Transcription
From: A.D.Dirkzwager<djatirot@me.com>
Subject: Uit Travels with Epicurus
Date: 16 October 2022
To: J.E.Kruijff-Bronsing <jekruijffbronsing@planet.nl>
Epicurus (± 400 v,Chr) zegt men, heeft wel 300 boeken geschreven. Geen boek is van hem bewaard gebleven; wel een bescheiden aantal quotes. Zijn leerstellingen zijn mondeling generaties doorgegeven o.a. de vrouw is gelijkwaardig aan de man.
VPRO GIDS
De overgang van kennis opgeslagen in bibliotheken naar die van IT data-centra.
Dochtervan Hannelies: Claartje Thuis-Kruijff is dominee.
De grondslag van het Christelijk geloof is de "herrijzenis."
Quote from ‘Travels with Epicurus’ by Daniel Klein
Pages 139 & 140
Freud’s assumption is that if ideas such a transcendent god and a lovely afterlife come into minds merely as a result of our feelings, then they must be nonsense. At strictly logical and empirical level, as Sportin’Life sings in Porgy and Bess, apropos dicta of the Bible, this assumption “ain’t necessarily so”. For example, our feelings could be the source of our idea that the stranger in a fedora has sitting across from us in the train is a serial killer, but it could turn out that the guy in the fedora actually is a serial killer. That we came to this idea in non-rational way has no bearing on whether or not it is actually and independently true.
Piling on the psychological interpretation of why we cook up God are today’s new atheists, thinking like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. These thinkers point out that most of us subscribe to scientific, logical-empirical thinking in 99 percent of what we do, but then we go off the deep end into illogical non-empirical thinking when it comes to God and religion. We pick between the two ways of thinking according to what we need: a scientific head suits driving a car, while an illogical, non-empirical head is a better fit when it comes to praying for salvation.
Sam Harris puts it amusingly: “If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the seize of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you ask me, why do you think that? I’d say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have a gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you. You can’t believe there is really a diamond in your backyard because it gives your life meaning. If that is possible, that’s self-deception that nobody wants.”
