Month: September 2011

Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden

An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic.  There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic.  And there never were any such cave-dwellers or  goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story.  And yet this, the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy, gives us the truth about the human condition.  It lays bare the human predicament in which shadow is taken for substance, and substance for shadow, the truth-teller for a deceiver, and the deceiver for a truth-teller.

The reader will have guessed where I am going with this.  If the allegory of the Cave delivers the truth about the human predicament despite its falsity when taken as an historical narrative, the same could be true for the stories in the Bible. No reasonable person nowadays could take Genesis as reporting historical facts.  To take but one example, at Genesis 3, 8 we read that Adam and Eve, after having tasted of the forbidden fruit, "heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the Garden . . . ."  Taken literally, this implies that God has feet.  But if he has feet  was he shod on that day or not?  If shod, what was his shoe size?  10 1/2?    Obviously, nothing can have feet without having feet of a determinate size!  And given that the original parents heard God stomping around, then he had to be fairly large: if God were the size of a flea, he wouldn't have made any noise.  If God were a  physical being, why couldn't he be the size of a flea or a microbe?  The answer to these absurdities is the double-barreled denial that God is a physical being and that Genesis is an historical account.  I could give further examples. (And you hope I won't.)

This is why the deliverances of evolutionary biology do not refute the Fall.  (I grant that said deliverances refute some doctrines of the Fall, those doctrines that posit an original pair of humans, without animal progenitors, from whom the whole human race is descended.)  Indeed, it is quite stupid to think that the Fall can be refuted from biology.  It would as stupid as to think that the truths about the human condition that are expressed in Plato's famous allegory can be negated or disconfirmed by the failure of archeologists to locate the site of Plato's Cave, or by any physical proof that a structure like that of Plato's Cave is nomologically impossible.

And yet wasn't that what Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist, was quoted as maintaining? 

Earlier I quoted John Farrell quoting biologist Jerry Coyne:

I’ve always maintained that this piece of the Old Testament, which is easily falsified by modern genetics (modern humans descended from a group of no fewer than 10,000 individuals), shows more than anything else the incompatibility between science and faith. For if you reject the Adam and Eve tale as literal truth, you reject two central tenets of Christianity: the Fall of Man and human specialness.

 I suppose this shows that the wages of scientism are (topical) stupidity.

Addenda (10 September 2011)

1.  I said that the Allegory of the Cave "gives us the truth about the human condition."  Suppose you disagree.  Suppose you think the story provides no insight into the human condition.    My point goes through nonetheless.  The point is that the truth or falsity of the story is unaffected by empirical discoveries and nondiscoveries.  Anthropological and archeological investigations are simply irrelevant to the assessment of the claims being made in the allegory.  That, I hope, is perfectly obvious.

2.  There is another point that I thought of making but did not because it struck me as too obvious, namely, that the Allegory of the Cave is clearly an allegory, and is indeed explicitly presented as such in Chapter VII of the Republic (cf. 514a et passim), whereas the Genesis account is neither clearly  an allegory, nor explicitly presented in the text as one.  But that too is irrelevant to my main point.  The point is that biological, anthropological, and geological investigations are simply irrelevant for the evaluation of what Genesis discloses or purports to disclose about the human condition.  For example, at Gen 1, 26 we are told that God made man in his image and likeness.  That means:  Man is a spiritual being.  (See my post Imago Dei) Obviously, that proposition can neither be established nor refuted by any empirical investigation.  The sciences of matter cannot be expected to  disclose any truths about spirit.  And if, standing firm on the natural sciences, you deny that there is anything other than matter, then you fall into the easily-refuted mistake of scientism.  Furthermore, Genesis is simply incoherent if taken as presenting facts about history or facts about cosmology and physical  cosmogenesis.  Not only is it incoherent; it is contradicted by what we know from the physical sciences.  Clearly, in any conflict between the Bible and natural science, the Bible will lose.

The upshot is that the point I am making about Genesis cannot be refuted by adducing the obvious difference between a piece of writing that presents itself as an allegory and a piece of writing that does not.  Plato's intention was to write an allegory.  The authors of Genesis presumably did not have the intention of writing an allegory.  But that is irrelevant to the question whether the stories can be taken as reporting historical and physical facts.  It is obvious that Plato's story cannot be so taken.  It is less obvious, but nonetheless true, that the Genesis story cannot be so taken.  For if you take it as historical reportage, then it is mostly false or incoherent, and you miss what is important: the spiritual, not the physical, meaning.

