Month: November 2013

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Article of Possible Interest on Cosmology and Religion

I am humbled and pleased that the editors of The New York Review of Science Fiction have given the feature position to my article on William Olaf Stapledon, “Contact, Communion, and the Marriage of Minds,” in the latest number of their publication.  “Contact” is the much-edited version of the talk that I gave last July at “Doxacon,” a colloquium on the crossroads of science fiction and religion.  I believe that the essay will be of interest to readers of The Orthosphere.  Stapledon was a greatly conflicted thinker, tempted by atheism, but unable to shake his profound intuition that the universe is not reducible to matter and the void; that existence has a divine ground.  His fiction and non-fiction alike address the issue.  I try to put Stapledon, as the subtitle of the essay puts it, “in context.”  The context is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, which I interpret as, partly, a religious displacement.

I offer an extract below –

Once the investigator grasps Flammarion and Lowell, along with the whole of late-Romantic plurality discourse, in this way [as a vestige of Medieval cosmology,] much of the peculiarity in their exposition begins to make sense.  When Flammarion seems to adhere to a Darwinian vocabulary, making free use of the term evolution, he never means what Darwin or Darwin’s materialist followers meant by the term.  On the contrary, the evolution that concerns Flammarion is that of mind, which he regards as the self-articulation at the microcosmic level of the macrocosmic consciousness – Dieu dans la Nature.  In a Times story for 10 November 1910, Flammarion told the reporter, “I believe there are denizens on Mars, and that they are superior to us.”  Flammarion opines that the Martians “ought to resemble [what humanity] will be several million years hence, inasmuch as Mars is a much older planet than the earth.”  Flammarion believes that the Martians have made several attempts to communicate with humanity, the first one “hundreds of thousands of years ago” and the last one “a few thousand years ago.”

Lowell, who knew Flammarion, writes in the same vein.  In his three-part Atlantic article from the summer of 1895 (June, July, August), he argues that the phenomenon of the canals “points to a highly intelligent mind behind it.”  Martian sentience must take the form of “a mind… of considerably more comprehensiveness” than the human.  Such things as “party politics,” Lowell insists, “have had no part” in the elaboration of the system of planetary irrigation – the canals whose courses Lowell had so painstakingly mapped.

According to Lowell, the very study of Mars exerts a spiritually transforming effect on him who undertakes it.  He learns to “look at things from a standpoint raised above our local point of view,” to “free our minds at least from the shackles that of necessity tether our bodies,” and to “recognize the possibility of others in the same light that we do the certainty of ourselves.”  As Lowell writes in Mars as the Abode of Life, “Turning to Mars with quickened sense, we witness an astounding thing,” a globe “where life at the present moment would likely be of a high order.”In the plurality discourse of the fin-de-siècle, then, the reader will detect the stubborn persistence of a cosmological view that actual modern science tells us is an outmoded and distinctly unscientific way of comprehending the celestial universe.  This late-Medieval way of thinking cosmologically sees the universe as creation; it sees the heavens as instinct with symbolic significance, pervaded by mind in the form of the plural, extraterrestrial humanities, and as responsive – at least potentially – to the effort, not only to establish contact with those humanities, but to come into communion with the sum and total of their shared consciousness.

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Traditionalism is also for Protestants

Kristor’s recent announcement that he’s moving to Rome leaves Yours Truly as the only Protestant regular contributor to this website. More generally, there appears to this writer to be a pronounced bias among Christian traditionalists toward Catholicism or (capital-O) Orthodoxy. Presumably this is because Rome and Constantinople emphasize the authority and tradition that are perhaps the defining elements of traditionalism, whereas contemporary Protestantism, as opposed to the faith of the Reformers, not only lacks this emphasis but often tends (unfortunately) toward antinomianism.

