Beauregard Bottomley
Every determination is a negation of the infinite (Hegel), and form precedes structure (Ernst Cassirer). There is one substance and infinitely many attributes (Spinoza's Ethics), and the internal critique shows the Bible's absurdities through paradox (Spinoza's TPP). Everywhere man is born in chains and the chains are for his best (Rousseau).
The author has a reasonable premise and shows that there wasn't a coherence within the Enlightenment and that every specificity led to a negation of the whole (Hegel's thought).
Cassirer is using his perspective of 1930s as he tries to make sense of the past through his present provides a shape through structure, and Spinoza reacts to Descartes by viscerally bringing Aristotle back and making our contemplation of the good our supreme Good (Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza each say that).
I think Jonathan Israel's book “Radical Enlightenment” gets the concept better than this author did. At times, this author read exactly like a couple of Great Courses I've listened to on the Enlightenment. Also, this author would veer towards political theory with liberalism, becoming socialism, and Marxists and entwine those in a story that seem superfluous to the real narrative as if the reader needed to know that, and the “Dialectics of Enlightenment” annoys me.
I did read a book that had Enlightenment in its titled and the author said he wasn't going to quote from any other post-Enlightenment book except for Cassirer's book. Cassirer knows form precedes structure, and the Age of Enlightenment didn't understand themselves as they were being themselves.
I read another book that made the statement “almost all Enlightenment thinkers were Pelagiusians.” I wouldn't be able to say that from having read this book even when this author got into Arianism, but mostly after 1800. I think thinkers that matter would have been Pelagiusians. Pierre Bayle's ‘footnote on David' was read more widely than the entry on David. Bayle's a hero of mine; comets are not God's wrath portending doom. By 1800, no sane person thought they portend doom.
Religion forces beliefs, behavior, and boundaries. The Enlightenment started the crumbling of those superstitions, control, and bigotries. Spinoza replaces the infinite of all things to all people with a reality of nature and collapses the myths that separated humans. Spinoza is the central character for the Enlightenment. Hegel embraces him with a One, then the Romantics come as if the Enlightenment never happened.
Witches were burned before the Enlightenment and witches were deemed silly after the Enlightenment. I can agree with the author that there was no Enlightenment as it was happening, but I also can make that statement about witches. Every time somebody goes from the general to the specific there is a negation of the infinite as Hegel said. I could have written a book claiming there was no Christianity and that there was just participation in Christianity in the first three centuries after Christ and it took a reflection of future believers to understand their past, but it's not the right way to think about Christianity. All history needs reflection and filtering through teleological lenses before reification happens. That's what historians do.
God is a trickster. He can never lie; He can only be misunderstood. His promises are always contingent on undisclosed conditions that will be fulfilled through contemplation of the divine and prove God's essence through his existence of maximal participation through His lack of interference within human experience. God through his incarnation Jesus and the Holy Spirit left the prophecies not yet fulfilled and the liturgy and contemplation of the divine economy will take the body of Christ through His Church and fulfilled the eschaton with teleological certainty. At least that's what these authors argue for in this book.
There's a desperate and pathetic attempt presented in this book at defending the absurdities concerning Jesus' promised second coming and the certainty that early followers believed. See “Broken Promises” by Mark Smith for how the NT does not deliver on its promise of the second coming.
Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” loves Gregory of Cusa for his ‘coincidences of contradiction' and these authors do too (see “Philosophical Allusions in Joyce's Finnegans Wake”, by Baines or just read the Wake yourself).
Alarms are raised when I hear pseudo-Dionysius get quoted as Dionysius the Areopagite. He was not a real person and never knew Paul. Aquinas thought the same in his Summa and advocates for Aristotelian contemplation as the ultimate meaning for humans participating in humanity. Aquinas didn't know that pseudo-Dionysius wasn't really Paul's first convert and that he was just a fictional creation to solidify the Trinity as real while entering the negative road (‘via negativia'), and these authors enter that road too in support of their negation theory for words-do-not-mean-what-they-say theory.
When Karl Barth becomes your defense for God warning bells should ring. Barth creates a fictional world of mythology that describes the certainty of nothing as the all that needs to be understood with no relation to reality. I've only read his first volume in his Dogmatics and one day I want to read the other volumes in the series, but I already know it leads to the kind of defense of God these authors create out of their certainties that Trickster God(s) are real.
One day is like a thousand years to the Lord. It's in the Bible, that proves that mere humans were thinking about the eschaton in silly ways. That's a major point in this book.
To read the Book of Daniel is to understand the trick the Pesher scribes were making with their own re-interpretations of prophecies that weren't coming true. They turned weeks into years and reassigned starting dates and prophesized regime change in their day while their numbers never added up just right. I'm not sure if these authors ever explicitly acknowledged that Daniel is fiction and was written 160 BC or so.
There is something that was always obvious when you read the Bible both the OT and NT, the prophecies never came true. Also, I can't emphasize it enough, the NT is rife with the imminent return of Jesus and the end times are coming within their life time. To not get that is to ignore what the NT says. Albert Schweitzer gets that and “Broken Promises” by Mark Smith shows that.
