Solipsism and Big Brother

'But how can you control matter?' he burst out. 'You don't even control the climate or the law of gravity. And there are disease, pain, death----'

O'Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. 'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

[...]

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'

1984, George Orwell

Our friends, the... crows?

This is a short and pretty wonderful talk at TED:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQAgzfwuNQ&feature=user

Share your ideas about what you think crows could do for us...

Nice...

"Tell me", Wittgenstein asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went round the Earth rather than the Earth was rotating". His friend replied: "Well obviously because it just looks as if the Sun is going round the Earth". To this Wittgenstein replied: "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?"

Is Lee Strobel pro-ID?

Judging from the fact that in most Christian bookshops in Spain we can find many of Lee Strobel's books, and judging form the fact that you'll struggle a lot to find only one Christian book that defends evolution (I never found any), it seems logical to assume that Strobel's books don't support evolution. Here you can find the evidence for this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_0WL1D5jOY&feature=related

Any opinions about this guy's argument?

Karl Barth and the Christian faith

"In history itself there is nothing, so far as the eye can see, that could provide a foundation for belief... In history itself everything could always also have been regarded as quite different. One should unequivocally hold that faith is based on revelation - on historical revelation to be sure, but on revelation; and one should get accustomed to thinking of revelation as a special category, as that unresolvable unity of happening, speaking and listening which is actually witnessed to in the Bible. Whoever wants to find revelation must find revelation and not something else, not something that revelation is as well. Otherwise he does not find revelation at all".

K. Barth

I think Barth comes closer to revealing his own position (among all these rather mysterious and cryptic paragraphs) in a casual remark:

"The more clearly the biblical witnesses of Jesus Christ speak, the more what they say gets lost in what we should today call the realm of pure legend".

In other words, the more clearly the Bible claims a revelation has occurred, the less reliable that passage is as history.

Barth's way of thinking here is rather weird: on the one hand he seems to share the historical judgement of liberal biblical scholars who thought that the events that reveal God's power in the Bible did not actually occur, but on the other he didn't follow them in disregarding these events and concentrating on something else. Rather he affirmed that the whole complex event of the Bible, which centred around those alleged revelations of God's power, was an indispensable part of a larger pattern of revelation.

This, to me, sounds like a lot of trickery focused on escaping the obvious conclusions to which your investigations are leading you. I can understand why people like Bultmann would get very angry when finding this dualistic view about the Bible. What I find harder to understand is why so many people today keep using these tricks in order to continue believing that which they suspect is not historically true anymore.

The truth of faith

"So what does it mean to claim that the truth affirmed by Christianity is not a description but an event, not a fact to be grasped but an incoming to be undergone? It means that the truth affirmed by Christianity is not primarily related to some external facts such as the age of certain Gospels or the particular facts contained in them. These are interesting and important issues that should be debated and reflected upon. However, the deep truth of Christianity is not found in the acceptance of some particular historical claim. Rather, it refers to a happening testified to within the Bible that cannot be reduced to words, confined in concepts, or divulged by definitions. The truth of Christianity is not something that can be reduced to intellectual affirmations or experiential moments that can be objectified and dissected by experts."

The fidelity of betrayal, Peter Rollins

So, what is it then? If the truth of Christianity (what makes it different from any other religion) doesn't depend on any historical happening such as, for example, the resurrection of Jesus, then: what does it depend on?

I have to recognize that I find this idea of letting Christianity be a religion based mainly (or most profoundly) on an unsearchable mystery a very tempting one. In this way (and this is not a criticism) Christianity can become anything I like: it can be the religion of my soul, pure subjectivity, not based on anything historical and completely and safely independent of the findings of any criticism that we can think of. In this way, it seems to me, Christianity becomes the perfect barthian religion, always separated from the realm of objective reality.

I have two problems with this. First, I am not sure that this way of understanding Christiniaty is fair to the way primitive Christians seemed to think of it - I remember that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians that if it can be shown that Jesus was never raised from the dead (a historical and objective fact) then his faith is vain (a subjective consequence). Second, this attempt to separate the Christ of faith from the historical facts of Jesus' life reminds me of Bultmann's way to do that very same thing. And if this is a fair comment, then I think Bultmann's attempt showed us why that wasn't a very good idea.

Hello, my uglies!

This is a new album by Rachel Austin. You can find it and listen to some of the songs here:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=60023848

The whole thing is really good (and it's not because I know her), but I specially like the fourth song: 'They said'. Very true...

Persepolis

This is a very worth watching film. Here you can access the trailer:

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/persepolis/

I recomend it. And after you watch it, share what you think!