Beauregard Bottomley

There is no preferred viewpoint for observing the world around us. When everything about the present is known, nothing about the context, relations and meaning will be known. Beatrice's (Dante's muse) last smile happens because she is ready to enter the perfection of God's Grace where change can't happen while Dante must return to the world of change. The author notes that Dante seems to get the better deal, I tend to agree. A changeless universal reality would seem static to me.

Kant breaks the mode for all philosophy. He takes truth out of the universe by making it not ‘out there', and entwines our understanding by acknowledging that space, time, and intuition are fundamental for understanding and meaning. Heisenberg realizes that we can only know what is revealed to us at one time, that position and momentum are not simultaneously knowable.

The author relies on Jorge Borges as he tells his story. That made me start to read the Borges' book The Total Library: Non-fiction 1922-1986. There's a lot of pleasant overlap between these two books. At the intersection of the infinite and reality there are paradoxes, or antinomies. Dante when he turns around, he sees everything and all time because just as for us moderns we know to see the big bang all one must do is stretch out your hand since the remnants for the creation of our universe is always at hand with only a now there is no past or future.

I found this book as one of the better newer books. The author never talks down to his readers. Nietzsche, Boethius, Augustine, Plotinus (it's almost impossible to write an intelligent book without invoking Plotinus or his Enneads), Einstein, Hugh Everett III, and a host of other familiar characters are all mentioned in this book to great effect.

I needed to read the graphic novel: The Iliad by Gareth Hinds in order to understand why this book is one of the all-time great reads. I would have not been able to follow the story other-wise without the comic book to guide me.

Here's a tip: every time you hear the two words ‘Just as' within this book, prepare for the most fabulous complex simile you've ever heard and let your ears prick up just as the tiger pounces on the sheep as the shepherd loses his way that's how Homer used his similes.

First, who amongst doesn't love the line “I'm a sniveling, conniving bitch” when spoken by the most beautiful woman in the world: Helen of Troy. That line sort of cracked me up. Too bad I'm not as self-aware as Helen was when she said that, but in reality, we all say one thing while behaving differently from what we represent. At least, I know I do, and not only would I not expect the most beautiful woman in the world to be that self-ware, I would also think she was being conniving when she said it.

The Iliad gives you no doubt for what the story is going to be about by making its first word Rage or at least in this version the first three words are Sing of Rage. Is Achilles really a hero? I'm going to say yes. Achilles claims he's pissed off at Agamemnon over what he tells anyone who will listen over the most superficial reason (something to do with a captured girl), but the real reason seems to be he knows that he is given a choice in life, he can do what is best for his world and his culture, but by doing that he will die, or he can go back home serve himself and live a for-filling life, after all that's what the immortal Gods have prophesized and the Gods are really never wrong except when they are. Father Zeus is the main God after all because Chronos did not eat him as the prophecy stated, and that showed that the immortal Gods and us humans can be masters of our own destiny. Achilles does have choice on what he should do. He makes a choice that will resolve his rage against the world by doing what a hero would do. At least Homer will let some readers decide that for themselves.

Achilles starts the Iliad with rage, but he's going to end it with understanding and resolution of his own fate. Also, as Achilles will say, ‘a man without facts is an idiot'. Or, one of my favorites when Achilles says ‘I hate nothing more than when a man says one thing and does another'. You know, we often have no real choice but to go through life finding our own set of facts about the world and attaching the best meaning we can to them in order to make our best choices while trying to keep rage at bay. The human condition can suck at times because we only have the cards that are dealt to us, and our best choice often is not what we really want.

I could relate Zeus and the other Gods to how the Bible portrays their situations. Zeus, the son of Chronos, often just doesn't seem to hear our prayers and he doesn't always seem to care about us mortals. Sleep and Death come to us all and nothing ever changes under the sun. Strife and Chaos have their way with us on the battle field as Ares (war) enables our war-like nature, while Aphrodite (love) does what serves her best.

No doubt, it's easy to see why this book had been mandatory reading for more than the last couple of thousand years. I think it blows away any modern Fantasy novel and its similes are reason enough to read this book while also allowing the reader to discover the truths of universal human nature.

History reveals itself most subtlety when we get a chance to look back at a historian as they were presenting what they thought was history. This book was published in 2013 and the angst, fear, confusion, and Evangelical mischief presented by the author tells the present-day reader (2025) as much about that time as the history the author was telling. Edward Gibbon's “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” is a great book not so much for the history he tells which he often gets flat out wrong, but because he tells the present-day reader of the foibles, arrogance, and false-superiority of the Englishman of 1776.

