Speaker – James Dee <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Religious beliefs have been questioned and opposed for centuries, from the pre-Socratics of ancient Hellas to the rise of science and the humanistic values of the Enlightenment\u2014often said to be in decline today. This talk will summarize the ideas of a surprisingly large group of Hellenic skeptics and atheists, briefly survey some heresies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and explore the anti-theological implications of the Scientific Revolution and the emergence of historical-critical biblical studies. Along the way, we will encounter a powerful argument built on sand, an extremely dangerous book that never was, a Christian who was willing to \u201cspit in God’s face,\u201d a decapitated gravestone in London, and a touch of \u201ccosmological vertigo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James Dee received his A.B. in Comparative Literature (Honors) from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas. He was on the faculty of the Classics Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1972 to 1999, serving as department chair for eight years. His current status is Visiting Researcher-Scholar in Classics. He has held two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Research and has published nine reference works (six in Homeric studies), along with three dozen articles and reviews.
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Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":885,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-24 17:15:49","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:15:49","post_content":"\n James Dee received his A.B. in Comparative Literature (Honors) from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Texas. He was on the faculty of the Classics Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1972 to 1999, serving as department chair for eight years. His current status is Visiting Researcher-Scholar in Classics. He has held two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Research and has published nine reference works (six in Homeric studies), along with three dozen articles and reviews.<\/p>\n","post_title":"James Dee","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"james-dee","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 17:15:49","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 17:15:49","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=885","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" We have a slightly diminished group today because of the memorial service<\/p>\n for Tom Powers going on at the same time. And also a lecture on<\/p>\n Japan. So we are a little fewer softening, but nonetheless very interested<\/p>\n in both the speaker and the topic. James D is a<\/p>\n stalwart of British studies. He got his B.A. in<\/p>\n comparative literature from the University of Rochester and his p_h_d_<\/p>\n in classics from the University of Texas. He arrived here just shortly after<\/p>\n the Whitman shooting from the tower in nineteen sixty six.<\/p>\n And this was at a time when most of the books in the library were still in the tower.<\/p>\n So in that sense, James is a kind of relic because<\/p>\n there are not very many of us who go back that far. Except for David. Yes,<\/p>\n David. David not only subscribes to more newspapers than anyone else, he’s been here longer<\/p>\n than anyone else. So he holds the record. James<\/p>\n has been the he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago<\/p>\n from 1972 to 1999 and served as the departmental chair<\/p>\n for eight years. And today this afternoon, he’s going to talk to us about<\/p>\n heroes of the intellect, unbelief and enlightenment values<\/p>\n across the ages. James.<\/p>\n There is, as you may fear, a handout if you know my tradition. So I will, son,<\/p>\n and I brought enough for you to have to apiece. So you may read in stereo.<\/p>\n Now it’s seven. Fear not.<\/p>\n But they’re packed with information that I’m sure you’ll be happy to have on down.<\/p>\n All right. Over the past four decades, I’ve delivered<\/p>\n almost 70 presentations to non captive audiences, and I<\/p>\n regard the three done here in Chronicle or chronological order as gold, silver, bronze.<\/p>\n When the idea first occurred to offer Roger this paper, I felt sure it couldn’t compete<\/p>\n with any of them. And surpassing them with platinum is beyond my powers. So there was<\/p>\n already a downward spiral and this one would be even worse. Happily, a solution<\/p>\n was in plain sight when I said gold, silver, bronze. Most of you thought of the Olympics,<\/p>\n but for someone with a classical background, there’s another possibility. The archaic PO’d Hesiod<\/p>\n recounts five ages of mankind in his works and days later won a<\/p>\n an odd text with a famous passage. Pandora’s box wasn’t a box. It was a pit<\/p>\n boss, a large jar. He CID’s five ages are gold, silver, bronze, heros<\/p>\n iron. The last being he see its own time filled with misery and corruption.<\/p>\n The intrusion of heroes into the medal sequence reflects the well-established traditions of<\/p>\n the Argan Nordic expedition, the Theban Cycle, the labors of Heraclitus and the Trojan War, all<\/p>\n known to have taken place hundreds of years before he CID’s 8th century BCE.<\/p>\n So I embraced the historic sequence and accordingly dedicate this talk to heroes<\/p>\n of the intellect, those brave individuals who have rejected conventional religious opinion<\/p>\n since the ancient world. By delightful coincidence, I was recently reminded that<\/p>\n an eminent classical scholar had already shown the way for the Heroes image in a colloquium<\/p>\n for the Classics Department February 22nd, Jason Nethercote, sung son<\/p>\n of U2’s longtime professor Bill Nuther Cut, gave a fine paper on the Roman poets,<\/p>\n Anya’s and Lucretius in conversation after Rudy mentioned that there was an article on<\/p>\n Lucretius also won a written by Vincent’s Buchheit titled Trilled<\/p>\n Desk Geist US Triumph of the Intellect, referring to one of the most remarkable passages<\/p>\n in Latin literature. Coming up shortly, I’m not the only one who thinks that unbelief has<\/p>\n a heroic quality. Some of you may have been lured here by the announcement, which has<\/p>\n five teaser phrases. I’ll highlight each one when we get there. Today<\/p>\n I’ll be discussing the development of certain ideas, often described as enlightenment values, said<\/p>\n to be under attack from opponents, religious and secular, claiming they have failed one way<\/p>\n or another. Among the chief defenders of these values is Steven Pinker, whose new book Enlightenment<\/p>\n Now One B focuses squarely on this issue. I’ve added a companion volume<\/p>\n also B by the late Hans Rosling, a celebrity of PBS and TEDTalk<\/p>\n fame known for