Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Calvin

It was a terrific day of Intro classes, with Nhu on Groundhog Day (here's Phil claiming to be a God), Nicholas on Star Wars, Spurgeon on Calvin, and lots of Einstein, Spinoza, Berkeley, & Leibniz. (That bio about Leibniz's jealous rivalry with Spinoza I mentioned is Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic.)

Here's my favorite Calvin:

I'm afraid I just can't get behind any theology that claims kids enter the world in a state of depravity, or that we all  deserve eternal damnation and unrelenting torment for expressing the very nature we supposedly were endowed with by our creator, or that the original "sinfulness" of long-gone ancestors is an ineradicable and permanent stain.

Such ideas can be engaged philosophically, but not by appeal to the putatively unchallengable authority of a pre-scientific, demonstrably errant, multiple-anonymous-contributor text.

One more thing, while I'm wound up, and before I cool down: global warming is not just an Al Gore fantasy.

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