Underground People

"In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises you in a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants - all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel."

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

That Peculiar Intensity

"Don't mistake what I'm talking about. It's not that I'm trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that's all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I'll tell you about him later) is great in the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove - and all that. Needless to say he's got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren't in any way poetic, they're merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish. A boy isn't interested in meadows, groves and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn't give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn't know one plant from another. Killing things - that's about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet, all the while there's that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can't long when you're grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you're doing you could go on forever."

George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

Process, Self, Society

For man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society.  Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon.  Although it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization.

Voegelin, Representation and Existence

Further Up and Further In

Having read through all seven volumes of Narnia again the final paragraph still brings me to tears, after all the adventures and all the friends along the way...

"And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

Campus wandering

The bicyclist

The Depth

"A descent into the depth will be indicated when the light of the truth has dimmed and its symbols are losing their credibility; when the night is sinking on the symbols that have had their day, one must return to the night of the depth that is luminous with truth to the man who is willing to seek for it.  The depth is fascinating as a threat and a charm- as the abyss into which man falls when the truth of the depth has drained from the symbols by which he orients his life, and as the source from which a new life of the truth and a new orientation can be drawn.  The return from the depth with a truth newly experienced, then, is symbolized as renovatio in the double sense of a renewal of truth and a renewal of man; the new man can experience the renewal of reality and truth with such intenseness that only the symbols of death and resurrection will adequately express it; the depth will become a dead point of consciousness beyond consciousness, so that the transition through the depth will have to be symbolized as a state of ecstasy or mania; when the new truth effectively constitutes a new social field, the event of its emergence will be considered to mark an epoch and to articulate the process of history by a Before and After..."

Eric Voegelin, Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History

The Bacchic Art

"If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds."

Socrates, in Phaedrus, 245a.

A'Falling

Mallarmé Sonnets

Oui, je sais qu'au lointain de cette nuit, la Terre
Jette d'un grande éclat l'insolite mystère
Sous les siècles hideux qui l'obscurcissent moins.

Yes, I know that far from this night, the Earth
Casts a brilliant mystery of unusual light
Beneath the hideous centuries that obscure it less

Mallarmé

I feel the light

Wildflowers and daydreams
start with a seed
so do the thoughts
spinning round in me

Beauty cycles again
mystery
where do I begin?

I feel the light
calling me
I feel the light
calling me

On Religious Confidence

Because I still rock

Drink tea

Meaning without God

As an atheist I've been asked how life can have ultimate meaning without God. This is quite a common question. For some of my nonfaith affiliated readers this will seem like a truly bizarre question. Does it suggest that people without faith lead meaningless lives, or at the very least, are simply fooling themselves about the things they find meaningful? The obvious answer is no, of course nonbelievers lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. Whether they're fooling themselves or not is really beside the point because you'd have to have a true ground of meaning outside the individual in order to compare.  The question secretly sneaks God back into the equation for that reason. The atheist believes we create and sustain our own meaning (or the cultural/social meaning we take as our own from our context or the contexts of others). This meaning is tested by experience and reason, shared and shaped by the vicissitudes of life and time.

If believers would take a moment to reflect they'd see they're in a similar situation. When they feel that God ultimately guarantees the meaning of life or whatever, they too are dealing with an idea (no less culturally/socially mediated in most cases). So when they say that God guarantees meaning, the hidden supplement (that indeed must remain hidden) is that the idea of God guarantees meaning. It must have this meaning because believers have no more access to this supposed ground than anyone else. Indeed they take it on faith. The difference between the believer and the unbeliever is that the believer insists his idea has the status of a real object-person whereas the unbeliever recognises her values for what they are, i.e idea(l)s, and may or may not choose to argue why such idea(l)s are reasonable considering X. The believer can also argue about the reasonableness of his position but he has already made the categorical error of confusing idea with object, potential with actual, when really he's in the same boat as the rest of us.

For this reason the question "How can you have ultimate meaning without God" is illegitimate. It's force is only felt by the one who has already made his idea a god.