his moving colored circle graphs that move from lower left to upper right<\/p>\n and forced sword swallowing. Pinker pays of a heartfelt tribute<\/p>\n because both have spent years trying to persuade people that things have gotten almost incredibly better<\/p>\n in what used to be the third world in the last century. Rosalind’s book is short,<\/p>\n very accessible and really worth your time. Also at letter B are just a few<\/p>\n recent discussions of secularism, liberalism, rationalism, athie ism, etc. My focus<\/p>\n will be on skepticism and outright unbelief and divine beings as cardinal elements<\/p>\n in the emergence of critical thought. Claims about divinities will be assessed from the vantage<\/p>\n points of reality through science and critical scholarship and more reality through<\/p>\n philosophy, since they provide the strongest arguments against divine beings and in favor<\/p>\n of human independence. Among the pivotal moments in this rapid fire survey<\/p>\n will be two of the stereotypical three modern revolutions Copernican and Darwin, in which<\/p>\n focus on reality. Leaving aside Freudian, perhaps now neuroscientific for<\/p>\n lack of time. By contrast, the principal arguments against divinities from capital<\/p>\n and more reality were already laid out in the ancient world because the general<\/p>\n trajectory is fairly well known. I’ll offer some sidebar stories unusual or downright<\/p>\n exotic bits that illustrate the main themes, but come, as they say in baseball, from left field<\/p>\n number to classical period. My principal resource in this is the first book in English<\/p>\n on ancient athie ism in more than 90 years. Cambridge Professor Tim Whitmarsh<\/p>\n is battling the gods to a. He notes contrary to what many have suggested,<\/p>\n that belief in divine beings is not the default setting of human minds and societies.<\/p>\n That there is no innate God gene. As some of carelessly said, Whitmarsh<\/p>\n observes that wherever you find claims about theism, you also find skepticism. He<\/p>\n cites mid-century British anthropologist Edward Evans Pritchard, also at 2-A, who says<\/p>\n in his 1937 book on the Sunday, Faith and skepticism are alike<\/p>\n traditional. Wherever it is speaking of which, doctors and not gods, there<\/p>\n may be faint signs of skepticism as early as Homeric epic, which, unlike biblical texts, was never<\/p>\n regarded as sacrosanct or infallible. There is an entertaining moment in the Odyssey to<\/p>\n be where Telemachus maybe the first sarcastic juncture youngster in world literature.<\/p>\n The chronology implies he’s not literally a teenager. His newly returned father, Odysseus,<\/p>\n tells him that in their battle against one hundred eight suitors, they will have as protectors<\/p>\n Athena and father’s zoos and by implication, nobody else. The son’s<\/p>\n response. Those are indeed fine defenders that you mentioned, even though they sit on high in the clouds,<\/p>\n seems a bit snarky. The words translated as indeed.<\/p>\n And even though our subtle particles that reveal a speaker’s real attitude, it doesn’t<\/p>\n diminish the appeal of Telemachus as momentary skepticism that those two divinities do<\/p>\n intervene. And I should say that the most recent scholarly commentator thinks it isn’t<\/p>\n ironical. Professor Whitmarsh begins his survey with the whole Merican Hestarted<\/p>\n Gods, who, as many of you know, did not pretend to be paragons of virtue being<\/p>\n immortal and powerful. They didn’t have to be. They’re described as engaging in all sorts of<\/p>\n non moral activities. And he said Chronos, a.k.a. Sadan, castrates<\/p>\n his father, run on us and swallows his children whole in the Iliad. Xu’s<\/p>\n recounts to his wife Herra, his sexual conquests and then the Odyssey<\/p>\n areas and Aphrodite have a sexual encounter, are caught in a golden net by Hephaestus,<\/p>\n her husband and the male gods invited to view the couple in flood grunted<\/p>\n delicto find it hilarious. Such behavior seems scandalous to<\/p>\n the first A.I.D. Tradition critic sign-off anti’s, who complained in a surviving fragment to see<\/p>\n that Homer and he seem to have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among humans.<\/p>\n Stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other to other fragments are similarly provocative.<\/p>\n One also to see. Maybe the first example of cultural relativism applied to human<\/p>\n societies, quoting Ethiopians say their gods are flat nosed and dark skinned. The<\/p>\n three nations that there’s our blue eyed and red haired, the other to see again more<\/p>\n imaginatively applies the idea to other species quoting. But if Kassell cattle and<\/p>\n horses and lions had hands, or could draw with hands and make things as humans do, horses<\/p>\n would draw the shapes of gods like themselves and cattle like cattle. And each of them<\/p>\n would make bodies such as they themselves have. That skepticism toward one<\/p>\n type of claim about divinities doesn’t mean that’s enough. Anees was an atheist. Another fragment<\/p>\n to see you last time speaks of one god greatest among gods and men. In no way<\/p>\n similar to mortals either in body or in thought. The first to see passage<\/p>\n is our initial example of a more reality based argument against traditional gods. The<\/p>\n ancient healthiness also came up with the first reality based arguments as well. Several<\/p>\n of the philosophers we rather unfairly called Priest craddock’s offered explanations for<\/p>\n effects previously considered divinely caused, thereby removing the gods from the material<\/p>\n world, as Whitmarsh puts it, to deal. The priest craddock’s marked the beginning<\/p>\n of a journey leading ultimately to what modern atheists call naturalism the belief<\/p>\n that the physical world is the sum total of reality that nature rather than divinity structures<\/p>\n our existence. Since this is a rapid fire survey, I’ll simply mention the great<\/p>\n names and their central ideas without elaboration. There was Staley’s 6th century<\/p>\n BCE who presumably using Babylonian information, predicted a solar eclipse<\/p>\n in five eighty five and said that water was the primal element. A next commander also<\/p>\n And he speculated in purely material terms on the origins of animal and human life from water<\/p>\n and symmetries. 6TH Century again preferred air as primary forming<\/p>\n solid objects through compacting. Whitmarsh spends almost two pages on a much<\/p>\n less famous figure a hippo of some us like theories. He argued for water and bore<\/p>\n remarkably seems to have asserted that the mind is entirely corporeal.<\/p>\n He was attacked by contemporaries for being atheist, and as Whitmarsh says also to<\/p>\n D, he may even be the first person in Greek history to have gained this reputation.