MachineMachine /stream - tagged with theology http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, (Part 3) : Adventures in the Dream Factory http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-3/ Philip K. Dick’s admittedly peculiar but passionately held worldview and the gnosticism it embodies does more than explain what some call the dystopian turn in science fiction from the 1960s onward, it also gives us what has arguably become the dominant mode of understanding of fiction in our time, whether literary, artistic or cinematic. This is the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth. And let’s be honest: it is simply immensely pleasurable… ]]> Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:42 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-3/ “I’m not sure I want to evolve, when it comes right... http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/19545387424

“I’m not sure I want to evolve, when it comes right down to it.”

]]> Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:25:09 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/19545387424 “God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life.... http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/19544911616

“God,” Eldritch said, “promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.”

]]> Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:17:47 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/19544911616 The New Atheism http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/26/james-wood-the-new-atheism?CMP=twt_fd Trapped in the childhood literalism of my background, I had not entertained the possibility of Christian belief separated from the great lure and threat of heaven and hell.

The New Atheism is locked into a similar kind of literalism. It parasitically lives off its enemy. Just as evangelical Christianity is characterised by scriptural literalism and an uncomplicated belief in a "personal God", so the New Atheism often seems engaged only in doing battle with scriptural literalism; but the only way to combat such literalism is with rival literalism. The God of the New Atheism and the God… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:21:05 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/26/james-wood-the-new-atheism?CMP=twt_fd Theology is Dead http://t.co/xjay4VC/great-read-theology-is-dead-quotthere-is-in-accord-with-reasons-movement-no-name-to-which-another-is-not-opposed-httptcoxjay4vc-x Great read: Theology is Dead "...there is, in accord with reason’s movement, no name to which another is not opposed” http://t.co/xjay4VC #x ]]> Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:52:46 -0700 http://t.co/xjay4VC/great-read-theology-is-dead-quotthere-is-in-accord-with-reasons-movement-no-name-to-which-another-is-not-opposed-httptcoxjay4vc-x How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:16:25 -0700 http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ Is there a secular body? http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by “secular society”? What intrigues me about this question is that, despite its apparent simplicity, the path toward an answer seems not at all clear. For example, are the scholarly sensibilities and the modes of affective attunement that find expression here elements of a secular habitus? What would be indicated by calling such expressive habits “secular”?

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular… ]]> Fri, 03 Dec 2010 09:47:00 -0700 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/11/15/secular-body/ Manguel, Muse of Impossibility http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.”

As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html Cosmology, Cambridge Style: Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Hawking http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the universe that isn't astonishingly inferential. Alas, you'd hardly know that from listening to the retired Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and his media echo chamber.

The breaking news originated in the latest book by Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (Bantam), co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow. It excited front-page editors as few science tomes do. Britain's Mirror exclaimed, "Good Heavens! God Did Not Create… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 Your Move: The Maze of Free Will http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/ You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right back to the beginning of the universe. You may also believe that determinism is true. (You may also know, contrary to popular opinion, that current science gives us no more reason to think that determinism is false than that determinism is true.) In that case, standing on the steps of the store, it may cross your mind that in five minutes’ time you’ll be able to look back on the… ]]> Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:19:00 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/ Infinite Life http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not recorded, but it must have been stimulated by experiences such as these. It may have merged in the mind of an ancient progenitor with thoughts of a God, a possessor of unlimited might, an infinite being itself. But whether or not the idea of God was born with the first thoughts of what cannot be counted, this wonderful book by an American historian of science and a French mathematician teaches… ]]> Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:18:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/76715/infinite-life?passthru=MDBkMjEwNTgzZjNhNGZmYjBhNzEzZTdiZmVlZDk0Nzg The rise of the new agnostics http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/ Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.

Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the "New Atheism"—the high-profile denunciations of religion in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague Christopher Hitchens—I believe it's important to define a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the… ]]> Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:38:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/ What did Jesus do? (Reading and Unreading the Gospels) http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because… ]]> Wed, 19 May 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all Believe it or Not http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:19:00 -0700 http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not Philip K Dick journals to be published next year http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8653261.stm The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed.

Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, had 44 novels published. His first was Solar Lottery in 1955.

He is best known for works including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - the basis of 1982 film Blade Runner.

Other films based on Dick's books include Total Recall and Minority Report.

Dick's journals include descriptions of a series… ]]> Tue, 04 May 2010 02:28:00 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8653261.stm Giorgio Agamben - What is a Paradigm - Lecture, 2002 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/ ...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in the human sciences, or even in art? These are the questions I will try to answer today. Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands… ]]> Fri, 30 Apr 2010 06:39:00 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/ Separate Truths http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/25/separate_truths/?page=full It is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom.

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to “All Religions Are One” (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism… ]]> Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:55:00 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/04/25/separate_truths/?page=full Theology for atheists http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism Theology lets us talk about deep and irrational urges. This is seen by some atheists as weakness. But maybe it's a strength as well James Wood, a writer who himself has lived between the tugs of belief and unbelief, made an eloquent call in the New Yorker last August for "a theologically engaged atheism". Concluding a review of Terry Eagleton's recent attack on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he imagines something "only a semitone from faith [which] could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative." At the American Academy of Religion meeting… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:29:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jan/04/religion-atheism If Atheists Ruled the World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9IPoAdct8 All text taken directly from online Christian fundamentalist forums. http://www.fstdt.net ]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:42:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9IPoAdct8