Apologies (accepted) & Napkins (used well)

Greetings Russell and Friends,

Much of my reading and writing this week has been in the comments concerning my last post on God’s goodness or lack thereof.  That is a new and exciting way to interact with our new friends – – something that we’ve seen modeled on several of their blogs.  Much of the content in these blogs is in the comments.  So we’re slowly addressing your reasons for doubt and unfolding the map to your intellect and heart.  I find your mind to be fascinating, likely because it is very different from mine.  I also find it fascinating when you and your wife J (aka CC) write each other from the same room.  Fascinating, and completely valid.  She said the following after you apologized for the length of your comments.

Your napkin drawing (that happened on paper, but same idea) was far more effective. Even if you has said the same thing in many thousands of words, I think fatigue would have prevented me (and perhaps others) from getting it. Are there readers who skip your comments altogether because of the length (knowing that they don’t have time in the Subway line)? You have so much to offer that I don’t want it to be missed for that reason.

I need to accept your apology and resist my impulse to reassure you that apologies are never needed.  That impulse does not honor the reality of friendship.  When I apologize I would rather have that apology accepted than deferred.  Why do I accept your apology?  Because I recently found myself in a Subway line trying to engage the blog content and I couldn’t attend to your very good comment, primarily because of length.  I read and scrolled, scrolled and read, gave up, then ordered a six-inch wheat black forest ham toasted with pepper jack cheese, green peppers, red onions, black olives, banana peppers, spicy mustard and a little bit of sriracha sauce.  I woke at four this morning intending to read every single one of your comments.  I’m actually a slow, plodding reader – – speed reading is anathema to me.  And I did, but it took two hours to do so thoughtfully.  Smaller bites and clarifying questions is good advice from your bride.

What about napkins?  That is a favorite strategy of ours when we meet for breakfast.  Back of the envelope analogies fail because the only envelopes I seem to have contain junk mail and I rarely have them at breakfast.  Likewise, we have never eaten together at a restaurant with cloth napkins.  I’m not saying that we couldn’t write on those napkins, just that it could get a little strange or tense.  In the napkin above I’ve illustrated a general taxonomy which may or may not be correct.  The horizontal axis represents a way of thinking – – like you or me.  The vertical axis represents a skeptical or theistic belief.  I’ve taken the liberty of asserting that you think the most like you and I think the most like me.  We serve as paradigmatic members of the quadrants:  you the Russell-like skeptic, me the Pascal-like theist.  Then I’ve assigned several of our more active writers to the quadrants as I see them.  I chose Madalyn for my way of thinking, albeit with very different beliefs, primarily because I find her writing style very easy to read.  I chose Howie for your way of thinking because when he first came by I thought you had adopted another pseudonym.  And so forth – – it’s a bit like picking teams for dodgeball.  It would be better for people to assign themselves – – then I could redraw the napkin, although I did find the creative effort to be draining.

Why a tangential discussion about napkins?  Because I’ve taken so many tangents this week trying to see how we see things differently.  Did you know that Bertrand Russell was an opponent of coherentism as an epistemic strategy?  I did not.  Did you know that Soren Kierkegaard requires too many special characters in the correct spelling of his name to be my favorite philosopher?  That was a joke (although true).  He’s not my favorite philosopher because I don’t have one yet.  Kierkegaard valued the subjective in his understanding of truth.  I didn’t know that, but I’ve encountered him before in many readings and it is probably time to go to the source.  My tangential responses to your comments and your linearity help me to learn and also to respect that I many not ever be able to reply to you in kind.  I understand your objections, I just don’t process the world that way.  And that is okay.  I’ll do my best.  Let’s have breakfast this week.

For our friends — which napkin quadrant would you place yourself in?  Any takers for the lonely square?  If you are one of the 8-in-ink and consider yourself misdrawn I am prepared to revise.

Pascal

–1:16

photo credit:  the napkin on the table, Pascal, my own work Creative Commons share and share alike

The Breakfast Table

Dear Russell and Friends,

I’m sitting at the same table we leaned on last night.  The table above is just a depiction, but evokes the memory and stirs my hope just the same.  At the table we were seven with a little Pascal darting in and out on spare occasions.  It was a better table than the taco booth.  It was hard dark wood and smithed cold metal with warm lines of approach.  It was not plastic, cramped, or formica.  Our nucleus was complete with our brides J and Mrs. Pascal there.  The valences of friends were three and strong.  Yes – – I just spent 15 minutes with a fantastic high school chemistry powerpoint deck on the periodic table.  Thank you anonymous chemistry teacher and internet Alexandria.  By the way – – you’re a noble gas and I’m an alkali metal, best kept dry.