<\/p>\n The next name on the roll call of Heroes is and Segarra’s, who explored natural phenomena and<\/p>\n proposed mind nutes as the central underlying essence. He was put<\/p>\n on trial in Athens in the fourth thirties for impiety, and here Whitmarsh suggested<\/p>\n to D. Again, this may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted<\/p>\n for heretical religious beliefs. Now the word heretical is a bit anachronistic.<\/p>\n There was no formal orthodoxy to which an Athenian had to subscribe, just a set of conventions<\/p>\n that should be observed. The last of the heroic priest craddock’s are low. Pippa’s<\/p>\n and his student or coworker Democritus, who both flourished in the fifth century and proposed<\/p>\n the idea of the item one the uncomfortable as the fundamental unit of the physical world.<\/p>\n This, of course, is the etymological ancestor of modern stomach theory, and is<\/p>\n quite striking that Democritus reportedly emphasized Touquet chance rather<\/p>\n than divine superintendence as a significant, significant factor in events.<\/p>\n So the priest craddock’s had already leveled critiques against the ordinary Hellenic view of gods and the<\/p>\n physical world, and it only got worse. The leading intellects of the fifth and fourth centuries<\/p>\n continue into this tradition of doubting or denying the gods and endorsing various forms of skepticism<\/p>\n or materialism. Whitmarsh features three late fifth century figures per Tagaris protocols<\/p>\n and the notorious oligarch Katee us. Tagaris was famous for saying in the first<\/p>\n sentence of a lost treatise titled On the Gods to E concerning the Gods,<\/p>\n I cannot know whether they exist or whether they do not or what form they have.<\/p>\n Similarly, Productize, who achieved proverbial status as a universal genius in his lifetime,<\/p>\n is reported in a papyrus fragment of the later philosopher of Philip Demus to have said also to<\/p>\n E the gods that are believed in do not exist, nor do they have knowledge.<\/p>\n Finally, critics Veeder of the murderous Thirty Tyrants wrote a play called Sisyphus, from which<\/p>\n one long passage survives to E! Last time outlining a completely<\/p>\n secular origin for religion and morality. I caught a small part of the 42 line text<\/p>\n some men of ingenious and wise intellect invented for mankind. The fear of<\/p>\n the gods so that there would be a source of terror for the wicked if they did or said or thought up anything<\/p>\n in secret. At that point, he introduced the concept of the divine.<\/p>\n Those three and numerous others are often lumped together under the term sophists. They are<\/p>\n often maligned as in the negative connotations of sophistry and sophistical, but their importance<\/p>\n in the development of thought is indisputable. I’ve been leskey is monumental. History of Greek literature<\/p>\n plays a striking tribute to these thinkers to F. No other intellectual movement can<\/p>\n be compared with the sophistic and the permanence of its results. What they broke up was never<\/p>\n put together again in Greek life. And the questions which they posed have never been suffered to lapse<\/p>\n in the history of Western thought down to our day. W. Casey Guthrie is the sophists part<\/p>\n of his monumental history of Greek philosophy. Quote, seleski is fine statement, but not<\/p>\n everyone is comfortable with this assessment. I cite a 1992 op ed column<\/p>\n to G of Garry Wills, who has a classic’s p_h_d_, although he left the field<\/p>\n for greener pastures with the Nixon Agnes’s back in 1970.<\/p>\n He read and was appalled by a conversation between Bernard Knox, one of the most eminent<\/p>\n classicists of the era, and Lynne Cheney, then head of the National Endowment for the Humanities.<\/p>\n Quoting When Knox pointed out what all classical scholars know by now that<\/p>\n the sophists forged the intellectual tools for rational analysis within our tradition, Cheney<\/p>\n expressed shock. She still lives at the simplistic level of history that Triste Sophists,<\/p>\n a term covering many very different thinkers and fifth century Athens as the villains of history.<\/p>\n They were relativists. They did not believe in absolute values. How can he defends such<\/p>\n people instead of learning from a man who knew what he was talking about? She tried to instruct him.<\/p>\n We’ve already seen that the intellectual tools for rational analysis go back before 5th century Athens.<\/p>\n But Wills’s larger point is valid. Rational analysis precludes absolutism,<\/p>\n especially the unexamined kind Whitmarsh in this. The great historian of the Peloponnesian<\/p>\n War through cinetis among the early atheists, noting that he never suggests there are divine<\/p>\n beings except in deluded human minds, much less that they intervene in human affairs<\/p>\n in strong contest to his predecessor, Herodotus, who seems to have had a firm belief<\/p>\n in a divine and ultimately moral cosmos. Quoting to H, the history can<\/p>\n reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.<\/p>\n Some of the most powerful moral arguments against the Divine were posed in the era of Socrates, Plato<\/p>\n and Aristotle. I’ll focus on just two. The first is the youth of dilemma posed<\/p>\n by Socrates in Plato’s earliest dialog. Many philosophers to this day regarded<\/p>\n as the most potent argument against the claim that moral values come from the gods<\/p>\n or capital g god. The text is fairly opaque in the original, so I’m quoting<\/p>\n a compact paraphrase from British philosopher A.C. Grayling in his book The God argument<\/p>\n to I is something good because the gods say it is. Or did the gods<\/p>\n say it is good because it is good independently of them? Grayling adds<\/p>\n that only a super zealot would agree that if God said murder and rape were good, they would be.<\/p>\n But most people have asked would almost certainly say that God is the ultimate authority for morals, and if it was<\/p>\n pointed out this this is this is impaling yourself on the wrong horn of the youth of Frode<\/p>\n dilemma. They would probably say that God can’t endorse immorality. God<\/p>\n has to be perfectly good, rather an infringement on an omnipotence.<\/p>\n And I’ll come back to this. Another attack on conventional ideas was posed by a much more<\/p>\n obscure philosopher in Aristotle’s lifetime. When you bulletin’s also to AI, he’s<\/p>\n not even mentioned in Whitmarsh his book he created seven paradoxes, at least<\/p>\n two of which are still considered extremely challenging. One is the liar. Paradox<\/p>\n is I am lying. True or false? Which duty’s Mark Sainsbury and his<\/p>\n textbook? Also two. I read it as a 10 out of 10 in philosophical difficulty.<\/p>\n The other is the surprises paradox a.k.a. the problem of the heap sort Ross<\/p>\n being Hellenic for heap or pile. This is teaser number one powerful argument built on<\/p>\n sand. Start with a pile of sev-. Take away one grain.