The author lets Christianity Today define what evangelicalism purports to be. Evangelicalism never knows itself and at times wins the debate by declaring that the other side aren't true evangelicals. Christians, Republicans, and evangelicals simply divide by alterity and neuter their opponent by appealing to a purity test that includes them while excluding the other.

The evangelicals redefine themselves while excluding the other. The definition of who they are is not as important as the myth they create about themselves. The author mentioned that Oswald Spengler created his own morphological history while fitting his narrative that defended his Germanic Fascist myth. Worthen debits David Barton, a pseudo-American historian accepted by the rightwing and evangelicals for creating the same kind of non-sense regarding American history and the founding fathers, and Worthen notes that the narrative being falsely spread is more important than the truth since the meaning and purpose is salvation not truth.

The author notes that she focuses on white evangelicals and their worldview(s). They demand a worldview and argue that anyone without their presuppositional Christian starting point can't possibly be right about anything. Their truth must be the only truth. Evangelicals can also have experiential truths from the Holy Spirit determining their feelings thus negating any refutation from rational, reasonable, or logical perspectives. There was a third set of evangelicals and they are dwindling and they respect reason as a pathway to religion while seeing the world in two magisterial as Stephen Jay Gould did.

The reason this book is so intriguing to me is that it would not have been obvious to me from this book that white evangelicals would have overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The author missed what was happening as she was writing and that is the theology didn't matter to them as much as the politics of division. Humans, their wellbeing, and soteriology gets sublimated by the authority of the religiosity pretended by 80% of the white evangelicals. It's the MAGA they want not the theology.

The divisions the author documents are quaint to read about, the real crisis of authority for white evangelicals comes about through their embrace of dehumanizing those who don't pass their purity test as it is filtered through their very own Holy Spirit decoder ring. When it comes to dehumanizing the other, American evangelicals are not fiercely independent, they are in sync with their fellow believers as long as they can actualize their hate. There is no paradox with their beliefs and their individuality. As mentioned in this book, the evangelicals started to control their intellectual truths through fiat and provided a compelling make-believe narrative to explain away their history through believing their changing myths while updating them on a as needed basis. The political trumps the theological and the current events of today show where the evangelicals were heading.

The book is a treat and I never really wanted it to end. The old fart vibes never stopped.

The Party of Disappointed People have a spiritual leader with Burton.

Those Papist with their superstitions need to reject their idols and embrace a different set of myths. Burton has the truth and all others are fools who don't avoid idleness and excess.

Any serious embracing of this book would be suspect. Burton's conservative, old-fart views fit today's madmen. The devil is real and causes us to stray from perfection and Jesus is the light, the truth and the way and Papist (Catholics) aren't true Christians after all. The other is to be feared since they aren't us.

Burton makes our lives surrounded by disappointment and we feel better when we accept that and embrace his interpretations of the world by outsourcing our truths to his preferred myths.

The author dislikes Trump as much as I do. I see Trump more as a Fascist than just a sexist as the author does and I see him as a racist. The author talks about sublimation and I would say Trump's sexism and racism are sublimated by his Fascism. My real dislike for Trump is for his ignoring the rule of law towards supporting his fascism. (Read Spengler, read Carl Schmidt, read Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf', you'll see why one can call Trump a fascist).

Most of what is in this book seemed familiar to me.

Logic, reason, and rational thought serve me better than rage or directed anger or emotional responses. Trump is nothing but rage and emotional responses and he is becoming as irrelevant as Captain Queeg with his strawberries, and Trump rages against Baltimore having rats and black people, and wants to send back four Congressional Representatives whose greatest sin is that they are not of his self appointed privileged identity class.

The world is not fair and sexism is real and the universe is not just. When Socrates asked 2400 years ago “what is justice” he makes a categorical mistake since the asking of the question presumes there is such a thing. There is not except for those who remain sitting at the children's table with fairy tale books. This book is good for pointing out the inequities prevailing in today's world especially in the realm of gender, but I already know the world sucks and women often get the short end of the stick, and just as Ayn Rand really doesn't need to tell us selfishness is a virtue, I don't need to be encouraged to think with my emotions especially when it leads to rage.