que est veritas?: October 2007

Religion should be Destroyed

This article evokes so many emotions; anger, sadness, confusion, laughter...mostly laughter.

Quote of the Month

We learn that we are separate beings in the world, distinct from what is other than ourselves, by coming up against obstacles to the fulfillment of our intentions - that is, by running into opposition to the implementation of our will. When certain aspects of our experience fail to submit to our wishes, when they are on the contrary unyielding and even hostile to our interests, it then becomes clear to us that they are not parts of ourselves. We recognize that they are not under our direct and immediate control; instead, it becomes apparent that they are independent of us. That is the origin of our concept of what limits us, of what we cannot alter or control by the mere movement of our will. To the extent that we learn in greater detail how we are limited, and what the limits of our limitations are, we come thereby to delineate our own boundaries and thus to discern our own shape. We learn what we can and cannot do, and the sorts if effort we must make in order to accomplish what is actually possible for us. We learn our powers and our vulnerabilities. This not only provides us with an even more emphatic sense of our separateness. It defines for us the specific sort of being that we are.
Thus, our recognition and understanding of our own identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitely independent of ourselves. In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control. If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities. How, then, can we fail to take the importance of factuality and of reality seriously? how can we fail to care about truth?
We cannot.

--Harry G. Frankfurt; On Truth

que est veritas?

Thursday, October 11, 2007

We're Democratic Atheists...and we're bright, too!

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