In person we gained what is so difficult in writing.  We had synchrony.  What writing wins in posterity it loses in the ability to speed, slow, watch, listen, and sub-cognitively interpret what is said and heard, implied and felt.  Smile, posture, tone of voice and stuttering silence were all apparent to me.  I felt at times like an extracorporeal observer.  I suppose for all except myself, I was.  This from a man who claims to love writing in fact to see the world through a writer’s lens.  In person was better.  But here I am at that table.  The sun rose quickly, the grass is greening and birds sing the elegy of night’s retreat.

I asked our readers, some of whom are becoming friends, where to go with this blog after I finished telling the first part of my story.  J was the strongest voice asking for a back and forth about your 42 reasons.  She wants to be convinced and I honestly think you do too.  I just can’t do it.  We will live and die with different ways of seeing the world, different criteria for being convinced, different emphases on the subjective and objective vicissitudes of life.  Madalyn expressed my views well.  Can we respect each other and try to understand each other?  Can we find room in the middle for a rustic table?  That is more where my heart, mind, and soul lie.  I invited a different couple to Détente last night.  They are the age of my older brother, mature, kind, generous, engaged, faithful to work and each other.  She is an agnostic who likes Karen Armstrong’s last book.  He an atheist who likes her first.  They are an amazing couple who love each other and care deeply about other people.  I wanted you and J to see a healthy couple who do not follow Christ but do model his care for humanity.  They care about the homosexual community, racially discounted, urban poor, and those without access to strong education.  I liked this couple when I met them – – just like I liked you and J.

This isn’t only your journey.  As I explained last night, I was raised with inherent biases against gay people, or worse – – Democrats.  These biases are hard to deconstruct.  I was also raised with an abiding love for Christ and the Bible.  The latter has inspired me to leave the former biases.  Just as you and I have come to very different conclusions about the usefulness of scripture, I feel as if my conclusions about people and politics are isolating in the evangelical strands of Christianity that I know best.

The only thing that really bothers me about the journey you and J are on?  You’re leading a double life, expending enormous energy by maintaining a lie.  You’re having to remember who knows what when.  Just tell the truth to real people in person.  “We want to believe, but we don’t right now.”  I can promise one thing and hold myself accountable to any who read here.  You can leave Christ and not leave me.  I will not isolate my circle to an echo chamber reinforcing my own views.  My circle includes you, at the rustic table, in person and here.

This post may feel like a pivot.  Probably because it is a pivot.  I am a strong believer in failure as a teacher and I felt as if I failed you and myself over the past two weeks.  Your posts were not the problem.  I’m glad that you’ve outlined a cogent reason for your non-belief that can allow others to be more authentic.  I will indeed reply to several points that you raised about the Bible.  How can I reconcile the concept that one error causes the whole house of cards to collapse?  Do I think God is bad?  And that’s about where I’ll stop.  Books have been written for and against, and that’s not the book I intend to write.  What about Victoria’s comment post on Miracles?  That deeply affected me and deserves a reply.  What would I like to see from you?  More positive assertions.  You are a positive and gentle person who loves his wife and daughters.  Could you please tell our friends about your curiosity alarm?

Pascal,

–1:16

 

photocredit:  ogstore.com

Counting Threads

 

Dear Russell and Friends,

This reply has been hard to write just as this week’s breakfast was hard to digest.  I’m afraid that my response to our words in person was similar to my response to the gentle words that you wrote in the last post:  anger.  Instead of replying, I decided to say nothing for a while.  Isn’t it better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt?  Anger.  Not my favorite emotion, but there it was.  What business have I trafficking in anger to gentle, respectful, and reasonable words?  Perhaps with very different styles we both do better in writing.  There is time to check and recheck:  the eraser, backspace or even rubbish bin if it doesn’t read back right.  In person we are there, welcomed into a circle of fellowship and contention.  I do remember what we argued about.  I thanked you for posting on Tuesday but confessed that I had not read it yet.  You warned me that some of the words could come off as if you were angry, but assured me that you were not.  We talked about ways to live and why I thought the ten commandments provided a good start, acknowledging that the anchor of authority was the Hebrew God.  You said there were two incompatible versions of the ten commandments.  I blanched.  I don’t regularly read the Hebrew scriptures besides Psalms and Proverbs.  I usually read the New Testament once in a year.  This year, and perhaps five others in adult life, I endeavored to read the entire Bible.  On the morning of our breakfast I was in Deuteronomy (the second giving of the law) and had very recently read the second giving of the ten commandments in Deuteronomy 5.  I thought that I knew Exodus 20 fairly well when it was given the first time.  In a booth, in a moment, I cried foul.  Show me.  I could pretend to be noble and say that I was thinking, “come let us reason together.”  No – – I was much less noble.  I was thinking, “bullshit.”

