Addressing Mike's comments (see below) a little more seriously -- or
perhaps taking them at a tangent and noting that the issues, the
important words, of one age don't have the same importance in the next,
Hume wrote his atheistic treatise /Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion, /but then stuck it away in a drawer. His reason for not
publishing it was very like some of the criticisms leveled against
Nicholas Wade recently, namely that these ideas, even if true will have
a negative effect on important elements of society. Carl Becker on
page 73 and following in /The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century
Philosophers /wrote ". . . What we have to realize is that in those
years God was on trial. The affair was nothing less than the
intellectual /cause celebre /of the age, and one which stirred the
emotions of men in a way we can with difficulty understand. Not many
men, not many Philosophers even, were likely to be troubled by the
logical dilemma that interested Hume and Diderot and Berkeley; but
everyone, the readers as well as the writers of books, was concerned to
know whether there was a God to care for his immortal soul, or no God
and no immortal soul to care for. . . Were they living in a world ruled
by a beneficent mind, or in a world ruled by an indifferent force? That
was the question which, in this cynical age of reason, men could become
heated over, a question debated everywhere -- in books, in the pulpit,
in the salons, at dinners over the wine, after the servants retired --
and we can no more think of a Philosopher ignorant of, or indifferent
to, this question than we can think of a modern philosopher ignorant of,
or indifferent to, the quantum theory. [Becker gave his lecture in
1931. Are philosophers still agonizing over the quantum theory? What
are the issues philosophers are not indifferent to today?] . . . What
concerns us is to know how the Philosophers meet and disposed of this
profound question.
"Well, we know that there was in France, after the middle of the
century, a little huddled company of rationalistic /enrages /who became
famous, or infamous rather, by openly professing the creed of atheism --
Holbach and Helvetius and La Mettrie and Meslier, to mention those who
most counted. . . . They had the courage of their logic, and made it a
point of pride or of bravado not to desert the Goddess of Reason after
having been so well served by her. . . . Were they not read, these
atheists? Did they not exert an 'influence'? Yes, indeed. everybody
read them, or, better still, heard their doctrines whispered about.
Everybody read them, but 'almost everybody was terrified.' They were
beyond the pale, these atheists. Let us not forget their social
isolation. . . ."
"This was the influence of the 'atheist' writings -- they made men
shudder. Yet the atheists were only following the Goddess of all
Philosophers (Rousseau perhaps excepted). Holbach's books, as Morely
says, pointed to 'the finger of their own divinity, Reason, writing on
the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe
is only matter in spontaneous motion; and most grievous word of all,
that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music
dies when the strings are broken.'
"Appalling is perhaps not quite the word. Appalling to the general run
of readers, no doubt; but other Philosophers had followed Reason as
faithfully as Holbach had, and were as familiar with her judgments.
Nevertheless, when the Goddess pointed to her judgments the
philosophers, almost without exception, refused to accept hem; instead
of looking at the writing on the wall, they turned their backs and edged
away, giving one excuse or other.
"Each Philosopher might, or course, have his own special reason for
deserting the Goddess. We know that Franklin, who as a boy stranded in
London had published an atheistical work, later repented of that act of
youthful braggadocio and dismissed the whole stupendous question by the
casual remark that while a mechanical theory of the universe might be
true it was 'not very useful'; certainly not very useful to him, a
respectable printer and politician living in Philadelphia, or famous as
a defender of liberty at the Court of st. James. We know that Hume had
exhausted the dialectical approach to knowledge and that the truths he
arrived at were, on his on confession, inadequately found. Besides, the
lonely man, tucked away in a provincial corner of the world, craved the
applause of his fellows; and the disconcerting fact was that his
speculative books not only did not sell, but were not received by his
friends. They lacked, as Hutchinson told him, 'a certain warmth in the
cause of virtue, which . . .. all good men would relish. Hume certainly
took no pleasure in being regarded as the cold and finished skeptic, a
destroyer of illusions He was much more ambitious 'to be esteemed a man
of virtue than a writer of taste'; and the fact that his history won for
him the popularity he craved naturally confirmed him in the belief that
it was useless to search into 'those corners of nature that spread a
nuisance all around.' These are, no doubt, the reasons why Hume locked
his /Dialogues/ away in his desk, the reason why his contemporaries,
could they have looked into that locked desk, would have found a most
extraordinary, a most perplexing conclusion to the brilliant argument
that demolished the foundations of natural religion; the conclusion,
namely that any 'person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections
of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest
avidity.' Hume did not exactly fly to revealed truth; but he refused to
publish his /Dialogues, /and never, in public at least, failed to
exhibit a punctiliously correct attitude toward the Author of the Universe."
Lawrence
On 7/22/2016 10:04 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
I don't know if anyone remembers back about 1998 or so on the old Phil-Lit list, in some discussions about God, there were at least two (as I recall) contributors who referred to God by typing "G_d". I guess it was the hole left by leaving out the "o" that made the typing of it holier. I don't know. But it would cause me to wonder if they thought that God was so sensitive that we humans could possibly ever hurt his feelings by waging religious wars,or, much less, just by typing out his full name? (Actually I think his full name might be "God Almighty" or "God Damnit" or "Jesus Fucking Christ" -- I've heard these versions and other such variations at least as often as stand alone "God." What I mean to say is, like, you know, come on, do they really think that God is such a sensitive soul? Hell, he fire bombed Sodom and Gomorrah long before we ever got around to Dresden and Tokyo. If you think that words or thoughts or even actions even can hurt him, well, I think that's a sacrilege. It certainly that doesn't speak well for his omnipotence and omniscience and. omnipresence. How would he ever be able to do the Divine thing -- whatever that is -- if we mere humans can cripple him up like a little kid crying in the corner because he didn't get a piece of candy. I'm of the opinion that God comes away from such adorational rituals longing to hear some humans cursing and shaking their fists at heaven and shouting: "Damn you! I'll get you yet!" That would surely make him feel better about himself than some Jesus Freak singing sweet hymns to him. We are his pet dogs, always going back to him with our tails between our legs -- humbled, yes -- but pissing on his leg none the less. "Vengeance is mine," sayeth we continually to ourselves. We'll get him yet, yes. We'll use his Real Name, His Full Name We'll shout it out: "AM, AM, AM, AM, "AM, AM, AM, AM "AM, AM, AM, AM "AM, AM, AM, AM "AM, AM, AM, AM. God is a very sensitive dude-God. You've got to be judicious in what you say -- and type! Oh dear. Maybe those who write G_d are wiser that I am. Now I'm afraid to even think of _________.