This book avoids the failed messianic prophecies of the anointed one, Christ. If anything, this book uses the failed prophecies in the OT as justifications for the failed second coming prophecies. This book chooses to focus on Christ's failure at predicting his second return and pretend that they were conditional. The other possible explanations that this book quickly dismisses are against the preterist and the realist who see them as never going to happen. Their presuppositions force them into this convoluted reasoning of conditionality. The alternative would mean that Jesus, i.e. God, as guided by the Holy Spirit were ill informed.
When Meister Eckart is invoked, you know you're going to get a paradox that's resolved by dogmatic assertion such that the more you know the less closer to Jesus and the further from the truth you'll be and to experience God and his message fully the empty side of the assertion must be embraced. This book gives you the null set through its process of negating the finite to deduce the infinite. This book quotes from Aquanis and Scotus, and Aquanis used analogy to prove through reason and Scotus used his ‘synchronic contingency of the now' to show absolutely that the perfect was real and must be. For these authors Scotus shows that the unfolding of history was meant to be, but not on the time line the NT implied.
I have a soft spot for books like this one since they cite many of the books I've read. I've read Augustine, pseudo-Dionysius, Cusa, Aquinas (yes, I've read his complete works), Barth, Aristotle, Plato, Scotus, Hegel, Heidegger, and most of the other writers the authors rely on.
The author's appealed to Hegel as well as Heidegger. Yes, the authors are far ranging in their philosophical meanderings. I started to connect a Heideggerian concept that fit some of their God-ness talk and as Heidegger in his Time part for being makes our being-in-the-world through our ‘care' of the past, present and future. That corresponded at times to how the authors were making the Trinity such that the Father is the past, Jesus the present and the Holy Spirit the future.
The best defense for God and Jesus not returning is the author's approach for their persisting in the insistence of an essence that in its very being of unknowing makes for an omni perfect being who incarnated in human form to enable us to become perfected such that the second coming will happen as we're guided by the Holy Spirit (past, present and future) through the Churches, liturgy and contemplation of the divine, and obviously that is not a very good defense. It takes a lot of mumbo-jumbos to have it make sense and the authors are more than happy to provide that. It takes a trickster god for it to work and explain away the non-event of the second coming not happening in the first century AD, and these authors guide the readers in that approach.
All religious people mentioned in this book were saviors and contributed to necessary fundamental change within society and were agents for improvement within the system. That seems silly. It is easy to say that, for example, slavery was endorsed and approved by Pope Nicolas V in the 15th century for non-Christians in the newly explored territories and that led to the enslavement of Africans through Muslim slave traders and to African slaves to the New World starting in 1619. The religions were part of the problem and kudos to the few brave ones who stood up to the institutional cruelty and bucked their religious leaders. The real problem was the religion itself and the rot created by them, and this book never connected those dots.
It would have been just as easy for the author to call out religion as he did for capitalism and government, but he went out of his way to talk about the religious people who stood up against their religious institutions. Religion and its institutions have turned Jesus into MAGA today and preach Christianism that endorses Christian Nationalism. Those who hated homosexuals, or wanted women to be subservient to men and know their place, and advocated for the separations of the races often were mindlessly led by their religious institution. The private religious schools for K-12 were started primarily because religious folk didn't want to hob-nob with people of different colors. Slavery is biblical base and the southerners had their bible to back their hateful positions.
I would have criticized the text for his ignoring the marginalization of homosexuals but he apologized in the afterward for that. He blamed America for Japan attacking America. That always seems convoluted to me.
The author made religious people a hero while ignoring the rot that religion perpetrated on America through their enabling racists, capitalists, demonizing gays and so on. I know religion is becoming obsolete (read “Why Religion went Obsolete” by Christian Smith), but historically it is a cause of many of the problems listed in this book not their savior.
I cringe when serious people seriously cite the Book of Acts. I know I'm in for a mythological tour-de-farce. Wright doesn't disappoint.
Wright guards against having the seven authentic letters of Paul not say what they are saying. He gives a funny line: the best way to read Galatians is to read it in an angry voice since Paul is mad and showing it.
Wright three times mentioned that it's possible to believe in free will and determinism at the same time since Paul, Pharisees, and the Greek society weren't sophisticated enough to understand the contradiction.
Paul is everything that is wrong with Christianity and it is in plain sight for those who read him. Wright de-theologizes Paul intentionally. Paul was certain that he was right and everyone else was wrong and tolerated no dissension. The end times were near and imminent according to Paul. They didn't come and some metaphorical becoming Christ like is not a reasonable interpretation for what did not happen. Paul wanted nothing more than the world to end and Christ return and punish everyone who did not believe as he did. We call those zealots today and we are at our best when we ignore them. Wright embraces him.
From this book, I see that Calvin clearly is inspired by Paul and understood something Wright was unwilling to accept: salvation comes from God alone as God loved Jaccob and hated Essau in the womb shows he picks favorites with foreknowledge. Read the “Institutes of Christianity” by Calvin and cringe at the nastiness that culminates from what Paul is getting at.
