Film on L Wittgenstein

Go to youtube Wittgenstein (1/7)

Movie by Derek Jarman (1993)

Boring sermons blamed for dip in Philippine Church's popularity

Boring sermons blamed for dip in Philippine Church's popularity

Churches are fast becoming obsolete-religious ghettos. Sermons and pastors do not impact on real issues.

Also read my research project, "Failures of Christendom" below.

My Readings Jan -Feb 2013

Books that I'm reading for a research project on "Failures of Christendom viewed through the Lens of Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean Critiques"

Kierkegaard, ATTACK ON CHRISTENDOM.

Nietzsche, ECCE HOMO

Nietzsche, TWILIGHT OF IDOLS.

Nietzsche, ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

Soren Kierkegaard is a devout man who lived in Denmark from 1813-1855.

His Attack upon “Christendom” was a call to the Danish church to restore itself to New Testament Christianity. It also contained astute psychological insights about faith.

• The Failures

“No, official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament. Anybody can see
that merely by casting a fleeting but impartial glance at the Gospels, and then looking at
what we call ‘Christianity’” (Attack, 41).

• Church's Delusion

“When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. . . .
“In ‘Christendom’ the situation is a different one. What we have before us is not
Christianity but a prodigious illusion, and the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit
that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced,
first of all the illusion must be disposed of” (Attack, 97).

• Treating God as a Fool

You will soon realize that this whole official Christianity business is a morass of falsehood and illusion.
It is something so unregenerate that the only thing that can truly be said about it is that
by refusing to take part in the public worship of God as it now is, you have one sin the less,
and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool.



Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900, a German most unlike Kierkegaard, also condemned Christianity's pale and domesticated tolerance and its weak will.  He observed:

"Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline, getting thinner, better-natured, cleverer, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, ...more Christian."

In his book, The AntiChrist, 1895., he criticized the rise of sanctified self-deception, which turned weakness into virtues "'and impotence which doesn't retaliate is being turned into "goodness"; timid baseness is being turned into "humility"; submission to people one hates is being turned into "obedience" (actually towards someone who, they say, orders this submission - they call him God)."

•  Christianity's Impotency

This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,— we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay.

• Lost Contact with Reality

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”— or even “unfree”), and purely imaginary effects (“sin” “salvation” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”).

•  Rejecting Life and Body

...The priestly class.... Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing
the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life,
but also slanders it.

Morality is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people;
it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in opposition to life....

The priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained “the will of God”;
with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order.

How Handwriting Boosts the Brain

How Handwriting Boosts the Brain

At what age philosophy?

 At what age philosophy?

Fostering reasoning skills in young people can improve learning outcomes and one way of doing this is by teaching philosophy. 

Children are naturally curious and constantly asking "why?" 

Studying philosophy helps them not only explore answers to these sorts of questions, but develops critical thinking.

Brian Leiter – “Should we respect religion?”

Brian Leiter – “Should we respect religion?”

 In Chapter IV of Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter asks whether/why we should respect religion. The point here is to consider whether religion might merit something more than mere toleration, i.e. putting up with something that you don’t (necessarily) approve of.

How many great books have you actually read?

How many great books have you actually read?

 Scan the list, and say how many you’ve read.

 I think most people studying or teaching philosophy have read large parts of what we might call ‘the good stuff’, and we confuse reading that with actually reading the whole of a work.

(I think of myself as having read Berkeley’s Principles, but I really only know the good bit, which is to say the arguments for idealism at the start — God alone knows what’s in the second half of the book.)

Here's a list.

1. The Republic, Plato
2. Organon, Aristotle
3. Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
4. City of God, Augustine
5. Summa theologiae, Aquinas
6. The Prince, Machiavelli
7. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
8. Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes
9. Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
10. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
11. Ethics, Spinoza
12. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
13. Monadology, Leibniz
14. Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley
15. A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume
16. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume
17. The Social Contract, Rousseau
18. The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham
19. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
20. Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel
21. Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
22. Vindication of the rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
23. Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
24. Method of Ethics, Sidgwick
25. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
26. Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
27. Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore
28. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
29. Tractatus, Wittgenstein
30. Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
31. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
32. The Second Sex, de Beauvoir

Well, how many have you read, page by page, cover to cover?



Posted by James Garvey on  Talking Philosophy  October 8, 2012