Berger drew upon a wealth of sources from many cultures, languages, and histories. Subsequent searches for Berger revealed him to be a sociologist from Boston University, still employed, living about thirty minutes south of me. Publisher records and third party informations on The Heretical Imperative are conflicting. A first edition copy from Doubleday can still be acquired at a reasonable price, and information from them says the earliest date of publication was 1980. But curiously, the dedicatory note by Ms Nagley was dated exactly 24 days prior to this. Other sources confirm Nagley's date, including an open letter I found written by Berger dated April 1980, to the journal Theology Today, which mentioned the book's publication year as 1979.

The two in the dedicatory note proved more difficult to track down. I found nothing about Mary Frances Nagley, the writer of the note, though a deeper investigation could prove more telling given more time and energy. Research on her friend, priestess Mary Jane Nestler, was turning dour as well until I uncovered a press release from the Episcopalian news archives dated August 5, 2003. The release addressed Nestler as Deputy Mary Jane Nestler and not as a priest, the title of deputy in certain circles - including Anglican - indicates the status of laity and not cleric. A strange twist indeed, if Deputy Nestler was once a priestess but now is not. The press release itself was uninteresting, Nestler and other deputies wrote to encourage priests to study foreign cultures and languages in an effort of cross-anthropological appeal. At this point I decided to end the search to learn more about the curious note; further investigation would be unnecessary and probably uninteresting. Even as I write this I yawn with anticipating a long and restful sleep.