Quote of the week, from Zippy: “Of course I’m the sort who reflexively chambers a round when I hear the words ‘nothing but’ on general principles.”
Month: April 2010
Memo to Joseph Sobran and Tom Bethell
I’ve wish-listed this new book on Shakespeare: Despite the failure of early cipher-hunters such as Owen, Elizabeth Wells Gallup and Ignatius Donnelly to find anything meaningful, the idea that Shakespearean texts contain coded messages of authorship remains central. The Sonnets, with their apparently confiding, first-person voice, have proved fertile ground. Oxfordians find anagrams of “Vere”… Continue reading Memo to Joseph Sobran and Tom Bethell
Hitler and Einstein and Westerns….
In yet a further irony of history, we find: Hitler also had a penchant for the Saxon novelist Karl May’s Wild West adventure stories, which he had reissued in a special field edition for German soldiers at the front and later recommended to his military commanders as manuals of strategy. (Don’t blame the innocent May,… Continue reading Hitler and Einstein and Westerns….
Harris Redux
Now that both sides have vented, Brandon Watson weighs in with some thoughts on Sam Harris’s TED Talk.
Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum,… Continue reading