Taylor Weber > Recent Status Updates

“… [The Church] has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel.”

“Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales; we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough.“

"The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. The philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist."

Attia just explained how gum health, handgrip, exercise, and sleep contribute to reduced risk for Alzheimer’s. These are things I (very generally) learned in school, but I’ve never understood the “why” until now. Medicine 3.0 is awesome.

Continuing to really enjoy this book. I appreciate that Attia is willing to get “in the weeds” with the science / theory backing his argument. It pushes the reader to really seek understanding!

I’m already quoting/referencing several of Attia’s insights to many of my patients. Thankful to read a book steeped in science, and so applicable to my everyday work.

“… the Christian worldview offers a grounding for altruism and a reason to dare to believe that ultimate justice is more than a delusionary longing in the illusionary mind of the collection of atoms you mistakenly call “me.”

“To say that Christianity and Islam or Islam and Hinduism are just two sides of the same truth coin reduces pluralism to a patronizing posture by which we don’t respect others enough to take their beliefs seriously.”

"If you put control-oriented, analytical people in an individualistic, urban environment, give them a sense that the world will one day be better than it is now, and suffuse them with a conviction that there is an intelligence behind all things whose secrets are just waiting to be unveiled, then you would expect such a society to value novelty and discovery - even if most of them remain religiously devout farmers."

“Industrialization is a Promethean triumph as well as a Frankensteinian monster. Which of the two metaphors predominates - whether running water compensates for Hiroshima, or antibiotics for the Somme, or the growth in wealth for the overweening pride that accompanies it - probably depends on where you are sitting.”

Gradually, churches would replace the Church, which would lead inexplicably to calls for religious tolerance and then religious pluralism, and ultimately the privatization of religion. It would also contribute to the rising prestige of experimental science… [which gave] the same results whether you were Protestant or Catholic, [and] made it a prime candidate to replace the church as the empire of modern thought.

Reading this book several months after finishing Trueman’s “Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” is unintentionally timely. Lotsssss of tie-in between the two (Wilson has even referenced Trueman’s book several times).