Wright is a silly man defending a bitter man's myth-making through certainty from a delusion. Slaves obey your masters, wives submit to your husband, collectively punish all for the sins of one, fear Satan taking you over, women cover your heads in Church, and Paul will even pretend he is at times speaking for himself and is not always holy.
Christianity was fractured in its beginning as it is today. Wright ignores reality while pretending moderation and reason that are absent from his didactic ramblings.
Wright is way better than almost any other defender of myths I've read, but even putting sugar on the turd you have the turd to contend with. Wright is delightful in what appears as willful ignorance concerning the authentic interpretation of Paul.
In this volume Habermas publishes his notes that he used to create his first two volumes and footnotes them. He's defending a myth by using the myth and footnotes the crap out of it, and what remains is crap.
To illustrate the shoddy work in this volume, Habermas made a multipage defense with footnotes on how he won his debate with Antony Flew. I watched the debate; there was a copy on Youtube from 13 years ago. Habermas offered nothing but his standard apologetics and I would suggest skip the Flew parts and see if Habermas convinces you that the resurrection happened. I was not convinced by Habermas' assertions with no supporting evidence beyond ‘the Bible says so.' Also, note the debate is at least 13 years old. Habermas stopped updating his expertise along time ago and relies mostly on older notes.
Habermas made the absurd statements that only a skeptic thinks Jesus wasn't resurrected and that only a skeptic would deny the divinity of the Christian religion because of its rapid growth. Tell that to the 2 billion or so Muslims alive today. They doubt the resurrection and their religion grew at a faster rate than Christianity. They are believers (not skeptics) but with different myths. I don't think Habermas quoted from a single Muslim scholar or Mormon scholar. That seems like a move by an apologetic who doesn't care about the truth beyond his own special pleading.
How does having martyrs for the religion prove the resurrection is true. Habermas plays fast and loose with the word ‘disciple.' Dorcas was a disciple and was resurrected and she didn't die for the faith. I suspect she never really existed. She's in the Book of Acts. Habermas pretends Acts is real when he defends his apologetics but ignores the other parts. Eutychus was (luckily) risen from the dead as he fell out the third story after falling asleep from boredom as 5000 people quickly converted while Paul was preaching. Habermas ignores these resurrections. Isn't it a giveaway that the Eutychus story is a fake when his name translates to “Lucky?”
Habermas claims the prophecies prove Jesus is the Messiah and that the second coming is to be in the future. The Bible says differently. Read the NT. The messianic prophecies were not fulfilled nor did Jesus return as promised. It's clear there is a fight going on between the Jerusalem Jews for Christ and Paul's gentiles within the NT. According to Paul, he learned nothing from James and Peter and stuck with his personal vision as truth. In the end, Paul's brand of Christianity won out.
The skeptic does not need to refute claims of second-hand reported visions. Habermas makes group visions real. How many times did Peter deny Christ before the cock crowed? Three times, nope six times. Read the stories in the gospels and count the different people Peter denied Christ to. It is at least six. Second-hand accounts can easily be fabricated to support the preferred narrative.
When Paul referred to the ‘gospels' he can't possibly mean the first four books of the NT. I wish Habermas noted that as he spoke about Paul. Paul claimed a vision that made him a zealot. Paul visits Peter and James in Jerusalem. Paul states he learned nothing from them. All it takes is Peter to have a vision and convince others.
The ‘five hundred at one time who saw the risen Jesus,' that is not evidence that is a claim. It would have been more convincing if it was five people with their names given.
Jesus on the cross said “I say to you: this day you shall be with me in paradise.” Where did Jesus spend the next three days? In Hades arguing with Satan over the bones of Moses. The Bible as a source gets convoluted. Aquinas had a slick response to that when he said Jesus' spiritual body was in Hades and his physical body was in Paradise. Habermas dismissed the promise that Jesus would return by saying the Transfiguration fulfilled it spiritually. When confused claim spiritual fulfills promise. Jesus was never an earthly King while his followers claim he spiritually reign in heaven and the prophecies are specific that Jesus must be a King.
Habermas is using the Bible to prove his point that Jesus resurrected. Why doesn't Habermas just use the Bible itself to say that Jesus resurrected. Minimal facts seem superfluous when the primary source is the Bible.
How does Habermas know that Jerusalem was abuzz with Jesus-mania when he was crucified? The empty tomb and Joseph of Arimathea seem more fictional than real.
Habermas spent his life studying a myth. There is nothing there except claims with scant real evidence. This book is bad apologetics with footnotes to show seriousness. Habermas loves quoting Bart Erhman when he agrees with him.
There's another thing I noticed in this book. Christians don't agree with themselves about most things. The Resurrection's meaning goes all over the map as well as Jesus as God, the messianic prophecies, the virgin birth, and what kind of visitation Paul had and the second coming and so on. Habermas quotes from his scholars and they don't agree among themselves. Also, once again Habermas did not quote from a single Muslim or Mormon scholar who have vastly different opinions abut the second coming and so on.
Habermas hurts his case more than helps it. He thinks his old notes with their many footnotes are worthy of consideration. Watch that debate between him and Flew and skip the Flew segments and see how unconvincing Habermas' arguments are by themselves. Apologetics hurt their faith more than help it. It's best to start with the facts then reach a conclusion, clearly, Habermas starts with the conclusion and has his facts based on claims fit his belief.
