Fire and Knowledge

Mysteries of computer from 65BC are solved. Excerpt:

A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works….

Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon….

One of the remaining mysteries is why the Greek technology invented for the machine seemed to disappear. No other civilisation is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years.

The real issue [I had with] the Christian community was that [love] was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or America was a good country or whether last week’s sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 214

Naomi Wolf talks about “The Porn Myth” — pornography isn’t turning men into psychotic rapists, but rather turning them off to normal sexuality. An excerpt:

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention….

Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity?….

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity….

If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

Edward Shils used to say that there were four modes of education available in modern societies: schools, serious periodicals, new and used bookshops, and the intelligent conversation of friends.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 84

There’s not a lot of work in the Christian [writing] market if you don’t write self-righteous, conservative propaganda.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 188

We never return to the same book or even to the same page, because in the carrying light we change and the book changes, and our memories grow bright and dim and bright again, and we never know exactly what it is we learn and forget, and what it is we remember.

–Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (1996), p. 64

What is taught and learned is free—priceless, but free. To make a commodity of it is to work its ruin, for, when you put a price on it, we both reduce its value and blind the recipient to the obligations that always accompany good gifts: namely, to use them well and to hand them on unimpaired. To make a commodity of education, then, is inevitably to make a kind of weapon of it because, when it is dissociated from the sense of obligation, it can be put directly at the service of greed.

–Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1987), p. 52

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

–E.M. Forster quoted by Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 80