3.  The mistake of those who think that biology refutes the Fall is the mirror-image of those benighted fundamentalists and literalists who think that the Fall 'stands or falls' with the historical accuracy of tales about original parents, trees, serpents, etc.  The opposing groups are made for each other.  The scientistic atheist biologist attacks a fundamentalist straw man while the benighted fundamentalist knocks himself out propping up his straw man.  Go at it, boys!  The spectacle is entertaining but not edifying.

Hell for Philosophers

Jean-Paul Sartre put the following into the mouth of a character in the play, No Exit:  "Hell is other people."   What then would hell be for philosophers?  To be locked in a room forever with a philosopher with whom one has little or no common ground. David Stove and Theodor Adorno, for example.  Or Sartre and Etienne Gilson.

All is Impermanent? Impermanence and Self-Reference

I have long been fascinated by forms of philosophical refutation that exploit the overt or covert self-reference of a thesis. To warm up, consider

   1. All generalizations are false.

Since (1) is a generalization, (1) refers to itself. So if (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, if (1) is false, as it surely is, then (1) is false. Therefore, necessarily (1) is false. It follows that the negation of (1), namely, Some generalizations are true, is not just true, but necessarily true. (1) is self-refuting and its negation is self-verifying.  Some generalizations are true is an instance of itself which shows that it itself is true: one instance suffices to verify a particular generalization.

There are those who dismiss arguments like this as quick and facile. Some even call them 'sophomoric,' presumably because any intelligent and properly caffeinated sophomore can grasp them — as if that could constitute a valid objection. I see it differently. The very simplicity of such arguments is what makes them so powerful. A simple argument with few premises and few inferential moves offers few opportunities to go wrong. Here, then, is a case where simplex sigillum veri, where simplicity is the seal of truth.  Now consider a more philosophically interesting example, one beloved by Buddhists:

   2. All is impermanent.

(2) applies to itself: if all is impermanent, then (2), or rather the propositional content thereof, is impermanent. That could mean one of two things. Either the truth-value of the proposition expressed by (2) is subject to change, or the proposition itself is subject to change, perhaps by becoming a different proposition with a different sense, or by passing out of existence altogether.  (There is also a stronger reading of 'impermanent' according to which the impermanent is not merely subject to change, but changing.)

Note also that if (2) is true, then every part of (2)'s propositional content is impermanent. Thus the property (concept) of impermanence is impermanent, and so is the copulative tie and the universal
quantifier. If the property of impermanence is impermanent, then so is the property of permanence along with the distinction between permanence and impermanence.

In short, (2), if true, undermines the very contrast that gives it a determinate sense. If true, (2) undermines the permanence/impermanence  contrast. For if all is impermanent, then so is this contrast and this distinction. This leaves us wondering what sense (2) might have and whether in the end it is not nonsense.

What I am arguing is not just that (2) refutes itself in the sense that it proves itself false, but refutes itself in the much stronger  sense of proving itself meaningless or else proving itself on the brink of collapsing into meaninglessness.

No doubt (2) is meaningful  'at first blush.' But all it takes is a few preliminary pokes and its starts collapsing in upon itself.

Michael Krausz ("Relativism and Beyond: A Tribute to Bimal Matilal" in Bilimoria and Mohanty, pp. 93-104) arrives at a similar result by a different route. He writes:

     Paradoxically, because all things are contexted, the idea of
     permanence cannot be permanent. But it does not follow that in the
     end all things are impermanent either, for impermanence too is
     contexted and it too finally drops out of any fixed constellation
     of concepts. (101)

Krausz invokes the premise,

   3. All things are contexted.

Krausz writes as if (3) is unproblematic. But surely it too 'deconstructs' itself. Just apply the same reasoning to (3) that we applied to (2). Clearly, (3) is self-referential. So (3) cannot express an invariant structure of being. It cannot be taken to mean, context-independently, that every being qua being is contexted.

Note also that if (3) is true, then every part of (3)'s propositional content is contexted: the universal quantifier, the concept thing, the  copulative tie, and the concept of being contexted are all contexted. What's more, the very contrast of the context-free and the context-bound is contexted.

