"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former." -- Jonathan Swift
That's an interesting counterpart to the beginning of the famous poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:
"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in His hand Who saith "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''"
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Wow, rob, you have learned nothing in your time away, huh?
ReplyDeleteIt just seemed such an obvious joke I couldn't resist.
DeleteYou don't think this post was the least bit pompous ?
Rob, your animosity caused you to miss my joke: "And the same goes for my life!"
DeleteIn other words, this happens with wise men, and ALSO WITH ME.
Oops. Yes, I totally missed the joke.
DeleteBTW: My initial comment wasn't driven by animosity just by a (mistaken) attempt to be humorous.
Ok, cool. Welcome back.
DeleteThanks.
DeleteThat's an interesting counterpart to the beginning of the famous poem Rabbi Ben Ezra:
ReplyDelete"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!''"
So Gene, does that mean in the third half you'll embrace atheism? ��
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas!