Sunday, June 12, 2016

The Age of Voltaire

by Will and Ariel Durant

Through his writings, Voltaire helped change Western Europe in the 1700s to a more secular, less religious place. Voltaire stands foremost among the thought-leaders that France knew as the philosophes. Since many philosophers in eighteenth-century France were hostile to Christianity as they knew it, the word philosophe took on an anti-Christian connotation. This group also included Diderot, the force behind a multi-volume Encyclopédie that had a lasting impact toward a more enlightened society.

In these excerpts, we see what Voltaire and a few other philosophes said to counter centuries of Church dogma:

Chapter excerpts:

I	France: The Regency two plays from Voltaire's early years. One traced religious crimes through the ages
VII	The People and the Statea pamphlet which urged the government to establish its authority over the Church, to prevent the Church from being a state within the state
X	The Play of the MindMontesquieu defies the censors, poking at Christianity by poking at Islam/span>
XI	Voltaire in France: 1729–50Letters concerning the English Nation: liberty of person and property; freedom of the press; the right of being tried in all criminal cases by a jury of independent men; the right of being tried only according to the strict letter of the law; the right of every man to profess, unmolested, what religion he chooses.
XIV	Switzerland and VoltaireLooking in history to discover a history of the human mind. Organized religion the villain in his story, since it seemed to him generally allied with obscurantism, given to oppression, and fomenting war.
XV	The ScholarsEuropean acquaintance with alien faiths and institutions was a powerful factor in weakening Christian theology. Why had China no record or tradition of Noah's Flood? Why had God confined his Scriptural revelation to a small nation in western Asia if he had intended it for mankind? How could anyone believe that outside the Church there would be no salvation? Were all those billions who had lived in India, China, and Japan now roasting in hell? The structure of dogma showed new cracks day by day.
XVI	The Scientific AdvanceJoseph Priestley received the credit for the discovery of oxygen. In his Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, he said . . . that the soul and body, being in reality the same kind of substance, must die together. Astronomy. Laplace. To destroy the errors born from ignorance of our true relations with nature, errors and fears that will readily be reborn if the torch of science is ever extinguished. BOTANY. 1. Linnaeus. He treated man (whom he trustfully called “homo sapiens”) as part of the animal kingdom. The effect of science upon religion—or rather upon Christianity—seemed lethal.
XVII	MedicineTo reform the care of the insane. A milestone in modern medicine Led by Pinel, who had imbibed the humanitarian ethics of Voltaire, he received permission to strike off the chains from his patients, to release them from their cells, and to give them fresh air, sunlight, exercise, and progressive mental tasks.
XVIII	The AtheistsSince many philosophers in eighteenth-century France were hostile to Christianity as they knew it, the word philosophe took on an anti-Christian connotation. La Mettrie, Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, Grimm, Helvétius, and d’Holbach They turned their backs on metaphysics as a hopeless quest, and on systems of philosophy as pretentious vanities. Faith in reason became the foundation and instrument of "liberal" thought—i.e., in this aspect, thought liberated from the myths of the Bible and the dogmas of the Church.
XIX	Diderot and the EncyclopédieNearly all its contents used as weapons by the philosophes in their conflict with Christianity
XXI	The Spreading Campaign: 1758–74Helvétius, from his Treatise on Man: The desire of the clergy in all times has been to be powerful and opulent. By what method can it satisfy this desire? By selling hope and fear. Another abbé, Raynal, in 1772, detailed and denounced the greed, treachery, and violence of the Europeans in dealing with the natives of the East and West Indies The dominant themes of the Enlightenment: hatred of superstition and priestcraft, and resentment of state-and-Church tyranny over life and thought. Catholicism was an imposture by which prelates and rulers had joined forces to support each other through myths, miracles, propaganda, oppression. Himself a noble, d'Holbach would do away with hereditary aristocracy: "Are nations to work without respite to satisfy the vanity, the luxury, the greed of a pack of useless and corrupt bloodsuckers?"
XXII	Voltaire and ChristianityHe said nothing about Christianity that had not been said before. It is only that when he said it the words passed like a flame through Europe, and became a force molding his time, and ours. An intelligent man does not need it as a support to morality; too often, in history, it has been used by priests to bemuse the public mind while kings picked the public pocket. What was it that aroused him to open war? It was the suppression of the Encyclopédie, the orthodox explanations of the Lisbon earthquake, and the ferocious executions of Jean Calas and the Chevalier de La Barre.
XXIII	The Triumph of the PhilosophesFreeing public education from the control of the Jesuits. He argued, their domination of the classroom closed the mind to original thought, and indoctrinated pupils with loyalty to a foreign power. The rules of morality should be taught independently of any religious creed; "the laws of ethics take precedence over all laws, both divine and human, and would subsist even if these laws had never been declared. Fresh enthusiasm for helping the poor, the sick, and the oppressed was due chiefly to the philosophes, and above all to Voltaire. Morality grew more independent of religion.

In America we need to revisit these ideas.

Wednesday, Dec 30, 2015

Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks is a movie about the making of “Mary Poppins” in which Walt Disney himself appears as a character. The central character is author P.L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson.

Mr. Banks is the father of the children cared for by Mary Poppins. Mr. Banks had his roots in P.L. Travers' own father, Travers Goff. The movie goes back and forth between two story lines.

One story line (1906) tells how P.L. Travers as a six-year-old, original name Helen Goff, was encouraged and imbued with such imagination by her father, Travers Goff, who worked as manager of a local bank. The young Helen Goff worships her dad as he spins fantastic stories and paints images of a magical world all around. Travers Goff ended up self-destructing, victim of drinking brought on by manic-depressive illness. As her dad floundered, Helen saw her family rescued by her Aunt Ellie — the genesis of the nanny who comes in to save Mr. Banks.

In the other story line, in 1961, P.L. Travers fights to keep her characters from being 'Disneyfied' while Disney and his creative team make Mary Poppins into a movie. She has horrors of her Mary Poppins 'cavorting and twinkling, careening towards a happy ending like a Kamikaze'. For twenty years, Travers has refused Disney's request for movie rights to her creation. At the urging of her agent, Mrs. Travers, as she insists on being called, reluctantly takes an 'exploratory' trip to Disney Studios.

“  cavorting and twinkling, careening towards a happy ending like a Kamikaze ”

Travers did not want the story or any part of it made into a cartoon.

Read the complete article here.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

On the Historicity of Jesus

A book released in late June of 2014: On the Historicity of Jesus by Dr. Richard Carrier. Carrier chose to have it published by a scholarly press that specializes in religious books, to lend his work more credibility.

This book examines a daring question: whether there is a case to be made that Jesus never existed. That the Jesus we know originated as a mythical character, in tales symbolically narrating the salvific (having the intent or power to save or redeem) acts of a divine being who never walked the earth. Later this myth was mistaken for history or deliberately repackaged that way, and embellished over time.

Read the complete article here.