In short, (3), if true, undermines the very contrast that confers upon it a determinate sense, namely, the contrast between the context-free and the context-bound. For if all is contexted, then so is this contrast and this distinction.

(3) collapses in upon itself and perishes for want of a determinate sense. And the same goes for all its parts. Copulative Being collapses into indeterminacy along with every other sense of Being: the   existential, the identitative, the veritative, the locative, the class-theoretic. Being ends up with no structure at all. If Being and Thinking are one, as Father Parmendides had it, then the collapse of
Being brings Thinking down with it.

Clearly, we are sinking into some seriously deep shit here, and it is of the worst kind: the formless kind, crap that won't own up to its own crapiness, the kind that deconstructionists, whether Continental or Asian, like to serve up. It is stuff so unstable that one cannot even say that it stinks. Do we really want to wallow in this mess?

Wouldn't it be better to admit that there is an Absolute?

Max Scheler, George Orwell, Ressentiment, and the Left

Max Scheler describes a form of ressentiment that leads to "indiscriminate criticism without any positive aims." (Ressentiment, ed. Coser, Schocken 1972, p. 51) Although Scheler was writing in the
years before the First World War, his description put me in mind of contemporary liberals and leftists, especially when they are out of power. He continues:

This particular kind of "ressentiment criticism" is characterized by the fact that improvements in the conditions criticized cause no satisfaction — they merely cause discontent, for they destroy the     growing pleasure afforded by invective and negation. Many modern political parties will be extremely annoyed by a partial satisfaction of their demands or by the constructive participation of their representatives in public life, for such participation mars the delight of oppositionism. It is peculiar to "ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that it demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism. We all know certain representatives in our parliaments whose criticism is absolute and uninhibited, precisely because they count on never being ministers. (Ibid.)

About a generation later, on the other side of the Channel, George Orwell wrote in a strikingly similar vein in his "The Lion and the Unicorn":

The mentality of the the English left-wing intelligentsia can be  studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative     querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.

Not much has changed.  

Phone Phools

Here are my two favorite examples of telephonic foolishness.

1. Leaving a message on the wrong answering machine. This has happened more than once. One time, a guy calls and hears our message: "This is Bill and Mary. We are either unable or unwilling to come to the phone at this time. Please leave a message after the beep."

So he proceeds, "Hi Jack, this is Clyde. I'm down at the Glass Crutch bar and grill and plan to stay until closing time. Why not come down and join me? We'll hoist a few."

2. Failure to grasp the concept of a wrong number. A guy calls asking for Dave. "No Dave here," I reply, "you must have the wrong number." Guy calls again an hour or two later, asking for Dave, and I give the same response. The pattern repeats itself several times over a few days. Concluding that the caller's contact with reality is minimal and drug-mediated, I finally say, "Hey man, haven't you heard? Dave OD'd on smack about a month ago." Caller: "Wow, far out!"

Never heard from him again.

What’s Wrong with Pelagianism?

You will be forgiven (by me, anyway) for finding the doctrine of Original Sin (OS) in its Augustinian form  absurd.  For it seems to entail a logical contradiction.  The originality of OS seems to conflict with its sinfulnness. 

To start with the sinfulness part. If my having done (or having failed to do) X is a sin, then my having done (or having failed to do) X is something for which I am morally responsible.  But I am morally responsible for an act or omission only if I could have done otherwise.  But if I could have done otherwise, then it cannot be essential to me (part of my nature as a human being) that I sin (or be in a sinful condition, or be guilty).  Whatever guilt accrued to someone in the past (Adam or anyone else) in virtue of his misdeeds is his affair alone and is not chargeable to my moral bank account.

To put it anachronistically, there was a Kantian follower of Pelagius by the name of Coelestius who maintained that man cannot be held responsible for keeping a law or achieving an ideal if he lacks the capacity to do so.  As Reinhold Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1941, p. 247) writes:

Thus the Kantian "I ought therefore I can"  is neatly anticipated in the argument of Coelestius:  "We have to inquire whether whether a man is commanded to be without sin; for either he is unable so to live and then there is no such commandment; or else if there be such a commandment he has the ability."

