[lit-ideas] Re: Faith
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 18:23:50 -0400
How do you suppose one determines 'solid content' without, at some
point,doing a headcount?
Depends when you do a headcount. A headcount for phlogiston today would
be disappointing; in the past, encouraging. Some winners of the Nobel
Prize for literature would get discouraging headcounts today,
encouraging headcounts at the time of their election.
Depends also whose heads are counted. As we used to say in book retail:
"Twenty million flies can't be wrong." Is Danielle Steele one of the
greatest American novelists? Billy Graham the greatest American theologian?
And if (by luck for nobody is directing this from Parnassus) the right
heads are counted at the wrong time, it's the same as if the wrong heads
are counted at the right time.
Point being that having a lot of fundamentalists doesn't mean anything
more than having a lot of flat-earthers...the headcount doesn't mean
real headway in the cultural dialogue...just a spike in the acceptance
of a bizarre or variant reading.
Whereas, say, the idea of the individual has made real headway since the
Renaissance.
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