Khari > Recent Status Updates

Once the...idea of a total difference...between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we're backing our side in the struggle for existence, it's only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reasons.

Combatants always tend to imagine that the war is further on that it really is.

"An increased interest in [Christianity], or even a growing measure of intellectual assent to it, is a very different thing from the conversion of England or even of a single soul. Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural."

"The 'decline of religion' so often lamented (or welcomed) is held to be shown by empty chapels. Now it is quite true that chapels which were full in 1900 are empty in 1945. But this change was not gradual. It occurred at the precise moment when chapel ceased to be compulsory. It was not in fact a decline; it was a precipice."

"Who does his best to keep you from talking too much and eating too much by giving you dry throats and headaches and indigestion? Eh?' 'And what about sex?' said I. 'Yes, what about it?' retorted the Body. 'If you and your wretched imagination would leave me alone I'd give you no trouble. That's Soul all over; you give me orders and then blame me for carrying them out."

"You are always dragging me down,' said I to my Body. 'Dragging you down!' replied my Body. 'Well I like that! Who taught me to like tobacco and alcohol? You, of course, with your idiotic adolescent idea of being "grown-up." My palate loathed both at first: but you would have your way. Who put an end to all those angry and revengeful thoughts last night? Me, of course, by insisting on going to sleep..."

Well, at least this next essay doesn't quote Foucault or Marx and it is written in an understandable way in the introduction.

Why am I reading the third book of a series where I didn't like the first two?!?!!?

Completionism is a curse.

"The greatest [attempt at a minimal religion] was that simplification of Jewish and Christian traditions which we call Islam. But it retained many elements which Professor Price would regard as mythical and barbaric, and its culture is by no means one of the richest or most progressive."

"Mathematicians, astronomers and physicists are often religious, even mystical; biologists much less often; economists and psychologists very seldom indeed. It is as their subject matter comes nearer to man himself that their anti-religious bias hardens."

"We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment."

"In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumor that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility."

"Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others."

"Where the tide flows towards increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always be treated an enemy."

"We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else's fault-the Capitalists', the Government's, the Nazis', the Generals', etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world."

Yes. He described the current age perfectly.

"It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books...It is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian."

Alas, we have not heeded this advice.

"What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects-with their Christianity latent...Our faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us...

"Sentences beginning 'Science has now proven' should be avoided. If we try to base our apologetic on some recent development in science, we shall, usually find that just as we have put the finishing touches to our argument science has changed its mind and quietly withdrawn the theory we have been using as our foundation stone."

"There will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A liberal Christianity which considers itself free to alter the faith whenever the faith looks perplexing or repellent, must be completely stagnant. Progress is only made into a resisting material."

"The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or you think it good for society or something of that sort."

"In short, the majority of women experienced 'women's language' not so much as its producer but as its (gendered) consumer. They 'heard' modern women 'speaking' in the novels and the magazines."

This might actually be true. Or at least true in the idea that fictional women in Japanese literature speak in a more gendered way than actual women...that I think could be argued with data.

"The rise of women's language is thus inescapably connected with the development of consumer culture."

As if Japanese women of the past weren't involved in purchasing? Or does she mean the purchasing of written material?

Granted I haven't even read a paragraph of this book in a couple of months, but the conclusion of a paper is not the place to slip in an explanation that hasn't been discussed before. Where was the photograph and colonial education mentioned as a contributing factor to the way that women in the Meiji period spoke?

How did I ever read this stuff and find it convincing?

That paragraph is entirely circular. According to it, the development of the modern concept of language (whatever that means) was both its own cause and its own effect.

Not only that, but it was influenced by things as disparate as colonial education and the photograph. Indeed that they were directly responsible for its rise...just one question. How?

"Precisely the same new 'modern' conception of language that enabled and was enabled by the development of rational bureaucracy, the universal education system, nationalism, the military, the print media, colonial education, science and technology, and mimetic apparatuses such as stenography, the photograph, and the phonograph made possible the emergence of women's language, the sign of Japanese culture and tradition

"Nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her."