"I believe in a teapot"
HOLALA. There is a teapot analogy to faith in religion, as in the theory of Bertrand Russell, as explained over a zillion lines on MSN (!) by pugnacious Mash(ed). I am in a disembodied space, floating among teapots. Ok...let me, very seriously, read it.
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot)
-Sorry I can't help but scoff at the debaters of religion (either way). Though that's not to say that I disagree with the analogy.
-To add on, I think Johnathan Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit will not only be more interesting, but entertaining too. That you can make yourself feel a certain sort of enthusiam or zeal, is very much a kind of mechanized process (eg. mass affirmation, group pressure) and an artifice. Don't trust your senses entirely! And at the same time, mock the scientists, the ones who search hard for a kind of truth, who come up with lofty, pretentious platitudes. And at the same time, be warned against trusting the (satirical) text itself. I digress.
-Although often I do feel that faith is much more complex (and paradoxically, simple). Of course like anything else, susceptible and informed by circumstances. But it becomes so much a part of you, something personal, just to say "I believe" (whether in religion, or in technology, or just in anything inspiring), that it is somewhat impossible to accurately define it.
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot)
-Sorry I can't help but scoff at the debaters of religion (either way). Though that's not to say that I disagree with the analogy.
-To add on, I think Johnathan Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit will not only be more interesting, but entertaining too. That you can make yourself feel a certain sort of enthusiam or zeal, is very much a kind of mechanized process (eg. mass affirmation, group pressure) and an artifice. Don't trust your senses entirely! And at the same time, mock the scientists, the ones who search hard for a kind of truth, who come up with lofty, pretentious platitudes. And at the same time, be warned against trusting the (satirical) text itself. I digress.
-Although often I do feel that faith is much more complex (and paradoxically, simple). Of course like anything else, susceptible and informed by circumstances. But it becomes so much a part of you, something personal, just to say "I believe" (whether in religion, or in technology, or just in anything inspiring), that it is somewhat impossible to accurately define it.
posted by angeline at 6:15 PM
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