An anti-science screed with a plea for Gaia self-protecting itself while incoherently saying ‘the Heisenberg uncertainty principle with Godol's incompleteness theorem shows that nothing we do matters and the earth (Gaia) will take care of itself better than we can help.' I hate books that misuse the Poisson distribution and this book did that as he fabricates a non-linear world not solvable and pretends fractals and recursive logic proves that humans can't help the earth's ecology. There was a lot of underhanded misuse of science and please learn that science induces not deduces as he stated (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was wrong on that too). The author is ignorant on philosophy of science. The movie wasn't bad, I watched it for the first time yesterday.
There were weird echoes of post-structuralism unnecessarily reverberating within this book. For a book written in 2006 the author should have moved beyond the cultural self-reinforcement of Berger's book “Social Construction of Reality.”
Seeing the world through sociology is profitable. All sociology is interpretation and reconfiguring culture as a starting point leads to a recoding of the disaster that is unfolding today. The interpretive lens of recognizing the being of privileging the privileged class gives credence to a post-structuralist structure of relativism. MAGA is post-structuralist and post-modernist while they recode reality through the interpretative lens.
The disaster unfolding today with MAGA enabling sex crimes with minors seems to show that cultures, societies, and psychology need to break the mold and then rebuild it. I'm satisfied with just saying ‘do no harm' is a reasonable starting point. Objective moral truths aren't necessary but their absence doesn't mean the proper lens for interpretation is through Derrida or Michel Foucault.
This book seemed like it was written in the 1990 and when I saw it was published in 2006, I was less forgiving for the relativism inherent within the author's interpretation of facts about the world.
This book mentioned that the left-right-handed chirality problem highlighted by Kant and how that logic became part of the Thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s and was not revealed until the chirality of a molecule was considered and America was spared suffering because of one woman researcher who realized that chirality makes a difference.
Kant is well worth reading about always. For Kant it is never the thing-itself it is about the thing. Our thoughts are always about something. Also, with Kant there is always the awareness of do we think something is funny because we laugh, or do we laugh at something because it's funny? Is our existence actualized by our thinking or does our thinking make for our existence? There is an ontological difference between appearance and reality and that spot within us leads to the false assurance of certainty of self that is the thing-in-itself. Hegel takes this a further step in “Phenomenology of Mind.”
This book read as a well-presented Great Course lecture on Kant and his ideas. That makes this book worthwhile by itself. The appearance is as vital as the thing-in-itself. Synthetic (feelings) and analytic (logic) dichotomy rubs against the thought content and intuition concept divide.
The universal, necessary and the certain lead to anti-realism and for Kant he realizes it is our transcendental deduction that centralizes the faculty of knowledge as the nexus for space, time, and intuition. There'll never be a Newton for a blade of grass, according to Kant, of course, Darwin disagrees.
The author connected dots that I could not get at by reading Kant's complete works. Kant gives a movement from spiritualism to religious certainty then to non-certainty and it seems to me Kant was more of an atheist than the author seemed to believe. He's the expert, I'm not.
I probably lean more toward making Kant my favorite of all philosophers. He is the first to no longer think that the truth is out there and relocated truth within us. Descartes assumes the world away by his cogito, Kant brings the world back and places us in it; Kant ridicules Anslem through realizing existence is not a predicate. The Copernican revolution of the mind was a good first step and Kant started that ball rolling. Hume and Leibnitz needed a synthesis and Kant provides it.
In the history of the world has anyone ever been convinced by the truth of Christianity by Van Til's presuppositional apologetics? I suspect not. This book gives it credence and even cites how any rational argumentation is not possible without the Biblical God of creation as a starting point. Is it any wonder that Evangelical Christianity is becoming obsolescent 50 years after this book was first published.
These essays have the best that was available to them 50 years ago and the tired old arguments are still around today. At least, today the deniers of evolution by natural selection usually don't heap the epitaph ‘scientism' when they slur science and the scientific method as this book did. Evolution deniers are on the fringe of society and indifference to their ‘creationist' claims is met with yawns if they are noticed at all.
“Life has no meaning if life does not have ‘ultimate' meaning” according to this book. I guess their right, but to me the ‘ultimate' sneaks in an infinite worldview that entails God. The truth is what I want has nothing to do with the truth that exists. This book even makes the assertion that ‘objective morality' is the only bulwark against wrongful acts.
In 1975, when this book was written, the Evangelical Christians were posed to take over America at least rule it in tandem with the liberal Protestants and the Catholics who according to Jimmy Swaggert assured me they were going to hell unless they were born-again and had a personnel relationship with Jesus Christ.
There wasn't a single sentence in this book that told me what God was actually doing in the world except generating feelings of dread and gratitude through the Holy Spirit which seem as easily explained by natural psychological states within humans who claim to have them.
There was a mixture of appeals to Wittgenstein and B. F. Skinner in justifying their fictional evangelical world states. They have fallen out of fashion today.