<\/p>\n Is it still a pile? Sure. Iterate a bazillion times. When<\/p>\n did it stop being a pile on the way down to zero? The<\/p>\n principle is that there can’t be a justifiable all or nothing dividing line on a perfectly smooth continuum.<\/p>\n After centuries of being dismissed, this paradox roared back to life in the late 20th<\/p>\n century as vague goodness linked with the late Professor Lotfy Zodiacs fuzzy<\/p>\n logic professor seems very in conversation. Several years ago told me that<\/p>\n the heap paradox would be at least a 9 on his difficulty scale will<\/p>\n encounter three applications of it at the end of this paper. The last person to be treated in this survey<\/p>\n of Hellenic unbelievers is Epicurus, who compiled the materialist Adam ism of<\/p>\n Low Keep US in Democritus the reality aspect with a profound question about the morality<\/p>\n of divine beings. For all the provocative nature of his argument, there is no surviving<\/p>\n source in Hellenic, not even a summary. The only full source is the Christian Latin<\/p>\n father lacked tenuous in his tract on the anger of God written around 300 C-T.<\/p>\n Some 550 years later, I’ve quoted David Hume’s compact<\/p>\n paraphrased to J. Of the argument itself, not like tension’s text. Epicurus<\/p>\n is old questions are as yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil<\/p>\n but not able then? Is he omnipotent? Is he able but not willing then?<\/p>\n Is he malevolent? Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?<\/p>\n The ancient holiness were also astonishingly productive in many areas of science, but their most remarkable<\/p>\n achievements came after the great Athenian period was over in what’s called the Hellenistic era.<\/p>\n Following the death of Alexander and 3:23 BCE, Luchino Russos<\/p>\n wide ranging and learned volume, The Forgotten Revolution to Quaye gathers<\/p>\n sources for their work in a dazzling variety of fields. I’m merely citing from<\/p>\n headings in his table of contents mathematics, geometry. Optics, sonography. Catoctin,<\/p>\n geodesy mechanics. Hydrostatic. Pneumatics, mechanical engineering. Instrumentation, military technology.<\/p>\n Navigation. Medicine and outby physiology. Botany. Zoology. Chemistry. Note<\/p>\n also the two section titles on your page, there were ancient astronomers like aristarchus<\/p>\n who came to a huge centric view of the solar system long before Copernicus and even<\/p>\n speculated on an infinite universe. Having mentioned Roussos book, I should say<\/p>\n that one area in which he’s a little outdated is the wholly astonishing device called the Antique Ketterer<\/p>\n Mechanism, on which there is a recent authoritative book by Alexander Jones to L<\/p>\n and even a PBS documentary. I’ve reproduced his diagram of circa 30<\/p>\n interlocking gears, a degree of engineering complexity no one had thought possible<\/p>\n in the ancient world. Simon Winchester’s brand new book, The Perfectionist, is also at 2.<\/p>\n L discusses the mechanism at the beginning of Chapter 1, something I recommended<\/p>\n when he was here several years ago and said he’d never heard of it before. The Romans, on the<\/p>\n other hand, were not renowned for philosophical, scientific or abstract intellectual interests. Two<\/p>\n quick examples. One, the charismatic philosopher Can’t Deities created a sensation<\/p>\n in 155 BCE. When he visited Rome, he gave a speech praising the justice<\/p>\n of Rome’s growing empire, which was enthusiastically received until he gave another<\/p>\n speech the next day, disproving everything he had said. The arch conservative<\/p>\n Cato, the elder in the Roman Senate, proceeded to expel philosophers from Italy,<\/p>\n not wanting the youth to become attached to words and theory rather than pragmatic<\/p>\n military virtues. Number two, I can’t resist citing one delightful crystallization<\/p>\n of the non-IT election of intellectual jism of the Romans from Karl Boyer’s 700<\/p>\n page history of mathematics to M in the midst of a 152<\/p>\n page summary of Hellenic achievements. He notes that in seventy five BCE, when Marcus Taleo<\/p>\n Cicero was serving as quiet star in Sicily, he found the neglected and overgrown tomb<\/p>\n of Archimedes, which had a diagram of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder,<\/p>\n alluding to one of his most famous discoveries. Boyer says dryly He restored<\/p>\n the tomb. M. Desh Almost the only contribution of a Roman to the history of mathematics.<\/p>\n After 150 pages. I’m very sorry to report. The Boyer’s witticism was<\/p>\n removed from the third edition of the book, revised after his death by one<\/p>\n automatic spok of Georgetown, Texas. By contrast,<\/p>\n there are a few Latin writers who do have a place in the survey. Chief among them, Titus, Lucretius,<\/p>\n Caras, contemporary of Cicero, who wrote the most extensive and focused attack on the traditional<\/p>\n gods that survives from the ancient world. A sixth book, hexameters poem called David Rabe ROOM<\/p>\n in our Turok on the Nature of the World. In particular, his praise of Epicure us<\/p>\n early in the first book to end is one of the most spectacular passages in Latin literature.<\/p>\n My non verse translation doesn’t come close to conveying its force.<\/p>\n The depiction of Epicurus as cosmically heroic, daring to fight against the traditional<\/p>\n gods, break through the gates of nature and in a pure act of intellectual imagination,<\/p>\n wander through. The immensity is unlike anything readers of Latin literature had<\/p>\n ever seen. It may annoy some people, especially those with expertise in Renaissance, Latin<\/p>\n and Italian scholarship, even to mention the next book on your handout. Stephen Greenblatt’s<\/p>\n Pulitzer winning swerve with its memorable, if overstated subtitle. But it was<\/p>\n responsible for putting translations of Lucretius at the top of their Amazon category for a while.<\/p>\n And even if very few ever made their way through all six books, Greenblatt deserves some credit<\/p>\n for just getting people exposed to this unique work. And it’s thoroughly unblushingly secular<\/p>\n materialism. I mentioned only in passing the Augustan poet of ID, whose metamorphosis<\/p>\n had a merry time recounting traditional tales about the gods without a trace of reverence.<\/p>\n One line from his earlier hours on a toria, too. Oh, Express’s pretty unabashed<\/p>\n cynicism expended yesterday all said it would expect it. Aspartame was<\/p>\n it’s convenient that gods exist. And since it’s convenient, let’s pretend they exist.<\/p>\n Nadjib. One has to recall that revival of old time religiosity was<\/p>\n a key part of a gustus program, and the supremely Urbain offered for reasons<\/p>\n unclear, was exiled to a Semien barbarian port city on the Black Sea.