mardi, janvier 25, 2005
YO TWITCHY - SIT STILL!
I was getting very irritated in my religion class today with the dude sitting next to me. Loud sighs every ten minutes, numerous glances at the clock, twitching, fidgeting, tapping, pen-clicking. Fucking distracting when you're trying to pay attention to the lecture. GRR.
We're learning about the writings of J.L. Mackie (he's apparently a critic of "theism", which is belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world), and about the "free world defense". Something about how if God created beings that were predisposed to always choose good over evil, then technically they didn't have free will. And having a world in which the creatures have free will has better moral value than a world that does not. Or something like that... We've also covered a lot of the relative necessity of evil. As in, if the world only consisted of "good", we wouldn't know it, because we would have nothing to compare it to. Etcetera, etcetera...
Philosophy of Religion is a challenging course - there are a lot of abstract ideas to grasp. Having been raised with a certain narrow viewpoint on what "God" means (i.e. the protestant Christian interpretation), and having, umm, outgrown that limited definition, I don't really subscribe to the underlying beliefs of these mainly Christian philosophies. Mostly we just have to familiarize ourselves with each writer's theories and criticisms of each other. It's pretty interesting.
In his attempt to clarify the notion of "possible worlds" to us, Harvey asked the class if any of us were committing any evil as we sat there. The notion is that if we can observe limited groups of people who, for limited periods of time, are abstaining from all evil, then we can conceive of a world where everybody is engaged in non-evil at all times; a possible world, although not actual. I was pretty annoyed with buddy beside me at that point, and I was actually pretty close to saying that HE was committing evil by making it impossible for me to get maximum benefit from the lecture. Sheesh. | ¶ 7:20 p.m.
We're learning about the writings of J.L. Mackie (he's apparently a critic of "theism", which is belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world), and about the "free world defense". Something about how if God created beings that were predisposed to always choose good over evil, then technically they didn't have free will. And having a world in which the creatures have free will has better moral value than a world that does not. Or something like that... We've also covered a lot of the relative necessity of evil. As in, if the world only consisted of "good", we wouldn't know it, because we would have nothing to compare it to. Etcetera, etcetera...
Philosophy of Religion is a challenging course - there are a lot of abstract ideas to grasp. Having been raised with a certain narrow viewpoint on what "God" means (i.e. the protestant Christian interpretation), and having, umm, outgrown that limited definition, I don't really subscribe to the underlying beliefs of these mainly Christian philosophies. Mostly we just have to familiarize ourselves with each writer's theories and criticisms of each other. It's pretty interesting.
In his attempt to clarify the notion of "possible worlds" to us, Harvey asked the class if any of us were committing any evil as we sat there. The notion is that if we can observe limited groups of people who, for limited periods of time, are abstaining from all evil, then we can conceive of a world where everybody is engaged in non-evil at all times; a possible world, although not actual. I was pretty annoyed with buddy beside me at that point, and I was actually pretty close to saying that HE was committing evil by making it impossible for me to get maximum benefit from the lecture. Sheesh. | ¶ 7:20 p.m.