I think the difference between ‘Fundamentals' and ‘Evangelicals' was mostly of an imaginary kind as spelled out by this book. The Evangelicals seemed to have a personnel relationship with Jesus, believed in dispensationalism (Biblical ages), and had a Millerism (return of Christ) belief. The Pentecostal and Assembly of God folks didn't seem to make the Evangelical cut because they relied too much on their personnel experiences. Catholics, the ones who are going to hell, believed works trump faith and for the Evangelicals faith alone justifies. I'm thinking Babtist come in multiple flavors and some would say they belief in the literal word of the Bible and it was inspired by God, they could just as easily be called Fundamentals or Evangelicals or both. This book said as much.
The start of the obsolescence of Evangelicals will start in 1990 (according to the excellent book: “Why Religion went obsolete,” by Christian Smith. The evangelicals had their opportunity in 1975, but they laid the seeds for their own destruction with this kind of thought as laid out in this book. Can't we all just hate LGTB and claim ‘marriage is between a man and a woman' and blame those who disagree on their sinful nature?
The irrelevance of the childish belief in make-belief myths is a given in this book and the background that this book was thrown into in 1975 would have assumed the fictions as truth and the burden would have been on the reader to refute the claims, today not so much.
It takes a historian to contextual the rot that flowed from Hayek.
A racist without Christianity is often a libertarian, neo-libertarian, or paleo-libertarian. The label is a way for them to hide behind their racism. The paleo version gives them a chance to shit on ‘elites' and usually by most definitions they themselves are the elite such as Steve Bannon, Trump, Thiel, Musk and so on. The neo-liberals start with Hayek and end with MAGA and its hate.
Charles Murray clearly a person with racist beliefs decided to embrace God today. At least that's what his new memoir will claim (I haven't yet read it but I read the review in the WSJ). He recently wrote a book defending God in general and Christianity in particular. His racism didn't need religion until now. MAGA is destroying white-evangelical Christianity by systematically taking away the theology and replacing it with ideology. White-evangelical Christianity is becoming obsolete and politicizing religion is not helping them. See the recently published book, “Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America” by Christian Smith.
Peter Thiel one of the self-proclaimed libertarians from Hayek's bastard children featured in this book requires a scape-goat with his twisted re-incarnation of Rene Girard's mimetic sacrifice for the sake of the greater good when the greater good includes the self-appointed ‘elites' privileging themselves over the hoi-polloi. There's a fun book I would recommend to partially understand the insanity inherent within the pseudo-intellectual nonsense espoused by libertarians justifying their superiority and that would be “Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1 and 2: The Great Mediations of the Classical World.” It's part of the Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (SVMC) Series.
Gold bugs love fictions that make them relevant. This book brought back memories of me reading Harry Browne's book “How to profit from the coming economic devaluation.” They were obviously meant to embrace the great replacement theory and warn against globalist (i.e. Jews). Those kinds flowed out of Hayek's worldview and were toxic in their implicit superiority.
Maury Rothbard mentioned in this book is another one that sucked me into their racist world view and this author brings receipts on what they really meant in their guise of anarcho-libertarianism.
I'm positively inclined towards this book because at one time I was a true believer in the bastards of Hayek and have no one to blame but myself for my wrong headedness, mea maxima culpa. Today, I see the same rot coming from MAGA and they have usurped the ideologies of the racist featured in this book. They haven't disappeared they've just renamed themselves. Rand Paul had to defend as real the immigration super highway cutting across the country from Mexico to Canada back in 2016. The bigots still exist they just have different conspiracy theories that they embrace.
I'm sort of loving the split in Hayek's step-bastard children between Nick Fuentes and the Ben Shapiro wings of MAGA over the last week or so. They both hate women, brown and black people, gay people, transgender, Democrats, atheists, but differ on Jews verse Muslims. MAGA sublimates libertarians who usually don't care about religion. They all fall under the same umbrella while MAGA wants Christian Nationalists and Libertarians prefer no religion at all for their nationalism. They both want the hate and division and Thiel and Musk want to sacrifice us on their imaginary altars while acting as our saviors. Hayek is their north star. It's not hard to read Hayek and realize that fascists, racists, Christianists, Libertarians, and MAGA would evolve from his writings.
I enjoyed seeing the history of how I deceived myself into believing Hayek's bunk and his bastard children. This shows the rot behind the ideology and how at their core they want to make us their servants through their conspiratorial substance free ‘science.'
Democracy needs equality to survive. The Titans of hype and delusion profiled in this book prioritize their power over the true, moral, and good. Without their manipulation of reality their dignatus melts into the ether of the void.
Peter Thiel creates an ‘antichrist' from time to time as he misapplies his shallow biblical interpretations and appoints his puppet J. D. Vance as his savior. This book made Vance a central character while the world knows him for the cartoon villain he is. Thiel prayers at the altar of Rene Girard as illuded in this book. I suggest reading his book “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World.” Girard requires a sacrificial goat for the creation of saviors. The Titans of hype and delusion believe they are our saviors and the people are their preferred sacrifice. To save us they must destroy us, because for them democracy needs inequality to survive and freedom is antithetical to their maximizing their dignatus.