<\/p>\n For the last years of his life, his irreverence was probably not the primary cause,<\/p>\n but it’s a hint of things to come in the more ideologically driven Christian world. So the Hellenic world<\/p>\n in particular produced abundant critiques of traditional theology, both from the standpoints<\/p>\n of reality out of Muslim and Europe, epicurean materialism and morality. The philosophical arguments.<\/p>\n But other forces prevailed for more than a millennium. Number three dark middle<\/p>\n ages. I put. Dark in quotes because there are specialists who find the term demeaning. Dark<\/p>\n Ages, but this section will show the post classical retreat from reason. The transformation<\/p>\n of the Christian religion. Or maybe religions from obscurity to dominance over the Roman<\/p>\n Empire is one of the oddest stories in history. The subtitle of Keith hopkins’ book, 3-Day<\/p>\n says it very well The Strange Triumph of Christianity. I’m not going to deal<\/p>\n with that process, but its effect upon the intellectual world was extremely harmful. We’ve seen<\/p>\n how much latitude ancient Hellenic thinkers claimed for free expression of ideas not<\/p>\n absolute, but more than most places and times. Now there could be only one truth.<\/p>\n And it wasn’t arrived at by observation of nature or experimentation, or logical thought, or even introspection,<\/p>\n just alleged revelation, not subject to any kind of Socratic cross-examining.<\/p>\n And yet there was serious conflict within the new religion from the first generation, because James,<\/p>\n Peter and the inner circle in Jerusalem, who had known the living yet shocked the real name of Jesus,<\/p>\n regarded Paul, who would never set eyes on him as an outsider, purveyor of false claims<\/p>\n and even crazy acts. Nine and in twenty six, Paul’s own letters<\/p>\n showed there were splinter groups and divergent opinions even in the early first century C.E.<\/p>\n Since there could be only one true belief, all the others came to be labeled heresy,<\/p>\n an innocent word perverted by theological obsession. Since in classical Hellenic hydrous<\/p>\n this simply meant chase with no implication that any one choice was inherently<\/p>\n wrong. Those splinter groups proliferated positively. Astounding rate<\/p>\n by the end of the fourth century. We have two catalogs of heresies 3-B,<\/p>\n one by Epifanio S. Bishop Bishop of Selam US called Panaro on Medicine Chest,<\/p>\n which covers 80 heresies. The other by Phil last Rhea’s called the book of Diverse<\/p>\n Heresies containing a hundred fifty six and elaborate translation<\/p>\n of Epifanio has been issued by Brill. But for last, REOs has apparently never been published<\/p>\n in English. I imagine most of you are aware that there were more than a few versions of early<\/p>\n Christianity, but one hundred fifty six? Who was it? Who said Let 100 flowers<\/p>\n bloom? The Hellenic world didn’t pay much attention to Christian claims, as we<\/p>\n see from Paul’s experience in Athens Act 17. But a philosophically trained<\/p>\n skeptic might have noted that the lack of agreement stemmed ultimately from a lack of evidence<\/p>\n for their outlandish assertions. If you’re curious about this bizarre period, two books<\/p>\n by former Bible literalist Bart Ehrman 3C provide an excellent entry point.<\/p>\n It was also in the late 4th century that Christians, six decades after their strange triumph,<\/p>\n began killing other Christians, calling them heretics. The first was precisely on us,<\/p>\n put to death in three eighty five by secular Roman authorities in the Gallic town of Traeger<\/p>\n primary reference that 3D. The ostensible charges were sorcery and immortality,<\/p>\n but he had long been accused of heresy and standard histories of Christianity, called him<\/p>\n the first fatality of Christian intolerance. Moving forward, the stereotype<\/p>\n phrase for the dark medieval period of European history is the age of faith.<\/p>\n But at the same time, there were skeptics and heretics galore, and even a few hardcore atheists. In<\/p>\n places where Christianity had not imposed a stranglehold, it was quite possible to reject<\/p>\n their claims. Sometimes in memorable ways, there is a pleasant story 3 about<\/p>\n read God, the King of the friesians in the early 8th century, preserved in a Latin<\/p>\n biography of St. Vote from the King was about to be baptized into the Christian faith.<\/p>\n When he stopped the proceedings and asked for from whether the great majority of kings and princes<\/p>\n of the Phrygian nation would be in heaven or in hell on being told that the unbaptized<\/p>\n could not be in heaven. Redbud stepped back from the font and said he would not accept<\/p>\n being deprived of the company of the deceased leaders of the friesians, and that he couldn’t suddenly<\/p>\n abandon the beliefs and traditions of his own culture. One of the most entertaining,<\/p>\n complicated and obscure episodes in this period is something called the Book of the Three Impostors,<\/p>\n described by French historian George Mean Oua in his French title 3 F<\/p>\n as a blasphemous book that did not exist in translating the<\/p>\n University of Chicago press punched up that title, adding for sensationalizing<\/p>\n elements atheists bible most dangerous. Never. This is, of course,<\/p>\n teaser number two. The story, meanwhile, tells us an incredible tangle of myth<\/p>\n and history already in the 13th century. There were rumors of a supremely heretical tome<\/p>\n that claimed Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were impostors, and all three Abrahamic religions were<\/p>\n nothing but folly. Pope Gregory the 9th issued a ferocious denunciation<\/p>\n of the. Look, which no one had ever seen. And it’s supposed author of Holy Roman Emperor<\/p>\n Frederick the Second. Who is excommunicated? Not once, but twice in his lifetime.<\/p>\n The first was rescinded when he was behaving better. At almost the same time, St. Thomas<\/p>\n Aquinas called for unrepentant heretics to be executed. 3-G, quoting<\/p>\n the church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others by excommunicating<\/p>\n him and separating him from the church and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be<\/p>\n exterminated, thereby from the world by death. This fully institutionalised<\/p>\n suppression of thought. Maybe the low point in relations between religion and freedom.<\/p>\n George Colton’s multi-volume history of the monastic era in Europe, covering the years one thousand<\/p>\n to fifteen hundred is written with an openly anti-Catholic bias, which means<\/p>\n he gleefully includes episodes that do not redound to the credit of the church and his<\/p>\n dogmas. His discussion of what might be called the Proteau crusade against the Albert Jensens in<\/p>\n the 13th century draws on a large collection of trial documents assembled by<\/p>\n the Inquisition in the south of France in the same timeframe as the two previous examples.<\/p>\n I quote v.r Colten, one of the most memorable passages recorded in Latin 3H.<\/p>\n The same Petrus P\u1ebdr Ghazi has said that if he got hold of that God, who would<\/p>\n save just one of a thousand humans that he himself had made and would condemn all the others.<\/p>\n He would tear them apart and ripped to shreds with fingernails and teeth as a treacherous person,<\/p>\n and would regard him as false and perfidious, and would spit in his face. Spirit in<\/p>\n Feachem a U.S. teaser. Number three saying Mahe died from the drop.<\/p>\n Apparently a French curse. He demurred. His vivid defiance<\/p>\n may remind you of the notorious Van de fushi and Dante’s Inferno. Also 3H, who made<\/p>\n an obscene hand gesture called Figs Fiqh and threw them in God’s face,<\/p>\n where upon serpents come to magnify his torture. Colten notes that<\/p>\n final salvation of all mankind was a characteristically Albert J\u00f8rgensen belief.<\/p>\n The documents go on with another 15 pages of testimony against Petrus. Apparently,<\/p>\n his own brother turned on him without stating what happened. But there were no good outcomes<\/p>\n for Albert Jenson’s, so he was probably executed for heresy. Yet he surely would have said<\/p>\n he was the true Christian. So the dark and Middle Ages, a bit like the Romans,<\/p>\n did not contribute much to the development of our main themes arguments against divinity based<\/p>\n on reality and morality. But the attempts to impose a smothering dogmatism<\/p>\n were bound to incite resistance when better information and a revival of old ideas came<\/p>\n along to challenge orthodoxy. Section 4 Renaissance Enlightenment<\/p>\n With the coming of the Renaissance and Reformation, we enter into periods of even more intense conflict and divergent<\/p>\n ideas, often promoted with a positively alarming level of fanaticism, especially<\/p>\n to anyone who thinks that all the defenders of these religions were equal and being wrong.<\/p>\n The broad outlines are familiar. I’m not going to redraw them. In fact, we’ll be absurdly selective in coverage.<\/p>\n The first of the three so-called revolutions, Copernican, seems to have begun around<\/p>\n idea of KUVO centricity. Although he did not publish his book until 15 43,<\/p>\n reportedly seeing its final pages on May 24th, literally moments<\/p>\n before his death. Popularising account at 4 a. The retreat of geo<\/p>\n centricity continued with the work of Kepler and Galileo, and religious leaders lost one of the foundations<\/p>\n of their system the belief that Earth was the center of everything and the sole focus of divine<\/p>\n attention on the religious side. The unity of Western Christendom, already<\/p>\n undermined by the Great Schism with the Eastern Orthodox and 10:54 was shattered just<\/p>\n seven years after Copernicus. The discovery by Martin Luther’s rebellion against the corruptions<\/p>\n of the Roman Church, his insistence on using and interpreting only the Bible<\/p>\n itself. So last creep Torah rejecting Catholic emphasis on church tradition,<\/p>\n opened a path for the later emergence of historical critical scholarship, which ironically, has<\/p>\n yielded devastating results for the adherents of literalism. Whether Catholic or Protestant,<\/p>\n the disintegration of European Christianity led to an efflorescence of splinter groups generically<\/p>\n called Protestant. That continues to this day. The second edition of Oxfords World<\/p>\n Christian Encyclopedia for BEA claims thirty three thousand ninety. Christian<\/p>\n denominations around the planet, although they apparently count the Catholic Church through 236<\/p>\n times once for each country in which it appears this expands almost exponentially<\/p>\n from those hundred fifty six heresies in the fourth century. Things could get pretty. Wild.<\/p>\n Constitutional law expert Leonard Leaving’s massive book on blasphemy has several<\/p>\n spectacular chapters on 17th century sects in England, including<\/p>\n the Quakers. Nowadays, quiet and demure who vehemently refuse to submit<\/p>\n to authority, religious or secular, and marched into other churches, sometimes stark<\/p>\n naked, denouncing the congregations as doomed to hell. This multiplication<\/p>\n of beliefs came became a recognizably English trait. 150 years later,<\/p>\n poet Robert Southey provided a humorous list of heretical sects in England for<\/p>\n D. I won’t read all the names, but they’re real. Even the Mughal Etonians and<\/p>\n the head of Baptists are in the Oxford English Dictionary and you can see there’s a problem if<\/p>\n only one can be true. How do you decide which the Jeffersonian wall of separation<\/p>\n dating from the same decade as Saudi’s list was in part intended to keep those<\/p>\n sects from killing each other, which both Jefferson and John Adams thought would happen<\/p>\n if any one gained control over the state offering. Even a bare summary<\/p>\n of major Enlightenment figures would be the most superficial part of this superficial talk.<\/p>\n So I will simply point to Spinoza, who led the way in abandoning the God of the Bible. HUME<\/p>\n rejected miracles and said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he must be a scoundrel.<\/p>\n Voltaire, who after the Lisbon catastrophe ridiculed lionesses, claim that this is the best of all possible<\/p>\n worlds. DETROW In the article Buddhist who presented secular interpretations<\/p>\n of reality, American hero Tom Paine, who pilloried Bible stories and demand Worldcon,<\/p>\n who showed the inadequacy of scholastic arguments for God. I jumped now<\/p>\n to number 5, 1920. The 21st century’s the 19th century produced a sustained attack<\/p>\n on the Judeo-Christian system from within. That is by scholars who knew their texts<\/p>\n intimately and applied rational and critical standards, undermining their historicity<\/p>\n and exposing the complex background to the heterogeneous texts of the Bible. The foremost<\/p>\n name is David Friedrich Schwartz, who published at twenty eight a fourteen<\/p>\n hundred page study in 1835 5A, which was soon translated by novelist<\/p>\n Maryann Evans, better known as George Eliot. Its impact can be gaged from Albert<\/p>\n Schweitzer’s Quest of the historical Jesus also 5A, which surveys one hundred years<\/p>\n of work on the historical Jesus, but devotes 50 of its 400 pages just<\/p>\n to Strauss and his opponents. Half a century later, the skepticism of predominantly<\/p>\n German scholars had reached general recognition among the educated in England. Matthew Arnold,<\/p>\n Oxford’s first professor of poetry, showed the new attitude in a single phrase<\/p>\n strategically placed as the final sentence of a popular edition of his book, Literature and Dogma<\/p>\n That line turns up at the climax of the 19th centuries. Most one of the most controversial<\/p>\n novels today almost completely forgotten. Robert Ellesmere by Mrs.