hell’s handmaiden

Ah, Europe… Decadent Old Europe… The Great Corruptor… The canary in the coal mine of humanity, first to succumb to the modernist poisons…

… our society has degnerated quite a bit until, as Steyn points out, parts of it are becoming post-human. … Things which would shocked and revolted the whole world 30 years ago are just more hum-drum news these days. And don’t think I let off the United States on this - we’re not nearly as depraved as parts of Europe, but we’ve got our shop of horrors to go through as well.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why people want to make so much of language. It is a clumsy mess of metaphor and innuendo, loose associations, broad overgeneralizations, half-baked inferences, and historical baggage imported from dozens of languages and cultures. Yet, time and again we insist that there is something magical in our utterances, something profound in our choice of words.

The tradition stretches back at least as far as Plato, who built his whole philosophy– and poisoned the western philosophical tradition– with his confusion of ‘word’ with ‘reality’. And today, analytic philosophy charges blithely along the same absurd path. Still, I cannot understand it.

Joy, at TelicThoughts, points to a summer course by Allan McNeil in which the question is considered, Is Religion Adaptive?

Sure. Yes, it is. It is adaptive in the same way that any other element of culture is adaptive, and I object to McNeil’s conditions #2 and #3 for this reason. You can’t really apply those conditions to culture in general, and I see no reason to apply it to a subset.

… this country is committing against the people of Mississippi.

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There is a University named Naropa University near where I live. Naropa is a private institution, which means they can do what they want, but the fact that Naropa gets to use the title ‘University’ is a constant annoyance. True, Naropa is accredited, which is a horrific shame. Why? Well, I guess its namesake provides a clue– an Indian Buddhist mystic who spoke to magic fairy people… oops, a goddess. Shame on me!