[insert parenthetical]  Why talk, write, argue in public?  I am so flawed and this is so messy.  Friendship is messy.  Love is messy.  These discussions can should happen with friends. But friendship usually involves then survives injury.  I would rather tell the truth than spin myself to death in vertigo. [parenthetical done]

I asked who had taught you how to study the Bible.  I truthfully admitted that I had not been taught and suggested that the same might be true for you.  And then we left.  I’ve been thinking about it since.  Allow two reflections on my anger?  To me this topic and you are important.  If either were not I could answer, or not answer, with apathy.  The Bible has an interesting take on anger:  be angry and sin not.  Much easier commanded than actualized.  As much as possible, I want to spend little time in anger because I usually can’t follow the imperative to divorce it from sin.  Over five hundred words without me mentioning the trustworthiness of the Bible.  Me evasive?  Never.  This is the first second time I’ve used profanity on the blog.  The first?  My response to your comment on When to give, Where to stand.  Dammit Russell.

Back to work.

“The questions then press thick and fast, as they did for both Jews and Christians in the pagan diaspora:  What counts as loyalty and disloyalty?  What counts as dangerous compromise, and what as wise flexibility?  When do you resist, when do you run away, when do you stay and try to improve things from within?”  Surprised by Scripture, N.T. Wright, p. 184

The brief N.T. Wright interview that I read and linked to in my first WWRR post introduced a topic, but begged for context.  Madalyn said much the same and offered that I could, perhaps should, go deeper.  She was right so I ordered the book and completed it yesterday.  The second chapter is titled, “Do We Need a Historical Adam?”  From the faith perspective that I grew up in, even the question is disrespectful.  To doubt a literal Genesis and a young earth was to doubt Jesus, the resurrection and everything else precious.

This is part of the dichotomy that I now see as false.  If Genesis is not literal, can scripture still be inerrant, infallible, God-breathed (inspired) and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness?  I can approach this from a few angles:

1)  The scripture was useful to me in recognizing, but not acting upon my anger in sin.  I was able to find solace in 1 Corinthians 13, reminding me that love is patient and kind.  If I dwelled in anger, that would work against the call to love.

2)  The scripture was useful to me in correcting my errant path.  I turned back (repented).

3)  The scripture was useful to me for training in righteousness.  Training implies a perpetual preparation.  I am hopeful that I’ll become more like Christ with age, maturity, and constant use.  Scripture will be my measure.

4)  I don’t believe in a literal Adam or a six day creation.  That is not surprising for my skeptical colleagues, but what about for the loved sisters and brothers with whom I’m about to fellowship?  It would be very surprising, perhaps threatening, for some.  Like our Taco Tuesday, it could provoke anger.  I should be careful.

5)  I think in metaphorical language.  If Genesis is the story of transition from prehominid woman to humans in recorded civilization then what value does it have?  Is there still a creation?  Yes.  Is there still a creator?  Yes.  Does the creator communicate with his creations?  Yes.  Can these creations worship themselves as in Romans 1?  Yes.  Is there a Problem deeper than a generalized misunderstanding of logical fallacy?  Yes.  Much deeper.

6)  You know that I love studying science and even practice it in an applied manner.  The m-verse doesn’t solve a problem for me.  The m-verse doesn’t expand the denominator of time to infinity where anything can happen.  The m-verse can not redefine nothing.  Quantum fluctuation is not nothing.  I find it intellectually coherent to say that our observable universe began with low entropy because God created it with order.  I still find it compelling that a beginning begs a beginner. Ex nihilo nihil fit

7)  So my view of scripture has changed.  It no longer bothers me to consider that the creation story in Genesis was a myth (story to teach truth:  not a fiction).

