God is God - I'm not!

Incorporating a religious, especially a Christian, dimension in our life is of immense value. Taking on board the spirit of the Bible, and that of Jesus, sets us free of all the distortions in our view of what is true and good and noble, and enables us to make decisions that, in reality, make our life satisfying. Here is a valuable insight into this predicament that confronts the well-being of Western society in particular:

Society, more and more, gives us license to be grandiose, to set ourselves up as the center and proudly announce that

publicly. Not only are we allowed today to get too big for our britches, we aren’t culturally admired unless we do assert ourselves in that way. And that’s a formula for jealousy, bitterness, and violence. Grandiosity and restlessness need healthy guidance both from the culture and from religion.

Today, we generally do not see that guidance. We are dangerously weak in inculcating into the consciousness of society, especially into the consciousness of the young, a number of vital human and religious truths: To God alone belongs the glory! In this life ultimately all symphonies remain unfinished. You are not the center of the earth. There is real sin! Selfishness is not a virtue! Humility is a virtue! You will only find life by giving it away! Other lives are as real as your own!

We have failed our youth by giving them unrealistic expectations, even as we are depriving them of the tools with which to handle those expectations.

[]  See also The Mess of the Post-Christian Age

A problem with science

       Detail from Salvador Dali's      
 Enigma Without End

An up-and-coming German philosopher has some critical words about the way  many in his own field and in the scientific world think about what we can know as real. Markus Gabriel, a professor of philosophy and chair of epistemology at the University of Bonn, Germany, highlights what has been been described as "the cavernous gap separating sophisticated professionals from healthy common sense".  The English translation of his book, Why the World Does Not Exist, has just been published by Polity Press.

In a review, New York academic Richard Wolin points out that Gabriel identifies particular branches of study as "inherently flawed, because their scientism — the conviction that science alone represents the royal road to truth — leaves no room for phenomena like poetry, reverie, or human intimacy, experiences that prove refractory to laws of causal determination".

"More seriously, the epistemological dogmatism of such approaches risks codifying a new species of metaphysical intolerance, since they condescendingly stigmatize competing claims as "unscientific." As Gabriel pointedly remarked in a 2014 article in Die Zeit: "At an earlier point, God and fate were invoked in order to deprive us of our freedom; today, it is ‘nature,’ ‘the universe,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the egoistic gene’ or ‘evolution.’"

While the ordinary person welcomes Gabriel's highlighting of the intolerance of scientism, his inclusion of imagined creatures like elves or the unicorn as having the same ranking as the concrete reality around us posits little obvious change from "the ludicrousness of the cul-de-sac in which much of academic philosophy finds itself today", as Wolin puts it.
[] See also: The scourge of lying and cheating in science