On the other hand, if there is such a thing as original sin, then sinfulness is essential to me, 'inscribed into my very essence' as a French writer might put it. For original sin is not the sin of Adam and Eve only, but the sin of all of us.  Adam is just as much Man as a man; Eve is just as much Woman as a woman.  We are all guilty of original sin.

And so OS seems to entail that sinfulness both is and is not essential to me.  And that is a contradiction.

We might essay a Pelagian escape route by modifying our understanding of the doctrine in the following way.  OS is not, strictly speaking, a sin but refers to a sort of structural flaw or weakness, one to be found in each and every human being, which predisposes us to actual sin but is not itself a sin or a state of sinfulness for a postlapsarian man or woman. This predisposition might be ascribed to the hebetude of the flesh or the inertia of nature.  Whatever its source, it is not in our power.  Hence we are not responsible for it and not guilty in virtue of it.  It does not interfere with our free will or make impossible self-perfection.  There is no inherited guilt.  Perhaps the structural flaw under which we all labor is the result of someone's sin in the past; but if it is we are not morally responsible for it.

Perhaps Pelagianism has its own difficulties? 

Untranslatable? Then Not Worth Translating!

When I hear it said that some text is untranslatable, my stock response is that in that case the text is not worth translating.  If it cannot be translated out of Sanskrit or Turkish or German, then what universal human interest could it have?

The truth is one, universal, and absolute.  If you have something to say that makes a claim to being true, then it better be translatable. Otherwise it has no claim on our attention.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Mr Vallicella,
 
I want to give you a heads up on the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". The phrase is probably an idiom that means something like 'universal wisdom' or 'all knowledge'. A better translation may be 'The Tree of the Knowledge of Everything From A to Z'. There is, in fact, nothing in the story that indicates that Adam and Eve had no free will before the eating of the fruit. God, in fact, gives them orders that presuppose the freedom to disobey…to tend the garden, to refrain from eating some fruit, etc. The eating of the Tree was literally to eat of the fruit that gives one the wisdom of God, to overcome the limits God had placed on them and become more like Him. And the result is the clothing of the self, and later the tilling of soil and animal husbandry and after Cain the building of cities. It is not 'moral' knowledge they are coming to but the knowledge of what it takes to enact their own wills to 'get what they want…things like technology and the building of cities.
 
Peace and Blessings,
Joshua Orsak
 
1. The crux of the matter is indeed the interpretation of 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.'  So one question for Mr Orsak is how he would support his interpretation.  After all, the phrase speaks of the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of all things.
 
2.  In yesterday's post I did not say that Adam and Eve did not have freedom of the will before eating the forbidden fruit; I said that they were not moral agents before eating it.  I specified two individually necessary conditions of moral agency (and I left open the question whether they are jointly sufficient).  The one is free will and the other is knowledge of the difference between good and evil.  Since both conditions are necessary, absence of either prevents a being from being a moral agent.  So what I was arguing is consistent with Adam's and Eve's possession of free will prior to their eating of the forbidden fruit.
 
3. The point I was making (and I got this from Peter Lupu, to give credit where credit is due) was that there is something prima facie puzzling about Genesis 2 & 3.  Roughly:  How can God justly banish Adam and Eve from paradise for disobedience prior to their knowing the difference between good and evil?
 
4. Orsak's solution is to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers all knowledge.  I agree that if this interpretation is defensible, then the puzzle collapses.  But what considerations speak for Orsak's interpretation?  After all, the most natural way to interpret 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is to interpret it as referring to a tree the eating of the fruit of which confers either (i) the knowledge that there is an objective difference between good and evil, or (ii) the knowledge of which actions/omissions are good and which evil, or (iii) both.

The Frank Shorter Story

Shorter We who were swept up in the running boom of the 1970s for a lifetime of fitness and satisfaction owe a debt of gratitude to the runners and writers who popularized the sport.  The four who stand out most prominently in my memory, 37 summers after I first took to the roads, are the running writers Jim Fixx and George Sheehan, and the world-class competitors Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter. 

Shorter is often credited with being the father of the running boom due to his winning of Olympic gold at Munich in 1972 in the marathon.   October's Runner's World features a lengthy piece on Shorter that tells of his triumphs but also of the physical and psychological abuse that he and his siblings received from their Jekyll-and-Hyde father.

 

 

Fall of Man or Rise of Man? The Aporetics of Genesis 2 and 3

At Genesis 2,17 the Lord forbids Adam from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death.  In the next chapter, however, Eve is tempted by the serpent, succumbs, eats of the tree, and persuades Adam to eat of it too.  As punishment for their disobedience, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden of Eden  and put under sentence of death.  Thus mortality is one of the wages of Original Sin.

The story has a puzzling feature that Peter Lupu made me see.  Let us agree that a moral agent is a being that (i) possesses free will, and (ii) possesses knowledge of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong.  Clearly, both conditions are necessary for moral agency.  And let us agree that no agent can be justly punished unless he is a moral agent and does something wrong.  But before eating from the tree, Adam and Eve are not moral agents.  For it is only by eating from the tree that they acquire the knowledge of good and evil, one of the necessary conditions of moral agency.   And yet God punishes them.  How then can his punishment be just?  My problem concerns not the truth of the story, but its coherence and meaning.  The problem can be set forth as an aporetic pentad:

1. If God punishes, God punishes justly.
2. If God punishes an agent justly, then that agent is a moral agent that deliberately does something wrong.
3. A moral agent possesses the knowledge of good and evil.
4. God punishes Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit.
5. Adam and Eve did not possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.

The pentad is logically inconsistent: the first four limbs entail the negation of the fifth.  To rescue the coherence of the story one of the limbs must be rejected.  But which one?

(1), (3), and (4) are undeniable.  This leaves (2) and (5).   One might think to deny (2).  My dog is not a moral agent, but I can justly punish it for some behavior.  But punishment in this sense is mere behavior-modification and not relevant to the case at hand.  So it appears that the only way out is by denying (5).  Adam and Eve did possess the knowledge of good and evil prior to eating the forbidden fruit.  If so, the so-called 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' is not a tree the eating of the fruit of which is necessary for becoming a moral agent.

Support for this way out can be found at Genesis 1, 26: "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness . . . ."  This image, I argue, is a spiritual image.  You would have to be quite the lunkheaded atheist/materialist to think that the image is a physical one.  Now if God created man in his spiritual image, then presumably that means that God created man to be a moral agent, a free being who is alive to the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. So before receiving the command not to eat of the tree of good and evil, Adam and Eve were already moral agents.  On this interpretation, whereby (5) is rejected, the coherence of the story is upheld.

"But then why is the tree in question called 'the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'?"  I have no idea.

Another intriguing suggestion that Peter Lupu made to me in conversation was that the Genesis story recounts not the Fall of man, but his rise or ascent from a pre-human condition of animal innocence to the status of a moral being possessing the knowledge of good and evil.  This makes sense if if it is by eating the forbidden fruit that man first become man in the full theomorphic sense.  And so, to put it quite pointedly, it is only by disobeying the divine command that Adam becomes a son of God! Before that he wallows in a state of animal-like, pre-human inocence.  Now surely a God worth his salt would not want mere pets; what he would want are sons and daughters capable of participating in the divine life. He wants his 'children' to be moral agents.  Indeed, one might go so far as to suppose — and this I think is the direction in which Peter is headed — that God wants them to be autonomous moral agents, agents who are not merely (libertarianly) free, and awake to the distinction between good and evil, but who in addition are morally self-legislative, i.e., who give the law to themselves, as opposed to existing heteronomously in a condition where the law is imposed on them by God.

The trajectory of this interpretation is towards secular humanism.  God fades out and Man comes into his own.  I don't buy it, but that's another post. 

Theocracy and the Left

I wrote, "To reverse the scriptural phrase, they will swallow the imaginary gnat of 'theocracy' while straining at the all-too-real camel of Islamo-terrorism."
 
A reader comments, "I'm not so sure it's gullibility as much as flat-out dishonesty half the time. Honestly, when I first heard the 'Dominionist' rumblings again, I thought it was comedy. As in, someone was making a joke, not that this was a serious charge. Imagine my surprise."

It is indeed dishonesty and we can expect more of it as Perry and Bachmann gain traction.  The Left will trot out the same old tired exaggerations and lies that they deployed during the Bush administration.  So it is appropriate that I repost  the following 2005 entry from the old blog.