You emphasized the following in your post:

N.T. Wright seems to be saying that if we start discussing why the Bible can be trusted, we’re missing the point of scripture. That is not a satisfactory answer. We must each make up our mind. Is the Bible without error, or might it have some error (in the intent of the original writings)? We must acknowledge the problems listed in the Inerrancy? post. It is not a distracting topic that misses the point. It is the foundation of trust for the whole Bible.

I disagree with you.  I’m not angry and I don’t plan to revisit that place often.  That said, I’m lying if I say all goes according to plan.  I feel that you have been counting threads and missing the tapestry.  The metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration is useful to my understanding of the world and in the imperative of how to live.  Does that make me a pragmatist like William James?  Maybe so.  I live in a pragmatic world.

Could other worldviews work?  Allow me to address my favorite:  Buddhism.  There is so much in Buddhism that endears itself to me.  Compassion.  I do think that is the answer.  I just don’t think that attachment or even suffering is the problem.  Because Buddhism offers the right answer, even to the wrong question in my opinion, it largely works.  I could live like a Buddhist and follow Christ well.  Or I could follow Christ and have the same answer to a better question.  In the scientific method, the question matters.

Your two questions were:

Questions

If you believe the Bible is without error in any sense (the meaning or letter of the original authors’ intentions, etc.), do you have a reason that doesn’t depend on the Bible’s claims about itself? How certain are you in your belief and can you justify your level of certainty in the face of The Problem and what other believers say about their sacred texts?

My non-biblical reason is pragmatic.  With scripture I have the tools to criticize my own heart, to overcome my own biases and to change.  I have the tools to turn (repent) when I’m wrong and the instruction to pursue humility and patience – – difficult character traits.  I don’t elevate the problem you reference above to The Problem.  On that we fundamentally disagree.  I must recognize my own cognitive fallacies rather than focusing on others – – on that we fundamentally agree.  How do I compare my beliefs to those of others?  Is the question right?  Is the answer right?  What do I do with both?

If you believe the Bible has errors, how do you have confidence in which parts are true? Why trust it in claims regarding the supernatural?

My core belief that God created is supernatural, isn’t it?  That is why it is not my chief cornerstone of faith but is a cornerstone nonetheless.  In this edifice, all corners bear load.  If I believe God created, and have no dissonance in accepting mechanisms of a bang, abiogenesis, and evolution writ large, then cognitive resonance and coherence results.

I know that we’re still friends.  I know that because I know your character which is naturally more gentle and respectful than my own.  I’m beginning to understand my character.  I hope to more as life progresses.  My character also allows for disagreement with friends, perhaps even yearns for it.  I look forward to our next time in person – – Détente number 3.

Pascal

–1:16

photo credit:  Resurrection of Christ tapestry, the Vatican

 

 

Another Year?

Dear Russell & Friends,

Another year.  Another year?  I remember us sitting at this table the Friday night before our first post setting up the parameters of the blog.  It leaked into Saturday morning.  We had picked our pseudonyms a week before.  No one has mentioned the connection to Ender’s Game.  Perhaps we have forgotten too – – am I Demosthenes or Locke?  I can’t remember.  I do remember the hesitation I had in titling my first post Why I am Not a Christian.  Would anyone get the irony?  It felt like an opening move in chess.  Then two weeks later, your post Why I am Not a Christian.  43 reasons.  Damn.  At least drop one and claim to have the answer to life, the universe, and everything.  Have I understood at least one of those reasons better?  The question has significance.  I used to argue. In honest truth, I enjoyed it – – probably still do.  What changed? Maybe years have added maturity.  I’m 42 now.  I do have the answer to life, the universe, and everything, so why flaunt it?  But I don’t think maturity is the answer – – maybe part of it, but not the answer.

You are the answer.  After two years of meeting we are becoming friends.  It takes time and we’re spending it. The more I know you, the harder it is for me to be irritated when I disagree.  You have no idea how much I disagree.  That’s not true – – I think you know very well.  But I see your motives, see your family, see you (African sense) and I’m not offended anymore.