<\/p>\n Humphry Ward. Born Mary Agusta Arnold, niece of Matthew Arnold.<\/p>\n The title character is a minister who loses his faith and at the moment of transformation. Also<\/p>\n five B quotes Arnold’s statement put in nested quotation marks with<\/p>\n italics and an exclamation point. Gladstone himself knew Mrs Ward well<\/p>\n and complained of the book’s harmful potential. He even reviewed it, helping make it<\/p>\n the scandal of 1888. By that time, Victorian England had<\/p>\n many unbelievers, one of the most outspoken being the lifelong maverick and social activist Charles Bradlow,<\/p>\n who was elected to parliament in 1880 but denied his seat when he refused to swear by<\/p>\n God, colorful as his life was. There’s a postmortem, a sidebar story that’s so unusual.<\/p>\n I had to include it for your enjoyment. Showing the hostility to free fingers can extend right beyond the grave.<\/p>\n When he died in 1891, the impressive sum of two hundred twenty five pounds was raised<\/p>\n almost overnight to erect a monument in Brookwood, London’s Necropolis Five see<\/p>\n and hand out. Page five it had a fine bronze bust, which you can see in the old<\/p>\n photograph it left. But in September 1938, one day before<\/p>\n a world union of free thinkers Congress was scheduled to visit, it was stolen<\/p>\n and it remains missing to this day. The Internet provides the photo at right<\/p>\n showing the stump on which the bust was mounted. This is teaser number for the decapitated<\/p>\n gravestone. There was an extraordinary sidebar to the sidebar because<\/p>\n Brad Lore was an ardent supporter for independence for India. Clark<\/p>\n says most of London’s resident India Indian population came to his funeral.<\/p>\n Among them was a 22 year old named. Underst gundy’s,<\/p>\n who says in his autobiography, Also Five See that while waiting for the train, he overheard<\/p>\n the heckling of a clergyman. That’s his word. Heckled by an outspoken atheist,<\/p>\n which only strengthened his distaste for atheists in the last hundred fifty years,<\/p>\n it brought with the reality based critique of theism, but about as far as it can go. Reducing geo centricity<\/p>\n to a tiny shadow of its former self, and within my lifetime, consigning anthropocentric<\/p>\n city to the dustbin as well. The first stage in the latter process was, of course, the work of Charles<\/p>\n Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, recognising the principles of descent with modification<\/p>\n and natural selection as unifying all life, implicitly rejecting the special<\/p>\n creation of humankind and denying God any role in guiding evolution<\/p>\n by within my lifetime. I refer, of course, to the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson<\/p>\n of the double helix of DNA first reported in 1953. In the most important<\/p>\n two page article ever published five D, your page quotes one of the driest<\/p>\n understatements in the history of science. Surely from Krick, it has not escaped our<\/p>\n notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests the possible<\/p>\n copying mechanism for the genetic material. The concept of divine<\/p>\n beings is operating in our world had been under sustained attack since the Great Till Nudnik Thinkers<\/p>\n and Attack revived with new scientific evidence in the days of Copernicus and Galileo. But<\/p>\n the Copernican revolution was only the beginning. As telescopes grew more powerful, the<\/p>\n mere act of looking out into space became more mesmerizing and disorienting.<\/p>\n Back in the 17th century, French philosopher Boulez Pascal said Five E! The eternal<\/p>\n silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Scholars still dispute<\/p>\n whether the me in this isolated sentence represents Pascal himself, a speaker<\/p>\n or a hypothetical free thinker whose views he disagreed with. In any case, telescopes were still<\/p>\n in their infancy in the mid 17th century, but it was already clear not only that the<\/p>\n earth was no longer the center of everything, but that there was no vault in the sky. Rather that,<\/p>\n as Pascal observed, space just goes on seemingly infinite. And the more powerful<\/p>\n the telescope, the farther you see. There is a remarkably evocative footnote<\/p>\n in the treatment of the 18th century astronomer William Herschel and Richard Holmes as excellent<\/p>\n age of Wonder 5F and hand out six. He cites a passage from an 1882<\/p>\n Thomas Hardy novel I’d never heard of two on a tower.<\/p>\n I’ve cut and pasted Holmes’s footnote in its entirety because it links the arrows of Herschel<\/p>\n Hardy, Edwin Hubble and Holmes himself through the feeling he calls cosmological<\/p>\n vertigo teaser number five, which might occur in Pascal’s day intellectually at<\/p>\n the mere thought of spatial infinity. But for modern astronomers comes from real<\/p>\n optical and psychological experience. I quote from Gail Christensen’s Hubble biography<\/p>\n also 5F, because Holmes seems to be misremembering a bit when he says Hubble<\/p>\n used to describe the invocation of Buddha is not, at least in the passage quoted<\/p>\n attributed to Hubbard himself. Note the absence of a page reference, but the general impression is surely<\/p>\n justified even if you think, as people did until Hubble’s day, that there is only one galaxy,<\/p>\n its depth and emptiness radically undermined the comforting illusion of geo centricity.<\/p>\n The phrase only one galaxy leads to a very special photo presented in original<\/p>\n color 5f and hand out six. Kristiansen calls it pl. h 3:35<\/p>\n H destined to be the most famous ever taken. I’ve copied from a beautiful<\/p>\n coffee table book on the Hubble Space Telescope dated October 6, 1923.<\/p>\n It has the letter N for Nova in three places, but one has been crossed out and<\/p>\n v._a are exclamation point added and read. Comparison with previous images<\/p>\n showed that the star was a seated variable, which meant that the Andromeda Nebula<\/p>\n thought to be part of our galaxy was in fact another galaxy at almost incomprehensible<\/p>\n distance from earth. Nowadays the estimate is at least hundred billion<\/p>\n galaxies. That seems like a final dethroning of geo centricity. The process already<\/p>\n begun with the heliocentric ideas of Hellenistic astronomers. The challenge to conventional<\/p>\n religiosity represented by this intergalactic scale is clear. If we see something<\/p>\n like this and you can’t read it from here. But this is a Hallmark children’s book with a title God<\/p>\n is Everywhere. Five G. From 1968, four years<\/p>\n after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, radiation confirmed the Big Bang.<\/p>\n The naive title seems utter nonsense. If we contemplate the cubic volume of the observable<\/p>\n universe universe. Must be at least ten to the sixty third cubic miles<\/p>\n one, followed by sixty three zeros from right to left.