February 26, 2006

2-26-6 Books et cetera

I'm reading Frend's Rise of Christianity now.  It had an interesting section about certain philosophers who had contact with Christianity.  One of these philosophers, Peregrinus Proteus, a Cynic, ended up as olympic history.  He happened to do it by burning himself alive at the climax of the Olympic games at the 236th Olympiad A.D. 165.  I suppose the phrase, "it’s better to burn out than to fade away," might be considered Cynical in origin.  


I read Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard.  It's about how faith is in a sense our link with the supernatural.  How our preconcieved notion of how the world works sometimes grinds against this notion.  While I like where he was going with this, I also want to stress that I think that God should be the foundation for a worldview, and not the metaphysical exceptions, as it were.  We should be ready and willing to see God work in His creation, and when it happens, though it is out of the norm for our experience, it is not out of the norm for Him.  The difference being that a preconcieved system based solely on human empirical data is going to be severely limited in scope.  However there is more to the universe and reality than our experiences.  Just a difference in jumpin' off points.
If a planet with a moon that teeters on the spot of being perfect for sustaining life, and a asteroid flys into that moon, does it make a noise?   Can sound travel through solids?

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