What of our others – – those who join to read and write?  Where did they come from?  Our first other is your first other – – CC.  I hate that name, but love her.  She is an authentic doubter, not a Counterfeit Christian.  CC writes and thinks like me but with a woman’s perspective and with more talent.  She wanted me to befriend you, hoping I would change your mind.  That may never have been the goal – – we’ll have to ask her.  She loves you and wanted you to have another friend besides her.  I hope you know now that she’ll never leave you even if you never come back to faith – – and neither will I.

Why have others joined?  She brought some.  In the longest tail called the internet we have found an eclectic micro-niche of people who may wish to understand each other and build bridges.  We have called for and tried to model humility from both skeptical and believing perspectives.  Others just came.  You thought it was my posts on Romans.  Good gracious.  You could paper the walls of Grand Central Station with commentaries on Romans – – it was written almost two thousand years ago.  You may be right – – I’m just not sure.

Regardless of the reason, I have to balance my unattractive tendency to rejoice in growing statistics with a deeper and more noble desire to share what we’re building here.  I look forward to your post today.  It may be (insert sardonic smile) longer than mine.  It will be you – – someone I have grown to love.

Your brother,

Pascal

–1:16

 

photo credit:  old calendar, wikimedia commons, public domain

Two Way Street – – my heart for believers

 

Dear Russell & Friends,

We’re less than a week away from the first anniversary of our writing adventure.  We shall reclaim Friday the 13th for something useful.  As confessed before, I find myself reflective – – almost in a New Year’s Eve-y kind of mood.  Why are we here?  Does it matter?  Recent comments have reminded me.  We are here to form friendships that can ask hard questions in the dining room.  I used to think the family room, but Mrs. Pascal won’t routinely let me eat in there.  Something else has struck me as I better read and understand my friend CC (Russell’s wife).  My call is forming to the skeptical – – I honestly find so many to be so likeable and interesting.  My call is also forming to revise the hearts of people like me who ignored, reviled, or discounted them for so long.  I actually do love the church – – not a building, but a community of Christ followers.  And because I love the church, I am willing to humbly criticize it – – realizing that the first to be criticized is me.

What did I need to hear?  Avoiding the skeptic and painting her with a thin haired brush is too pious by half. She does care about justice and mercy because she was made in the image of God – – whether she has acknowledged that God or not.  She does things that are:  true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.  Think on those things.

What did I need to hear?  Is there anything in my life or theology that is attractive or worthy of imitation?  Has it become about social acceptability and one-off platitudes for me?  Should I defend a broken American church or work to reform her?  I’m landing more on the side of the latter.  Love reforms.  Love criticizes his own heart, his own family, his own motives.

What did I need to hear?  Will I tolerate the continued scandal of the evangelical mind, or join the heritage of the Jesuits and engage my mind, culture, and tribe of humanity?

What did I need to hear?  The health and wealth gospel that I was raised with was a false gospel.  Joel Osteen is a false prophet.  The authentic gospel (discovered in my twenties) changed my whole life.  The authentic gospel saved the greatest wrath for the pharisee, not the sinner.  I have been both.  Remember the mercy you were given Pascal – – how dare you not offer it freely to another?

I am grateful for our friends and readers who follow Christ.  You may be the silent majority.  I hope that reading here will change the inclination of your heart just as writing here has done for me.  If we take Jesus seriously, how can we not weep for the pain caused in his name?  How can we not stand for something different in our generation?  St. Augustine saw the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD and died with the Vandals at the gate in North Africa.  He stood in a time of transition and was called to speak truth to his generation – – remember that he wrote to the church.  Now we stand in the post-modern, pre-future chasm.  Can’t we just call it the present?  What will we do?  We will care about our generation and reclaim the authentic gospel that deeply cares about people and profoundly transforms lives.  If we present an authentic gospel, it can rise or fall on its own merits.  I will no longer defend or tolerate the false.

 

Blessings,

Pascal

–1:16

photo credit:  © Frank Schulenburg / CC-BY-SA-3.0, via wikimedia commons

Détente

On Friday evening, Pascal and his lovely wife did something amazing. They opened their home and invited me, my wife (CC from The Counterfeit Christian), and six other people (including their oldest son and a couple that we’d only previously met as bloggers here) to sit down with food, wine, and fellowship. We each listened intently to those with sometimes similar, and sometimes wildly different world-views — but we did so with gentleness and respect. Free from hostility we were able to be open and vulnerable. This environment was very refreshing and led to real connections. We were each advocates of the legitimacy of our adversaries as people, which often led us to legitimize one another’s point of view.

CC wrote about her experience that night in this excellent post that I’m reblogging.

When Pascal and I started the online adventure that is russellandpascal.com, we hoped it could grow to be more than a blog. Gentleness and respect was and is more than a tag-line — its a recipe for understanding and friendship. Our meetings originally started across a physical breakfast table and continue there. The blog is just one medium of our communication. We wanted the meaning behind the blog to be a movement that reached into lives of people.

CC describes a ripple effect in her post, and that’s a bit like what’s happened here. This blog is just another tiny pebble dropping in the pond. We didn’t start the ripple, it’s been emanating for thousands of years — but we do want to join it. We hope that each of you will take it to your own communities and the effect will grow.

Pascal decided to call this meeting a détente, which means the easing of hostility or strained relations. It’s now a monthly affair. Consider opening your homes and lives to those of different points of view in your own détente.

Questions

If someone cared enough to invite you to a meeting like this, would you go? Why or why not?

Would you consider hosting a détente of your own? Why or why not?

Gentleness and respect,
—Russell

The Counterfeit Christian

Détente, n: The easing of strained relations

It’s my friend Pascal’s word. I guess it’s really anybody’s word, but he was the first in my circle to use it in the context I’m writing about.

Where is the tension? What relations are strained? So many. I’ll start on the inside and work my way out.

There’s a battle within me. I want to believe, but I can’t intellectually justify it. The tension is so great that I’m discovering that it’s the one thing I can’t really even talk about with my usual eloquence. I can’t figure out the denouement of my own story.

When I try to tell it, I start with the background story of why my faith matters to me in the first place. I went through times when it was the only reason I had enough hope to keep living. My faith told me that God…

View original post 1,598 more words

My Approach to Skeptical Friends: A Guest Post

Mike from Canada invited guest blog entries. He was pleasant to a fault and presented my post unaltered. I encourage you to visit his site, godlesscranium.com as well.
Pascal
–1:16

Boiling it Down

Greetings friends,

In Russell’s post introducing the Ask an Atheist (or Christian) series Howie posed the following:

What group (denomination, organization, etc.), person, book, podcast, and/or video would you pick that comes closest to describing your own way of seeing reality?

I replied that the most influential non-biblical text in my life is The Call, by Os Guinness.  It is.  I gave my last annotated copy to a dear friend who was struggling with faith.  I have another copy.  I’ll read it again and write more, probably different notes in the margins.  That book is probably why I’m here.  I’m 42 years old and I still ask, “what should I be when I grow up?”  The thesis of that book:  be and do what you are.  I think that my life calling may be to reach out to the skeptical in my generation and to reach in to my precious brothers and sisters in faith so that we don’t lose compassion or leave others behind.

But, despite sharing a part of my bliss with Howie, did I answer the question well?  I tend to be less thorough in my answers than Russell.  Did that book come closest to my own way of seeing reality, or did this?

 

Meet the Durants.  Then, if you can spare 5 hours in aggregate (I listened for the third time in 6 months in the car), listen to  this summary of their life work.  Although I prefer hardback books with a pen in my hand, this is one experience where listening is superior.  In the edition linked above, you’ll hear the delightful voices of Will and Ariel interviewed at the end of every chapter.

I bought the Story of Civilization in a yard sale for a dollar a book.  It was on the top shelf, waiting for retirement.  I’m not waiting any more.  I just finished volume 2 and will begin volume 3 after an interlude with Sean Carroll.

Why does this work represent my way of seeing reality most closely?  Probably because I am remediating a liberal arts education.  My education in STEM and subsequent teaching career required reams of technical reading with little time for arts and history.  That’s not true.  I had the same amount of time that I have now – – 24 hours a day with an average of 6 off for sleep.  My priorities on how to spend that time were different.  That’s true.

I’ll discuss science to the best of my capability and honestly, my capability is higher than the average blog reader or writer in that space.  Russell’s capacity in that domain surpasses mine.  But there is more.  That’s my argument.  There are different kinds of evidence that should be considered in the search for truth.  The integrated experience of billions over thousands of years seems a good place to start.  I’m making the 11 volume journey with the Durants.  If you’d like to meet them and understand how I think (it is plastic) then the digest above in Lessons is a great place to start.

Would other readers care to answer Howie’s question?  It was a good one.

Pascal

–1:16

photo credit:  SuSanA Secretariat [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons