Posts Tagged ‘ Words ’

Does everybody worship?

Sep 7th, 2015 12:48 pm | By

A Twitter conversation between Irshad Manji and Salman Rushdie.

Irshad ‏@IrshadManji
There’s no such thing as #atheism. Everybody worships. Our only choice is what to worship. ~ David Foster Wallace:

Salman Rushdie ‏@SalmanRushdie Sep 6

Wrong. Sorry. Just wrong.

Irshad‏@IrshadManji
.@SalmanRushdie “Just wrong”? Such absolutism has a name: dogma.

Well, no, not unless that were the sum total of the reply at all times and in all media. As a reply on Twitter it doesn’t amount to dogma.

And announcing that “everybody worships” is pretty dogmatic anyway. No, everybody doesn’t worship. I don’t think I do anything that could be called worship, for example. Worship is a specifically religious word, naming a religious emotion and attitude, and I’m pretty … Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 20 comments
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In philosophy ‘certainty’ has a specific meaning

May 28th, 2010 12:17 pm | By

Jim at Apple Eaters sees Pessin’s ‘paradox’ the way I do.

Man, there is so much sloppiness here that I want to bite something. First, in philosophy “certainty” has a specific meaning, and it means that there is no doubt. If that’s not what Pessin has in mind, he should define the term. The point there is that, even if I recognize that I am fallible and capable of mistakes, I likely am not certain that I have made some mistake in my reasoning. Were that the case, I would be going over that reasoning carefully to find the error. Rather, I just see that it is possible that I made a mistake, but that is nothing like having

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 14 comments
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