What'd the Enlightenment ever do for me, anyway? (Addenda)

[solarbird]

Read the main article first. It's right above this one, or should be.

Addendum 1: There's plenty more I could talk about in this Truth Project worldview article alone - like, say, this lovely bit of conflation:

For example, a 2-year-old believes he's the center of his world, a secular humanist believes that the material world is all that exists, and a Buddhist believes he can be liberated from suffering by self-purification.

The "secular humanist," who is, of course, representative of all evil - and in particular, everyone who doesn't believe in religious control over government - is akin to a two-year-old, declared an atheist, and conflated with the Communist Menace by rhetoric about the material world. It's a lovely bit of twisting rhetoric, eliminating everything down to the "clearly right" (them) and "clearly wrong" (everyone else) sides - and you'd better be on the right one.

Addendum 2: Or this amazing turn of phrase:

For example, let's suppose you have bought the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (secular relative truth) as opposed to beauty as defined by God's purity and creativity (absolute truth). Then any art piece, no matter how vulgar or abstract, would be considered "art," a creation of beauty.

Students of history, particularly art history, should be hearing echos of the entartete Kunst, with a global replace of "secular worldview" for "racially impure." And once you're paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels without irony, well - there's just not much left to say, is there? Other than hey, why not? You got away with quoting Stalin.

Comments

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Both addenda appear to be the same piece.

[solarbird]

Those are two things; lj-cut clickthroughs are kind of lame in that they expand all cuts, and then position your browser on the resulting fully-expanded page near the one you clicked on. In this case, the list is apparently short enough that both clickthroughs present the same image on your screen and no need to / room to scroll.

I've always had this idea in my head that lJ-cuts really ought to expand just the one clicked upon, but they don't.

[avram]

Those were both short enough that I don't know why you cut them in the first place.

[solarbird]

It was 2:30AM. Gimmie a break.

Oh right, they were originally in the main article. The cuts made more sense there. Then I decided I wanted them in a separate message. That's why.