As pointed out by this book the Titans of hype and delusion require a ‘mimetic' sacrifice and in their desperate search for enhancing their dignatus. The Titans have found their useful idiot in Donald Trump. To understand the mindset and motivations of all the villains portrayed in this book Girard provides a roadmap or one can read the short story by Shirley Jackson “The Lottery.”
Among the Titans of hype and delusion a sacrifice of the people is a requirement. Their self-worth comes from their anointing themselves as antichrist slayers through magical processes. They must have a sacrifice to preserve their dignatus and the mob watches Fox News (sic) and get distracted by Trump's cruelty which excites the Titans since they use the distraction to make the world less equal.
Bitcoin is for fools. (What do I know, I wanted to short it at $30000, and now it's above $100k). The Titans of hype and delusion need the myth to continue to succeed. Trump is floundering, generative AI through LLM is never going to return its investment, and J. D. Vance is off-putting when he speaks. The Titans of hype and delusion are losing their dignatus and their useful idiot is fading off the world stage as I get to watch it happen in real-time. As illustrated in this book, the Titans of hype and delusion all universally seemed to have supported Ron Desantis, the biggest goofball ever, before they rallied around their true transactional hero, Donald Trump.
It's not that the Titans of hype and delusion are crazy, they aren't. They believe crazy things so that they can enhance their imaginary value through increasing their own dignatus while sacrificing at the altar everyone else who is not them. I love watching the myth-makers create their myths and watching it collapse in real-time.
Rogoff blamed those who used his shitty spreadsheet results not the crappy algorithm with its ‘excel error' that he used and chastised them for thinking he meant a hard speed limit.
All the rot in modern magical thinking (MMT) economics is woven within this mythological fairy tale retelling of economic history.
Harvard economist want austerity for others and pretend debt destroys when ordinary people benefit. Greenspan assured us that he was shocked, that he couldn't believe it, but the bankers lied to him. Rogoff assumes rational agents are at play when he should question the hype and delusion as it is happening. The “Big Short” and Adam Tooze's “Crashed” cover the financial housing crisis of 2008 in more realistic terms than this book was capable since Rogoff was trapped in a myth of neo-liberalism nonsense and never manages to get out of his myths.
Books like this one will greatly please the opinion writers of the WSJ. I suspect it was a Journal's review that highlighted this book for me. I would suggest a far better book than this one if you haven't yet read it “Money and Government: Unsettled issues in Macroeconomics” by Skidelsky.
Rogoff's hubris gets in the way of telling a more balanced view of macroeconomics. His snipes at Elizabeth Warren and AOC were without context within the book and he owed it to the reader to explain why he said those snipes.
I'm going to go out on the limb here and say bitcoin is not going to replace the dollar and generative AI is not going to morph into AGI.
Economics doesn't have to be magical thinking and it really can make a difference. See Tooze's book “The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi Economy.” We're currently ruled by morons and I cringed every time Rogoff quoted from Lawrence Summers, didn't he go to Epstein Island multiple times? Didn't Harvard repeatedly cave into Epstein's best friend Donal Trump? I can't fault Rogoff for the disaster that is Trump since this book didn't get the chance to see Trump fail at everything after this book was published. China is playing Trump for the fool that he is and that can affect the strength of the dollar.
He has a strange relationship with Hitler. He attributes wrongly the Buddha's smile as wisdom. Thinks Marcus Aurelius outranks Zarathustra and Nietzsche should have stopped after “Ecce Homo.”
Aphorisms are fine from a pessimist since we can read more into them than the pithy statement says.
Schopenhauer does philosophical pessimism better and more elaborate. The early Nietzsche does do. I'm already a nihilist and Cioran's search for justice and fairness subtracts from my realism. Hindus and Buddhist show there is no eastern path to lessening our suffering and his appeal of redirecting our gaze back towards us as we look out is just as hallow as the Christian gazing outward. All understanding is interpretation filtered through our illusions through ourselves since being that is understood is language and language is the transcendental deduction resolving itself.
I do enjoy philosophical pessimism and Cioran provides that.
Malcom Gladwell and Walter Issaacson are a scourge against wisdom because of their hagiography and fictional framing of reality and this author relies on their narratives by demonstrating the danger of myth-making of genius and anecdote as reality.
I've stopped reading Gladwell and Isaacson since they pervert reality and the author has a good thesis but it gets swallowed by her sources.
I usually don't share publicly my distaste for Gladwell and Isaacson because it's an iconoclastic position that is not widely held. Half of the anecdotes in this book could have come from those authors.
All history is interpretation. The historians preferred narrative presented as history imparts knowledge, gives identity, and empowers their reader. A well-presented history talks as much about the historian as the history they are telling.
The ruling elites and historians foist acquiescence through rationalizing their preferred hegemony through selectively justifying the present (or not) by mythologizing the past. Edward Gibbons clearly did that in his popularly accepted influential book. Hofstadter does that post-war by reassigning the significance for our history.
At its core this is a book that looks at the literary creation of history from five popular historians primarily through the historian's focus from five different historians who represented a perspective from elite-white-intellectual, Jewish, class, race, and feminism. Each adding to the post-war conversation defining what we know, what we believe about ourselves and how to leverage that into productive change.
