Favorite Quotes of Ken Marks

Martin    Stevens
Berra    Carlin    Rizzo
Rubin    Stranger
Bush    Fields    Gervais
Keillor    Socrates
Aristotle
Hanh    King    Shaw
Faulkner    Marple
Mandela
Cicero    Schiller
Shakespeare
Dawkins    Plato

Discovered on
The Scratching Post

By Moristotle

Ken Marks began scratching on The Scratching Post the year after he left the staff of Moristotle & Co. After we ran the opening of his latest scratching last week, I clicked on its “About Me” link.

    Ken says little there directly about himself, leaving it to the reader to infer things about him from his pastimes, languages, reading habits, and favorite movies, words, and quotes.

     A telling quote with regard to his saying little directly about himself is the one by Socrates. Ken has a strong mind, not a weak one; he discusses ideas, not people.

Book Review: Poetic Philosophy / Philosophical Poetry

A review of Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy, by Jennifer Lobo Meeks

By Moristotle

From her opening pages, Professor Meeks, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Perimeter College of Georgia State University, manifests writing mastery and loving expertise on the technicalities and history of her subject. I recognized a book I wanted to savor; anyone interested in the roots of philosophy in Homeric and Hesiodic myths would.

Mamma Mia!

I felt sick yesterday morning, having spent some time during the night in agitation. Nu's latest email had posed two or three problems for me, not the least of which was that it stirred memories of old religious woundings—some very old, some not so old. As I said on Sunday (quoting one of my emails from the Friday interchange), "in my earlier days [in my youth, I] spent many hours praying"—for what I can't quite remember, but possibly for reassurance that I believed sufficiently to be "saved." Not fun to revisit all that. Children don't deserve to have religion foisted on them in that way. Santa Claus is bad enough, but parents admit that hoax eventually. Childhood woundings. The more recent woundings were suffered during my ill-fated attempt to form a friendship with a jehovah (Tom S), whose talking points and Bible quotations were, if anything, even more rehearsed than Nu's. I exited that interchange to preserve my sanity.
    Nu and I have been friendly and have referred to each other as friends. We discovered early that we shared some basic values, especially the sense that "everything is holy" (if anything is, as I qualified it). Ironically, Nu seems to have inferred from that that I must "believe in God" and "be a Christian," after all and in spite of my denial. Nu won't allow that morality has evolved, that evolved consciousness shapes spirituality. In my view, of course, the "revelations" of the Bible grew out of that evolved consciousness; they were not imposed from outside by "God."
    The tone (and the "love" words) of Nu's latest message suggest a parent-child thing, with me the child to her mother:

Morris, This will be my final reply to you on this subject.
    I am sad to see your response. I think that over the last several years I have communicated to you in a very loving way....

She had sent me at least two previous notes of talking points and Bible quotations, and I reminded her most recently—about a year ago—that I don't respond well to being "preached at."

The motives behind my words have been very transparent. I would think that ultimately they are the same for every true Bible-believing Christian who shares their beliefs with any who do not believe. It is a desire for all men to know God and to believe on His Name. A desire that all men would give Honor and Respect to the Creator of the Universe. In all genuineness and sincerity. It is NOT to win a debate, ever....

No one "knows God"; it's all words and ritual, same as is "believing on His Name"—as though mouthing formulas to win something could make any sense. The Bible isn't all bunk, but John 3:16 certainly is.
    And we know virtually nothing about the creation of the universe. To say that "God created it" adds nothing to our understanding; it is a nullity. It's frankly hard even to see what wish it could fulfill, except perhaps in a primitive brain incapable of judging the inappropriateness to cosmology of the parent-child schema.
    Nu has nothing to sell; why is she trying so hard to sell it?

In closing, I will just add that the Bible was written so men might receive its message. The "evil" that you speak of is put there for a reason, that we may all realize that there is none good, not one, and that left to ourselves we are all capable of the most heinous of crimes against God and against our fellow man. This is patent throughout the entire Old Testament.

I might nominate this "explanation" of evil as "put there for a reason" for lamest half-gainer performed from the theological diving board. Pure twaddle.¹

The Good News of the New Testament is that although the heart of mankind was continually disobedient and rebellious to God, He did not leave us in that lost and hopeless estate, he sent a redeemer who was the only one qualified to satisfy God's holy requirements...He was conceived by the power of the holy ghost in the womb of the virgin Mary and born of her yet without sin.

Here, child, have another dose of this redeeming elixir!

The bible was written over a period of more than 1,500 years, by over forty different writers from every walk of life including kings, peasants, and fishermen in three different languages, and this message has been preserved and the integrity of the message has not changed. This is a miracle that could not be concocted or staged.

The books of the Old and New Testaments were variously selected by whoever wielded the power to decide; the dominant figures in the early church rejected dozens of other accounts of what people believed had happened. Whatever "integrity" the Bible has was an editorial decision, and "God" was not the editor.

