The Meaning of Life according to various rather famous people (Dennett, Fukuyama, etc). I'm watching the Dennett video at the moment and it starts rather weakly, but, by midway through, is rolling along nicely. With topics like "being good without god" and "the anthropic principle" it struck me as relevant to a couple of recent
askmefi threads.
Dennett: [pause] i guess i'll say it again, more slowly...
(oh, and the player interface is rather delicate - give it time to load and click play a few times...)
posted by andrew cooke
on Oct 1, 2004 -
17 comments
Dear Leo, Dear Mohandas "The longer I live -- especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death -- the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else... the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries. Love... the highest and indeed the only law of life".
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (full text available) is
Leo Tolstoy's tractatus of "
Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life", a primer of (among other things) the doctrine of
non-violence. Among the many
fans of the 1894 book was an
imprisoned Hindu barrister, a
"half-naked fakir" if you want, a certain
Mohandas K.
Gandhi who was fascinated by
"the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness" of the
book. So he ended up writing fan letters to the great Russian man: who warmly wrote back to his young Indian "friend and brother". The old wise
Christian anarchist literary
giant and the shy, insecure
young man who sparked a revolution: to paraphrase another wise,
badly-dressed , pacifist old man, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such men ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."
posted by matteo
on Jun 17, 2004 -
16 comments
Out of the mist of the beginning of our era there looms a pageant of mythical figures whose vast, superhuman contours might people the walls of another Sistine Chapel. Their countenances and gestures, the roles in which they are cast, the drama which they enact, would yield images different from the biblical ones on which the imagination of the beholder was reared, yet strangely familiar to him and disturbingly moving. The stage would be the same, the theme as transcending: the creation of the world, the destiny of man, fall and redemption, the first and the last things. But how much more numerous would be the cast, how much more bizarre the symbolism, how much more extravagant the emotions!
Hans Jonas
Into the
Gnostic.
Of magicians, miracle workers, saints and sinners of early Christianities and other mystery religions--including but not limited to
Valentinus,
Simon Magus,
Mithras,
Marcion,
Manicheans,
Mandeans, the
Winged Hermes, the
Gospel of Thomas and the
Gospel of Mary, among many other
Apocrypha and
Pseudepigraphica, the
Cathars and
Apollonious of Tyana. Not to mention
Philip K. Dick.
posted by y2karl
on Nov 30, 2002 -
11 comments