But let it be known that this author is not moving to Rome and, more generally, that traditionalism and Protestants need one another. Continue reading →

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Christ the King

Imagine that, after having made a thorough study of the issue, you have been convinced that anthropogenic global warming is real and that its effects will be catastrophic for humans.  However, in your studies, you have also come to treasure the scientific enterprise.  You realize that coercion is utterly incompatible with the spirit of free enquiry on which science rests, and since government by its very nature involves coercion, you think it important for the purity of science to maintain a Separation of Science and State.  Although you are convinced that global warming is real, man-made, and dangerous, you realize that people of good will disagree with you, and you decide it would be wrong to impose your beliefs on them.  Therefore, you decide that the government should design policy according to what you are convinced is the dangerously false belief that carbon emissions are not a worry, and to avoid any taint of Science-State collusion, the entire subject of the greenhouse effect and the evidence for it should be concealed in public schools.  If climatologists want their children to be brought up differently, they can send them to private schools.  You defend this position of government ignoring the whole issue of global warming as one of “neutrality” between those who think it something urgent to counter and those who think it unreal or unimportant.

This is the position of a Christian who supports the Western ideal of “separation of Church and State”.  Don’t doubt that basing education and policy on false moral and religious beliefs (promoting sin and impiety) will have grave consequences for millions of souls.  And don’t imagine that there is anything neutral about established atheism.

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Open discussion: Teaching the faith

Evangelizing — making converts — is one thing; educating them is quite another. Catholic converts often have bad things to say about RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, a lengthy period of instruction in the Catholic faith preceding full entry into the Church, the quality of which varies from parish to parish but which is often shot through with nonsense, sentimentality, and occasionally heresy. Having spent a few weeks now in the shoes of an instructor, I regret my own bitterness toward those who instructed me, who I now see are thrust into the impossible position of having to abstract roughly two thousand years’ worth of Christian insight into approximately three dozen 45-minute chunks and relaying them to people who are so often products of their time and culture — that is, aggressively ignorant and Philistine almost to the point of being ineducable. Worse still, so many are functionally illiterate that a return to the historically normative (and superior) model of catechism-based education would probably be counterproductive.

I’m sure Protestants and Orthodox have their own horror stories to share, but I’m more interested in the success stories. How, having won potential converts, do we proceed to educate them effectively, and turn them out into the world ready to live authentically Christian lives?

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The King’s Liberty

In no other system of government might a libertarian so enjoy the satisfaction of his principles, as in that of a sagacious king.

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
the more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever people are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

Therefore the sage says:

I take no action and people are reformed.
I enjoy peace and people become honest.
I do nothing and people become rich.
I have no desires and people return to the good and simple life.

- Tao Te Ching 57

Continue reading →

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Vainglory & Hatred

Anyone who has for very long been a conservative – let alone a reactionary – will have found himself from time to time buffeted about by some acquaintance who is in the grip of a physiological syndrome endemic among liberals:

Rebellion → dysfunction → weakness → fear → anger → hate → dysfunction …

As it happens, my family and I have over the last few days been weathering a barrage of slings and arrows hurled by a few outraged liberals, on account of our extremely mild but public utterances of ritually impure ruminations on the latest waves of innovation in public policy. It’s painful, and above all tiresome. But one grows accustomed to it, over time. Until the Great Awakening, there will be no alternative.

Continue reading →

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The surreal world

From The New York Post:

Colorado has launched a new ad campaign that attempts to entice young women to sign up for the new national health-care program with the promise of free contraceptives and carefree sex.

In one of the print ads, a flirty young woman holding a package of birth-control pills and leaning against a young man says: “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control.”

She continues her steamy monologue: “My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.”

“I got insurance. Now you can too,” she says. “Thanks ObamaCare!”

The ad, which is dripping with lusty sexuality, dubs the young couple “Susie and Nate … Hot to Trot.”

To be on the safe side, there’s an added warning: “The pill doesn’t protect you from STDs; condoms and common sense do that.”

The ad is part of the “thanks obamacare!” campaign targeting young Coloradans — and underscores how the law’s backers will say just about anything to lure young people to sign up for the new mandatory health coverage, an outcome that is critical to ObamaCare working as planned.

The leftist often says that we who disapprove of contraception are free to choose not to avail ourselves of it. True enough; the problem is that we aren’t free to choose not to live in a society that’s been vulgarized by it.