In closing [yet again]: Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and Mohamed and all other great men inspired other men surely, but they died and are still decaying in their graves, but the One who claimed to be God and to breathe out the words of scripture Himself through His Holy Spirit (inspired) is not in His grave. He has risen, and is coming again to judge the world.

Says Nu, who obviously believes this without question and is impervious to any rational or skeptical challenge. Bible scholars disagree as to whether Jesus "claimed to be God." And the only use of the Bible's claim to be divinely inspired is to impress the gullible².

Dear Morris, that is all any of us care for you to know. We are not debaters or arrogant or any of the other things that you might be thinking. We are sincere and wish only God's richest blessings on you.

As if she cannot see that I am richly blessed, and certainly no less blessed than anyone in our email group.

This requires no response, please.

That "please," the unkindest cut of all!

And yet, that "Dear Morris"—heartfelt? Though not sure, one has to doubt it: the tone is too like that of a mother trying to manipulate a child. This has hurt me more than it has hurt you.
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1. Nomination subsequently ruled out of order.
2. From Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary:

   gull vt to take advantage of (one who is foolish or unwary)

Making an argument appear the better

The pre-eminent Sophist, Protagoras (circa 490-420 BCE), was up-front about the fact that the Sophist curriculum included instruction in making the "worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger)."¹ Their clientele included people who needed to bring or defend a suit in court (as reported in my post of January 11). We're quite familiar with that agenda, which is demonstrated every weekday in American courts, where the prosecutor argues that the defendant is guilty, and the defense attorney argues that he isn't, and each attempts to make his own argument appear the better without respect to the actual guilt or innocence of the defendant.

One of the informal charges against Socrates was, as he phrased it himself in answering the charge at trial (399 BCE), that he "makes the weaker argument the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example." Socrates of course countered that that wasn't what he had been doing. He said that he couldn't possibly be mistaken for a Sophist because they were wise and highly paid, and he was poor and knew absolutely nothing. Whether Socrates was ingenuous in saying this or slyly being sophistical, I leave to you to ponder.

We're also familiar with bloggers' trying to make their arguments appear stronger and their adversaries' weaker. We can see this demonstrated not only every weekday (but every weekend too), if we have the time and interest. Bloggers tend to be a contentious lot, even when they attempt to represent themselves as being engaged in a dispassionate search for the truth. I'm not above using "debating tactics" myself, insofar as I have the skill to do so. I believe that I have reason on my side when I say that god doesn't exist, and that a theist doesn't when he says the opposite. And the same theist is sure that "He" does exist and that I'm a fool. Each of us sets himself up to try to defeat the other. Because each knows he's right, each knows that the other cannot possibly demonstrate his position successfully.

And yet.

And yet, engaging in the somewhat (psychologically necessarily?) disingenuous activity of "discussing religion" on a blog can be fun, and not only fun but also instructive. I develop a better understanding of my own position by stating and defending it, and with effort I can learn a thing or two about an opposing position. By far my most dependable interlocuter is Sheepandgoaticus, with whom I have developed a genuinely respectful friendship. I look forward to his comments on my blog and (I think) he looks forward to mine on his. Though we may not really listen to what each other says, we seem to have learned how to pretend to do so with enough civility to continue the discussion.

I hope that I never think of him as my adversary, or of our interchanges as opportunities to defeat him. I also hope that I am open enough to the truth, however strongly I feel that I already have it, to be able to change my mind when a truly stronger case has been made for a different view.
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1. From a Wikipedia article on Plato's dialogue, "Apology," which portrays the trial of Socrates.

A little ancient history of atheism and evolution

A friend of mind (on the right, the taller one; yes, he purports to be a llama, albeit one that blogs) holds the view that it wasn't possible to be an atheist before Darwin discovered how species evolved by natural selection of the fittest. His reason seems to be simply that before Darwin the only explanation for the apparently designed creatures constituting nature was that a god had designed and created them. Humans had to account for that design and the only way to do it before the discovery of the law of evolution was to suppose a designer god. Quod erat demonstrandum. ("Designer god," by the way, is apt, seeing as how we've got the Yahweh brand, the Jehovah brand, the God brand, the Allah brand....)

However, there were some known atheists more than two thousand years before Darwin, and very likely others unknown, the survival rate of written documentation from those times being what it is. And of course there were those "fools" referred to at least once in the Bible and many, many times ad nauseum in the Qur'an. You know, the ones who said, "There is no god." Unfortunately, since they were fools and therefore of no account, the Bible writers and The Prophet Muhummad didn't provide their names. Mentioning them at all seemed to serve the purpose of putting the stick about to warn people away from immitating them.

Anyway, to get back to some known atheists, one, according to Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy, was the Greek Anaxagoras [circa 500-428 BCE]:

Whenever he can, he gives a mechanical explanation. He rejected necessity and chance as giving the origins of things; nevertheless, there was no "Providence" in his cosmology. He does not seem to have thought much about ethics or religion; probably he was an atheist, as his prosecutors maintained. [p. 63]

I acknowledge the "probably."