<\/p>\n And his acceleration is expanding, its expansion is accelerating. I’d like<\/p>\n to say the universe is too big for God, whereas most people still think God is shrink<\/p>\n wrapped around our planet and concentrated over the land masses. Modern theologians<\/p>\n and evident desperation sometimes say God is outside the space time continuum.<\/p>\n But where’s that as a bridge to the final section? I quote mathematician William Clifford’s famous<\/p>\n line 5 H. It is wrong always everywhere. And for anyone to believe anything upon<\/p>\n isn’t sufficient evidence. Which neatly links evidence. The reality aspect<\/p>\n to morality issues of right and wrong. It’s now time to return to philosophical and morality<\/p>\n based arguments against theism. Picking up where the ancient holiness left off, you might expect<\/p>\n to hear about the much publicized new atheists. But I’m going to focus on people better qualified<\/p>\n as philosophers, especially three items five I written or co-edited by the late<\/p>\n Michael Martin. Harvard trained and perhaps the most relentlessly rigorous opponent<\/p>\n of pro theistic arguments in the 20th century. The pages noted on your handout<\/p>\n show that three of the traditional attributes of God missions freedom, omnipotence contain<\/p>\n inherent self-contradiction and thus cannot be true. Plato’s<\/p>\n Youth of Frode Dilemma and the writings paradox of your abilities have been recognized as problematic for centuries.<\/p>\n Life it’s Restates Plato’s argument 5 J paraphrased by Grayling Back<\/p>\n to I. But not everyone has heard of Plato. Seems odd, but true. Forty<\/p>\n years ago, Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff produced an Article 5 K about<\/p>\n the collapse of morality. If there is no God imposing it from above. Each of the<\/p>\n phrases I’ve quoted is its own paragraph in the original, so it’s laid out vertically<\/p>\n with content. I would say highly unusual for a lodger in all eight years ago<\/p>\n to conservative Protestant theologians starting from Lefse, remarks attempted to solve the dilemma<\/p>\n in Gods favor five K again. To date, their book published by the American<\/p>\n Office of Oxford. It seems much more receptive to these things, has had no philosophy<\/p>\n journal reviews and only to an overtly Christian periodicals. One quote<\/p>\n may show why he God is essentially good, morally perfect without defect<\/p>\n or darkness. It’s an odd word choice. This means not only that he would<\/p>\n never issue a command that would would break any inviolable or necessary moral truth, but that<\/p>\n he could not. This is slippery territory. The limits of divine omnipotence<\/p>\n were discussed in the notorious but little red Regensburg address of Pope<\/p>\n Emeritus Benedict Five L. Joseph Ratzinger was a professor before becoming<\/p>\n cardinal and pope, and his talk is impressively learned. You should look it up amazingly.<\/p>\n He spends several paragraphs arguing against the claim, which he attributed to Duns, SCOTUS<\/p>\n and the Muslim even husband, that God must be able. Given omnipotence and<\/p>\n absolute freedom to invert all moral values, both Bagon and Walls<\/p>\n and the Pope respond by taking God’s perfect goodness for granted. A procedure<\/p>\n known as begging the question. In 2012, Galen Straus, and now here at U.T.<\/p>\n and Thomas Nagel at NYU had an exchange in the New York Review of Books 5 AM. Quoting<\/p>\n Nagel, Galen Strassman offers what I believe to be the most powerful argument against the existence<\/p>\n of God. The argument from evil is a theistic responses to that argument of which I am aware<\/p>\n seem unpersuasive, and I find it hard to understand how belief in an all good<\/p>\n and all powerful D.O.T. can survive in the face of it. So Epicurus is old.<\/p>\n Questions are alive, well and still unanswered. I had to add a brief reference<\/p>\n also 5m to one of the most formative books of my undergraduate days. Being a relic, this<\/p>\n takes me along back a long way back. Walter Coffman’s faith of a heretic, superbly<\/p>\n informed and intensely serious. And he, too, treats, treats the problem of evil<\/p>\n as decisive against God. The other argument you’re bulletin’s so righties paradox.<\/p>\n Back at 2, I is also flourishing. Three recent articles 5 n. Apply it informs.<\/p>\n I call the embryo logical. So righties Kerckhove and Waller the ethical so righties CIDR<\/p>\n and the paleontological. So righties mine the only non philosopher in the bunch. Kerckhove<\/p>\n and Waller undermined the idea of fetal personhood long before personhood amendments.<\/p>\n I asked the question between us and Olduvai Gorge, who had the first soul,<\/p>\n whose parents didn’t? And TED CIDR, in the most important of the three, argues that since<\/p>\n humans must completely fill a spectrum from really good to really bad, even<\/p>\n a very wise God can not make an ethically justifiable all or nothing division<\/p>\n anywhere on that continuum. So your abilities to is alive and well. After twenty four hundred<\/p>\n years, I close with a relatively little known defense of the societal<\/p>\n value of dissenting from conventional opinion, from another on none other than<\/p>\n John F. Kennedy 5. Oh, hand out seven. Less than a month before<\/p>\n his assassination, he was at immersed for the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library.<\/p>\n So one of his focal points is the poets or artists freedom to Dissent. But<\/p>\n it takes only a slight shift to extend his words to the freedom of thought that we have seen courageously<\/p>\n exemplified from the ancients until today his splendid remarks. Regardless<\/p>\n of whether Kennedy himself, for someone like Ted Sorensen actually wrote them, seemed both significant<\/p>\n and achingly poignant. In today’s atmosphere of illiterate tribalism, they<\/p>\n touch on other topics of high relevance. Now the Legistorm in Colleges, The Future of America.<\/p>\n I’ve reproduced the speech in its entirety. You can read it on your own time. It’ll make you painfully<\/p>\n aware of how far we have fallen from Kennedy’s eloquence and breadth of vision.<\/p>\n But to end on a positive note, we have, as Steven Pinker insists in the earnest final pages<\/p>\n of his book, numerous historical models for the deep values of reason, science<\/p>\n and humanism and both the freedom and the obligation. To exercise them in the quest for continuing<\/p>\n human progress without fearing imaginary divinities. Thank you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/138\/heroes-of-the-intellect-unbelief-and-enlightenment-values-across-the-ages.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/138\/heroes-of-the-intellect-unbelief-and-enlightenment-values-across-the-ages.mp3","audio_player":"