………………

Serious thinkers, those who aim at the truth, do not engage in linguistic sleight-of-hand. This is a tactic of ideologues and polemicists, whose goal is not truth but power. So my advice to all contenders in the political arena who want to be taken seriously as serious thinkers is that they avoid trying to advance their positions by way of the misuse of language. One sort of misuse is verbal inflation: one takes a word with a fixed specific meaning and inflates it to cover phenomena to which it cannot legitimately be applied. A good recent example is the loose and irresponsible use of the word 'theocracy.' I should think that this term counts as a pejorative for most all of us, whether on the Left or the Right. Very few of us want a theocracy. But to proceed further, we need a definition. 

Theocracy is a form of government in which the rulers are identical to the leaders of the dominant religion, and  governmental policies are either identical to or strongly influenced by the principles of the majority religion.  The idea is much better conveyed by 'ecclesiocracy' since 'theocracy' is something of a misnomer inasmuch as God himself does not rule in any so-called theocracy.  But the word is in use and we are stuck with it.  In a theocracy, the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a  higher power, as specified by the religion in question.

This definition of 'theocracy' is clear enough and comports well with standard usage. In light of it, those who refer to the Bush administration as 'theocratic' are clearly inflating and misusing the term. They are trying to win the debate by changing the rules of the debate in midstream. Among these rules is one that forbids tampering with the neutral terminology in which alone a reasonable debate can be conducted.

Let us see if we can be clear about some elementary points. A  conservative is not the same as a theist. A theist is not the same as a Christian. A Christian is not the same as a fundamentalist. A theist is not the same as theocrat.

Lefties need to be careful about their identity theories. Theist =  theocrat is perhaps not as outrageous as Bush = Hitler, but just as false.

Are there advocates of theocracy here in the USA? Yes. Do they pose any sort of threat? Not that I can see.  But lefties don't care about truth; they care about winning.  And they will do anything to win.  The end justifies the means.

Two Opposite Mistakes Concerning Original Sin

One mistake is to think that the doctrine of Original Sin is empirically verifiable.  I have seen this thought attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr.  (If someone can supply a reference for me with exact bibliographical data, I would be much obliged.)  I could easily be mistaken, but I believe I have encountered the thought in Kierkegaard as well. (Anyone have a reference?)  G. K. Chesterton says essentially the same thing.  See my post, Is Sin a Fact?  A Passage from Chesterton Examined.  Chesterton thinks that sin, and indeed original sin, is a plain fact for all to see.  That is simply not the case as I argue.

The opposite mistake is to think that Original Sin is obviously false and empirically refutable by evolutionary biology.  Thus: no Fall because no original biologically human parents.  As if the doctrine of the Fall 'stands or falls' with the truth of a passage in Genesis literally interpreted.  I lately explained why I think that is a mistake, and indeed a rather stupid one, though my explanation left something to be desired.  (I am working on a longer post on the Fall as we speak.)

So on the one hand we have those who maintain that the doctrine of Original Sin is true as a matter of empirical fact, and on the other we have those who maintain that it is false as a matter of empirical fact.  On both sides we find very intelligent people.  I take this disagreement as further evidence that we are indeed fallen beings, 'noetically wretched,' to coin a phrase, beings whose reason is so infirm and befouled that we can even argue about such a thing.  And of course my own view, according to which OS is neither empirically true nor empirically false, is just another voice added to the cacophony of conflicting voices, though, as it seems to me, it has more merit than the other two.

So we are in deep caca, intellectually, morally, and in every which way — which is why I believe in 'something like'  Original Sin. Our condition is a fallen one, and indeed one that is (i) universal in that it applies to everyone, and (ii) unameliorable by anything we can do, individually or collectively.  You say I need to justify these bold claims?  I agree! But it's Saturday night, the sun is setting, and it's time to close up shop for the day.  So, invoking the blogospheric privilege deriving from the truth that brevity is the soul of blog,  I simply punch the clock.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Four Black Barbara’s

Barbara George, I Know.  A cute ditty from late 1961, 'I Know' made the Billboard Hot 100  #3 spot in the U.S. George counts as a one-hit wonder at least on one definition of the term.  She left the music business by the end of the '60s and died in 2006.

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing. This great R & B number made it into the Billboard top ten in 1962.

Barbara Lewis, Baby I'm Yours.  From June 1965.  I like Hello Stranger from 1963 even better. 

Barbara Mason, Yes I'm Ready.  From 1965.