A Curious Little Blog

I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James.  He writes, When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible. On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl.  He says, Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateve

I am almost done with William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience."  Up until the last few chapters, I found it a fair-minded discussion of religion.  James seems not to believe in a religion, but he goes out of his way to treat it seriously.  The book provides a lot of interesting examples of conversions, spiritual despair, saintliness, and mysticism.  (Almost all but the last are from Christians.) Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him.  He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this:  "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself."  (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.)  And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with.  However, he then go

Allegedly, President Trump has inquired about buying Greenland from Denmark.  Most people mock this idea, but in fact I don't see anything wrong with it in principle.  After all, a large portion of the current United States's land area was acquired via four different sales:  the Louisiana Purchase, the Adams-Onis treaty (for Florida), the Gadsden Purchase, and Alaska.  Admittedly, the last of these was over 150 years ago, but otherwise they were similar to Greenland in being large (except Gadsden), sparsely populated areas that offered strategic advantages.  Since Denmark granted Greenland a significant degree of self-rule in 1979 and again in 2008, and since the population of Greenland are largely Inuits rather than ethnic Danes, the national allegiance of Greenland would not seem to matter much to its inhabitants.  The security of the island would surely be better protected by the United States.  From a Danish standpoint, apart from national pride, it is difficult to see what

I have every possible sympathy for the protesters in Hong Kong.  In 1997, when Britain returned sovereignty of the island to China (following the expiration of a 99 year lease), I thought Britain was wrong not to grant asylum to every Hong Kong citizen who wanted to immigrate to England.  This could, theoretically, have led to a flood several million non-English speaking people into the United Kingdom, and I can see the problems (not all that difficult to anticipate) if that had happened.  I thought Britain had a responsibility to those people who had been born and raised as British subjects not to turn them over to Chinese despotism.  I wonder how people on the Left would feel about such a situation today.  In general, they seem to support unlimited admission of asylum seekers, although only those who can find their own way into Westerns nations by walking or other means (I haven't seen any suggestions that we should fly those who live in the shadow of poverty and civil war from N