For the past two days I have been in a remote location at a small academic conference not connected with bird flu. I'm multitasking, now, writing this while listening to a founder of the critical legal studies movement in days of yore. It's been extremely interesting and always a pleasure to talk, argue and break bread with people with different perspectives from different backgrounds. One of the things you get at meetings like this are good jokes and cartoons others use in their talks you can steal for your own. Early on a noted philosopher of science put up a Sidney Harris cartoon showing two scientists in white coats at a lab bench. One says to the other, "Sure, maybe it's a drug for immortality, but it will take forever to test!"
That put me in mind of the trip up to the meeting. To get here I had to drive three hours with a colleague from the UK, a former mathematician and then well known science studies scholar now in his late 70s, his wife, and another colleague who is a philosopher and noted sociologist of science. I have an old car and its contents were even older. Our combined years that day was well over 250. The topic turned to the philosopher Karl Popper whom both of my academic companions had known personally. One of Popper's disciples was a person who had been a very religious and observant Jew in his youth. At some point he started to study science seriously. Then, as Popper's future assistant related to one of my companions, he decided his studies of the Talmud were irrelevant and sterile and he so informed his Rabbi father. The father responded that he shouldn't reject the Talmud until head had studied it sufficiently to make an informed decision. How long will that take?, the son asked.
The father's answer: "The rest of your life."
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Cute! It's one of those comments that sounds really wise and profound to a believer, and a total cop-out to a freethinker.
To use a referrant which will be familiar to the reveres: how long will it take you to master the violin?
Ah, but my dear Melanie, I gave it up.
Ah, but my dear Revere, God never gives up on us...
david: Really? That's not the rumor. In fact it is said He gets so pissed off that if you don't bow down and deliver yourself to Him he sends you somewhere where you will suffer torment and agony for eternity. Why? Because He loves us.
Ah David, Revere got you on that one and I even as a believer agree. Each time God came down onto us from heaven, he brought cleansing by fire, wind, rain, hail, pestilence etc. BF may be the latest and we might be on the doomsday march. Revere has a really neat graph I sent him a while back that shows we are in an upswing in everything bad. God, Nature or are we a pimple on the butt of the giant and he is picking at it?
That is pretty Old Testament there Revere in defense of David. Hasnt been too much past the birth and life of Christ except for the plagues and weather changes. Kind of like whats going on now.
Randy and revere:
Just remember that evangelical theology isn't the only branch of mainstream Xtianity. Karl Rahner taught universal salvation and this is mainstream thought in Catholicism.