Tom Morris

16 March 2007

A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.

Templeton winner thinks spiritual deafness is a problem

Charles Taylor: “The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable”

I hear these bells in my head. Whenever I tell anyone about them, they just tell me that I’ve got tinnitus and that I ought to go to an ear doctor. What hokey! They’re just deaf to the richness of my hearing!

I love how it’s the rest of us who get the diagnosis of being ‘spiritually deaf’ when it’s the superstitious goons who do things like wear cilices , an object that our dear Education Secretary apparently wears around her leg, that are off their collective rockers. You see lots of people wearing barbed wire. Ah, but it’s religion, which means they aren’t insane.

We don’t nail ourselves up to crosses or flagellate ourselves in the street. We’re just spiritually deaf!

Spiritual deafness isn’t the problem. Inability to use one’s brain is the problem, and no amount of spiritual noise and bluster can solve that.

Perhaps if Professor Taylor wants peope to look to the ‘spiritual dimension’, he can provide some non-idiotic reasons to believe such a dimension exists. Note: “it feels warm and fuzzy”, “my family believe it” and “there’s a book which says it’s so” are not good reasons.

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M. David Peterson has launched Planet.XSLTransformations, a ‘Planet’ of blog posts about XSL. There are a couple of different varieties - the above link, then there’s River which has del.icio.us links mixed in and Flood which has del.icio.us and Technorati links mixed in. OPML?

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