Sea Shells

[poliphilo]

Explain to me again why we have winter and summer.

It's because the earth tilts on its axis as it flies round the sun and, um, er, something like that...

Sherlock Holmes pretended not to know even that the earth went round the sun. He didn't want to clutter up his peerless brain with useless information.

It amazes me the things scientists say they know. Like the age of the universe and the size of it and all that stuff about black holes.

I take these things on trust, just as I used to take things on trust from bishops and theologians.

I feel uneasy sometimes about being so scornful of creationists. Could I convincingly expound Darwin's Theory of Evolution? Could I fuck!

If Newton said he was like a man picking up shells on the edge of a vast ocean, what does that make me?

I know this, that and the other. Or think I do. Most of it at second-hand.

The leaves turn brown. The air smells cold...

Comments

[ibid.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons why I say Science is a religion!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was watching a programme about black holes.

The arguments about what happens inside a black hole aren't so far from patristic debates about the nature of angels and involve concepts all but impossible to visualise or otherwise imagine.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I am fascinated by how much supposedly objective science is influenced by the zeitgeist - looking over Darwin I was surprised at how chauvanistic he was.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

That's something I've never heard said before. Our society goes in awe of the man. We tiptoe round his reputation- rather as religious people tiptoe round their popes and prophets- but most of us (and I include myself in this) have never actually read him.

[ibid.livejournal.com]

Check the ascent of man. It is full of 'proof' at how the lower orders are suited to their role in society because they have larger hands than the intellectual classes. He was surprised at how intellegent the Fijians seemed and he was acually quite larmarkian. This is not to deny the value of his ideas but I think Dawkins et al ignore a lot.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Finally, even the weatherman must look out his window.

I'm off to church, where I am baffled, frustrated, and sometimes despressed, because what do they know? They know as much as I do, which is pretty much nothing.

If there wasn't a choir, I think I'd quit. That's what I think this morning. And it's getting to be a drag to get up, find my music, drive through traffic--all to sing, and then shut out as best I can the voice in my head that says, "What are you doing here, you hypocrite?"

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

And yet, the music was the one thing in the church service that made me feel closer to the Diety. Choir was why I attended church long after I discovered my questions had no answers.

[(Anonymous)]

Music I think offers what Werner Herzog calls an ecstatic truth - which is probably better than all the debating in the world.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's difficult.

I chose to quit, as you know, but then I didn't have the music to keep me hanging on. I'm tone deaf.

A lot of people keep going to church because it gives them an aesthetic experience.

I don't think it's hypocrisy to love Church music while hating what gets said from the pulpit.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

The winter and summer thing I don't have a problem with. I have a fairly firm grasp on that. The light has changed here, even though it's still warm enough to require air conditioning (in the 90's).

But I have a similar problem with the moon. What happens to the moon when it's new? Why are monkeys named after a stage of the moon? And so on.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Monkeys are named after a phase of the moon?- I didn't know that.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never checked on this; it's one of those things that sits in the back of my brain, the kind of thing that you excel at bringing out.

I think they can both be gibbous. Now, of course, I should probably look it up, but I'm not going to. I'm probably full of shit.

Japanese people don't see a man in the moon, they see a rabbit pounding rice cake (mochi).

[four-thorns.livejournal.com]

the moon is gibbous, but the monkeys you're thinking of are called gibbons. i don't think there's any relation...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gibbous is a lovely word. It sounds really sinister, I guess because it looks like it ought to have something to do with gibbets- which it doesn't.