GK Chesterton, or someone like him, commented on the “aristocracy of the living,” meaning that social phenomenon under which a modern citizen imagines that he is smarter than anyone who lived before him. They did die, after all, and here he is, alive. And we are much closer to not dying, or at least it takes us a lot longer to die, these days.
It is not unlike the child assuming he is smarter than his parents, and most assuredly (in America, anyway) smarter than his grandparents. By this, however, he mainly means that he is living in the subculture of youth in America, and as aliens in that land, his parents do not know how to navigate it as well as he does. It gets worse with the grandparents, whom he assumes are of a weaker intelligence because they suffer from ideas that he, in his enlightenment, can see are bigotries.
The child’s obvious mistake is his failure to understand that the parents, if they are psychologically healthy, have no interest in being children anymore. They are only interested in the subculture inasmuch as their children are.
The grandparents have their bigotries, and some of them have almost universally . . . → Read More: Bigotry
Don’t say I never prepare you.
Here’s the Pinterest link.
Now, let’s just get it over with and say that the intentions behind this seem to be noble, and the designer of it seems to be wrestling with a paradox which he/she finishes by having the more pleasant side facing up. Very well.
In fact, over most of my life, I would have found this quite inspiring. It would not be my aim to discourage the designer.
My comment is that the paradox is vastly overstated, and perhaps is the wrong word.
The upper half operates solely on the premise of scale – if you are small, you are insignificant. In this sense, only the Universe taken as a whole has any significance because (as I understand), the next smallest unit is vastly smaller than the entire Universe. A super cluster of galaxies, or something, but there are enough of those that any single one is rather insignificant.
This is the mistake of a many atheists.
To address this in a preliminary way, the very smallest things are important in the sense that they compose all of the biggest things. If string theory is true, for example, then the shape, dimensionality, . . . → Read More: My critical thoughts on a Graphic Pin
No, I will not change the title.
If you haven’t had a change to read Ed’s terrific piece entitled Sex on this very blog please take the time to do so now.
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Ok good. I was reminded of his piece when coming across this story on the WSJ. There was a quote that really struck me
Even if we no longer believe in a deity, a degree of repression is seemingly necessary to our species and to the adequate functioning of a half-way ordered and loving society.
It’s sad to me, that in a day and time when pretty much every important piece of Catholic belief and theology can be had by simply going to the Vatican website, that Catholic moral teaching on sex is still represented as “repression.” Perhaps I should forward the author Ed’s excellent piece.
Now I don’t want to completely discredit the author. He’s attempting to make an important point – one that many in our culture are afraid to mention – that porn is bad. Like, life shatteringly bad. Like, men lose their jobs, homes, and families because of it bad. Yet in an increasingly permissive culture that doesn’t want anything negative to . . . → Read More: A riff on Ed’s “Sex”