The author deconstructs and rebuilds with an insistence on the persistence of trust as the ground for imaginary hope for things unseen.
The author started with a list of five world altering foundational shocks that are devasting to inerrant believing Christians such as evolution is real, Gospels not written by named authors, Adam and Eve were never real, Noah's flood is made up and other just as foolish claims. He acknowledges those facts as real but stuck to the theme of his book by claiming trust supplants faith as if trust in absurdities lessen the foolishness of trusting a book of mythology.
A recent book I read “Why Religion went Obsolete” by Christian Smith, mentioned that deconstructed Christians often end up on a spiritual spectrum. This author has jettisoned the nonsense of his dogmatic faith beliefs and squeezes what he can from what is left and remains a Christian without the dogmatic baggage of Biblical inerrancy.
I'll give him kudos for prominently highlighting my favorite book in the Bible, “The Book of Ecclesiastes” with its succinct wisdom such as be happy since it's latter than you think; this is the only life you have: ‘it's better to be alive dog than a dead lion,' all is vanity, nothing changes under the sun, the race doesn't always go to the swiftest.
I'm for anything that takes people away from certainty in fairy-tales and this author deconstructs from faith-in-fairytales into trust in good while emulating the ideal Christ. He doesn't land in my preferred spot, but at least he doesn't have to kill homosexuals or believe transgender people can't possibly exist, and he ignores the truth claim about Adam and Eve, Noah and his ark, or the convoluted logic of original sin needing a sacrifice for your sin. That is a good start.
There's a trick I do: I never take Deleuze seriously and by doing that he becomes one of my favorite writers. The way he writes with ‘anal shit' for words, and the BWO (body-without-organ) and his peculiar style cries out to not to be taken seriously as the realization of inanity of psychoanalysis becomes apparent.
The graveyard is full of people who metaphorically buried Kant. Deleuze is in that graveyard today.
I don't mind a book that dissects Kant through appealing to what Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant meant and how what we thought we knew changes through our ‘Copernican Revolution of the Mind', and I do like Deleuze, but I never took him seriously when he spoke about Kant.
I appreciate erudite essays about somebody who talks about somebody else who is talking about Kant while realizing the meta-meta-meta gets distant at times. One can just as easily read the original writers of Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz, Kant and Deleuze, but these essays will give an interesting perspective for those who haven't read the originals.
This book acts as a reminder that for those who believe in a demon-haunted world that means that the demons are in control.
There's an incredibly boring and dense multi-volume work called the “Anti-Nicene Fathers.” It was translated in the late 19th century by believers and reads stilted today. I've read the first three volumes. This author takes three of the most prominent contributors from the early church fathers and the Book of Mark and shows how the DNA of the time was awash with demons, devils, spirits that haunted, devil-made-me-do-it, and other superstitious nonsense. When a book like this one focuses on the demonic assumption of the books from the period, it's easy to see how that devilish non-sense gets ignored by the casual reader.
I hope it doesn't seem like I'm only picking on the ancient writers. Even today, serious people pretend that demons are real and evil exist as a real entity. The world loves a good spooky story and it's easy to outsource misfortune to demons when a demon-haunted world is believed, but the paradox is that means the demons are in control. I'm going to light a candle now and prayer the demons away.
There will be no spitting or shitting in Heaven.
Wives must bow down to their husbands for all that they have given them just as men must bow down to God for the same reason.
If your vow to God is such that it goes contra to the will of Allah an equivalent atonement may substitute.
Jinn, demons, and the devil are real and interfere with the Good.
God's essence is his existence and his substance is infinite with no accidents.
Thomas Aquinas would agree with all the above, but he appeals to reason before faith while Taymiyyah prioritizes dogmatism before reason.
Within this book there is an unhealthy use of the ‘no true Scotsman fallacy' with a dismissal of anyone who disagrees with the author as wrong and not a true Muslim.
At times this book was tedious and repetitive. Maimonides, the Jewish scholar who proceeded Taymiyyah by 50 years, gives a more coherent presentation than this book allows for. Maimonides and Aquinas have the same silly superstitious non-sense, but they both reconcile their holy books with Aristotle while developing a coherent system while Taymiyyah's dogmatic certainty is unyielding in its severity.
The manipulation of the masses through channeling feelings of dread, hopes and fears while taping into the ‘seal of the spirit' does not need the false-equivalency of ‘both-sides' use charisma as the author at times presents in this book. Monsters and their enablers are real and Hitler, Trump, Rush Limbaugh are not using charisma in the same way as Lincoln, Einstein or Obama did.
There's an element of society that wants to feel hate of others and feel superior because of that hate and demagogues and religious leaders have tapped into that know that a compelling story is more important than facts, empirical, analysis, logic, or reason. Aristotle taught rhetoric for a reason. Bad actors manipulate us with anecdotal yarns through rhetorical tricks.
Lincoln and Roosevelt were masters at providing yarns that illustrated complex real-world situations into simple terms that everyone could understand as this book mentioned. They also had a grasp of reality and did not ignore facts.
The false-equivalency that both-sides necessitates is destroying democracy such as: “Scientist say vaccines work while Aunt Millie said her nurse told her that RFK says they cause autism if you take Tylenol,” or “Trump kicks out transgender people from the armed services, while some democrat you never heard of wants Harvard to kill Israeli protesters.” The author would have been better served telling the reader the story of why some charismatic monsters is horrible and are destroying society, and by not lumping rational charismatic leaders with emotional manipulators.
Heidegger is completely into the cult of not thinking in this manuscript. He's hiding behind the essence of being and appropriates the clearing as he makes man, strife, earth, and God mystical grounds resolved by political feelings.
The Fascists and MAGA manifesto: ‘stop thinking and follow me' as the leader shouts his absurdities. Heidegger loves his race-based pseudo-politics and sociology and interprets the world around him as the destiny that he was waiting for and hides behind Dasein's authenticity. Russia bad, Germany good, he preaches. Race explains all. The machinations of power through community leads to the Russians and that is bad, and national socialism race-based certainty good, for him.
A footnote told me that a future addition of this manuscript would have Heidegger saying: “One would have to ask what are the grounds that peculiarly predetermine the Jewish community for planetary criminality,” does one ever really have to ask that question? I don't think so. A Nazi would, and MAGA does.
The manuscript, I use that description because this is not a book as such as it seems to be random notes loosely held together through his rubric of “Being and Time,” some Nietzsche thought, Nazi ideology, and mysticism of sorts, and his misdirection of ‘being' as fundamental for meaning.
Heidegger creates a convenient fiction (the French would say facon-de-parler) as he confounds the history of the concept of self with the history of the self's realization of itself and pretends that the authentic-self is real and knowable through following the powerful ruler within a race-based world. Heidegger is repugnant and seems to love his Hitler while not saying his name.
Oddly, I come from the perspective of having “Being and Time” be one of my all-time favorite books. Heidegger's repugnancy is plain to see in this manuscript.
The author said sociology is interpretation and he uses the data to tell a story with anecdotes from representatives through interviews which documents the process that led to the irrelevance and obsolescence of religion.
Religion destroyed themselves through a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. For example, the natural conclusion of having a ‘personnel relationship with Jesus Christ' is to have no need of attending church. Thus, no re-enforcement of the church approved narrative. It's as if they wanted to destroy themselves through there own foolishness.
The zeitgeist changed and religion disappeared through indifference. It became as relevant as typewriters with the young, or movies from the 1940s. The change happened starting in 1991, but it took events before to cement the inflection point and the events after led to indifference. The young don't dislike typewriters or old movies, they are just indifferent as they are with religion.
I hoped that secular humanism would have become the default position, rather the spiritual became the stopping point. At least they aren't tied to hating gays, trans, or propping up white nationalism and patriarchy.
The author systematically tells the story as it unfolds. He started with five reasons why religion could be relevant, and showed each as not able to withstand the tsunami that was unfolding.
The author as sociologist interprets the data about the specific and generalizes the story such that the trends can be understood.
This book explains exactly why I'm becoming indifferent to religion within American society. The current forces are overwhelming while the make-believers and the deniers of reality are only being heard among themselves and are looking for legitimacy through debate. Who really wants to argue with someone who says the earth is flat, evolution is fake, or that Noah was real?
I like conclusions that use data to get at the concepts that come from general understanding. This book is remarkable in the rigor that it uses while still providing a narrative that explains reality.
All sociology, all philosophy is interpretation, and as Hans Gadamer says “All understanding is interpretation. Being that can be understood is language.” Klossowski interprets Nietzsche.
I find the 1960s quaint. The intellectuals thought Freud made sense. For them, they thought there was an unconscious under the surface that was hidden from the conscious and Dostoevsky through Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same was a gateway for discovering.
With Nietzsche there is the best of all philosophy, and with him there is the worst. Klossowski hypothesizes the bodily and mental trauma that Nietzsche had was affecting his philosophy. That's probably true. “Ecce Homo” alludes to that.
Nietzsche is not as consistent or as coherent as Klossowski makes him out to be. Will-to-power is allusive and I would suggest the best way to think about that phrase is to translate in your mind as “actively engaging your own interpretation of the world.” Klossowski misses that at times because he is retrofitting a coherence to a mess of a system as he systemizes the incoherence.
There's an all too familiar ring to the story Klossowski is telling. I can't blame him as much as 50 years of Nietzsche scholarship came after he wrote this book. I can blame Klossowski for not fully elaborating on the ugly parts of Nietzsche such as his proto-fascism, misogynism, and spookiness. It is in plain sight.
There's a double bind that Nietzsche is trying to resolve as he knows his body is wasting away and probably realizes the same for his mind (trauma in the body, and confusion in the brain). His intuition trumping his rational as he gives way to the ‘now' of living without a foundation and realizing the ground is slipping away leading to his positive nihilism. The more he discovers, the less he is and the ‘eternal recurrence of the now' is his salvation for “being that can be understood” through language. His self becomes an illusion as his being reveals itself through the eternal recurrence of the now.
This is an overall good book and makes for a fun read.