Another possibility is Socrates [469-399], although I myself doubt it:

The indictment [Socrates was, remember, tried for impiety, convicted, and executed] had said that Socrates not only denied the gods of the State, but introduced other gods of his own; Meletus, however, says that Socrates is a complete atheist, and adds: "He says that the sun is stone and the moon earth." Socrates replies that Meletus seems to think he is prosecuting Anaxagoras, whose views may be heard in the theatre for one drachma (presumably in the plays of Euripides). Socrates of course points out that this new accusation of complete atheism contradicts the indictment, and then passes on to more general considerations. [p. 87]

Whether or not Socrates "believed in god," he didn't (from my readings of Plato's depiction of him in his dialogues) do so as an explanation of apparently designed nature.

Another is Diagoras, a Greek poet and Sophist "active in Athens in the last decades of the 5th century BCE" (that is, his life somewhat overlapped those of Anaxagoras and Socrates). (I found the photo of "The statue of Diagoras in Rhodes in the sunset light" on the web.) To quote the nearest source to hand (Wikipedia), "He became an atheist after an incident that happened against him went unpunished by the gods." What a refreshingly common, down-to-earth reason! So many people have doubts and some eventually lose their faith altogether out of considerations of all the injustice and cruelty in the world allegedly "created by god." Diagoras's story (at least as told by Wikipedia) is pretty interesting:

He once threw a wooden image of a god into a fire, remarking that the deity should perform another miracle and save itself....[Note the pronoun "it."]

The Roman philosopher Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, tells of how a friend of Diagoras tried to convince him of the existence of the gods, by pointing out how many votive pictures tell about people being saved from storms at sea by "dint of vows to the gods," to which Diagoras replied that "there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea." And Cicero goes on to give another example, where Diagoras was on a ship in hard weather, and the crew thought that they had brought it on themselves by taking this ungodly man onboard. He then wondered if the other boats out in the same storm also had a Diagoras onboard.

Like Socrates, "Diagoras was condemned to death at Athens and a price was put on his head." Unlike Socrates, however, "He fled to Corinth...."

....with reason did the Athenians adjudge Diagoras guilty of atheism, in that he not only divulged the Orphic doctrine, and published the mysteries of Eleusis and of the Cabiri, and chopped up the wooden statue of Hercules to boil his turnips, but openly declared that there was no God at all. [emphasis mine]

Though the evidence is sparse, it doesn't appear that either Anaxagoras or Diagoras had discovered the law of evolution. Perhaps they'd read or heard about the Greek astronomer and philosopher Anaximander of Miletus [circa 611 to circa 547]. Russell again:

[Anaximander taught that] there was an eternal motion, in the course of which was brought about the origin of the worlds. The worlds were not created, as in Jewish or Christian theology, but evolved. There was evolution also in the animal kingdom. Living creatures arose from the moist element as it evaporated by the sun. Man, like every other animal, was descended from fishes. He must be derived from animals of a different sort, because, owing to his long infancy, he could not have survived, originally, as he is now. [p. 27²]

So, my friend might be right!
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1. Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1996
2. Russell also says that "Anaximander was full of scientific curiosity. He is said to have been the first man who made a map...."

Socrates drank hemlock

As a teenager I had great faith in reason, and whatever faith I may have been born with was no doubt strengthened by my youthful reading of Plato's dialogues. I believed that if a person presented a logical argument for something, then everyone who could understand it was bound to accept it. I eventually realized, however, that such rationality failed many more times than it succeeded. People just wouldn't be bound by logic. And in time I remembered that Socrates ended up drinking hemlock.

But now it seems to me consistent with the paradox of freedom tucked inside the Seminal Nut of Being that logic doesn't rule the affairs of the universe any more than it rules the affairs of humankind. Miracles (expressions of God's freedom?) demonstrate its misrule in the one, and human freedom its misrule in the other.

We're heard of the possibility that if humans are utterly free to act (that is, without correction from God) then everything is permitted. But even more fundamental, now, it seems that everything is required: not only the svelte grace of the gazelle, but also the gazelle's glazed eye as the lion takes it down for dinner; not only the perfectly born baby, but also the still birth; not only the hero's recognition in public adulation and fable, but also the innocent man's execution for another man's crime; and on and on, world without end.

In the droll English film I watched last night ("Keeping Mum"¹), the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, Vicar of the Parish of Little Wollop, sums it up in his opening address at an Anglican convention:

Isaiah, Chapter 55, Verse 8:

My ways are not your ways.

And I think what He basically means by that is:

I'm mysterious, folks. Live with it!

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1. Released in 2005, directed by Niall Johnson, with Rowan Atkinson as Rev. Goodfellow, Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Maggie Smith as Grace Hawkins, and Patrick Swayze as Lance.