Ten Books Every Student Should Read in College

HUMAN EVENTS ^ | Week of June 2, 2003 | 28 distinguished scholars and university professors

[Aquinasfan]

Thats funny stuff, really. Theology is the most important topic for Christians, myself included, but it is not a science.

Is Sacred Doctrine a Science?

[Blzbba]

"I have a project I want you to do!

1. I want it "Fast"

2. I want it "Cheap"

3. I want it "Right"

Your response please. "


Typical management - keeping all the details of 'project' to themselves! LOL! Actually, it's done already...and under budget.

[justshutupandtakeit]

"Liberal Democrats" stand for strong military forces and a foreign policy which puts the United States first? Since when? Hamilton is almost universally condemned by the University Leftists precisely because he was the most far Right of the Founders. It was because of hatred of Hamilton that the Democratic party was founded by Jefferson and Madion.

Jefferson is the father of the RAT party of deceit and demagogery. He totally opposed the strong military, totally opposed a Navy and worked to destroy both while president and before. His power was dependent on the NY RAT machine (which fought Hamilton and the constitution tooth and nail) and rabble rousers across the nation. He totally supported the Reign of Terror in France and schemed incessently to ally us with France.

Hamilton outsmarted him with the funding scheme which was the capitalization of the Blood of the Revolutionaries and a price of Freedom. His brillant insight into funding set the course of the nation on centuries of Economic growth. We are the most powerful nation on earth because of his brilliance in discerning that the capitalized word of America was as valuable as Gold. No wonder he was Washington's closest collaborator for 20 yrs.

Little wonder it took a concentrated conspiracy (now known as the DemocRATic Party) against him to attempt to frustrate his policies (the policies of the Washington administration were Hamilton's.) How ironic that a man like Jefferson: deceitful, hypocritical, dissembling and dishonest could be held higher in the estimation of his countrymen than a man like Hamilton who fought his entire life for freedom and national independence whose integrity was beyond compare whose forthrightedly standing for what he believed earned him the enmity of those who prefered to work in the shadows, through loathsome surrogates, and whose actions do not come close to matching his words. The more one learns of Jefferson the worse he comes off. Of course, if you prefer the Parson Weems type of mythology to cold, hard reality you are welcome to it.

[Aquinasfan]

I was very old before someone pointed out to me that one needs to read his metaphysics in conjunction with his logic. Much of the difficulties of his essentialism went away when I did this.

A great, great book is "An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas". Nice too because it's mercifully brief, about 150 pages or so. A must have for the library. It makes a good gift for college students or the philosophically minded.

[Aquinasfan]

He had a saying: "If you want a degree, go to college... If you want an education, go to the library."

So true, but try telling that to HR. But that's a gripe for another day.

[Aquinasfan]

LOL! Neither theology nor philosophy has built the bridge you trust when driving your car, the building you trust won't fall over in a windstorm while at work, the house/apmnt/etc you live in, the media you rely on for communication (TV, cellular networks, PCs, Al Gore's Internet, etc.), the vehicles you use for transportation, etc.

I wouldn't want a philosopher to barbeque a hamburger for me either, but that's irrelevant. The assumptions upon which the natural sciences are based are determined by philosophy. Philosophy is therefore logically prior to the natural sciences.

For example, scientific endeavors depend upon certain assumptions such as the fact that the universe is comprehensible, that physical laws are uniform, that one can trust one's senses, that time progresses forward (that is, history is not literally cyclical). The reason why the natural sciences were fructified in the West is because of the influence of Christianity, particularly the influence of the Catholic Church, and even more particularly, because of the Church's dogmatic teaching regarding "Creation from nothing," as Stanley Jaki argues so persuasively.

In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

1. "Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."

2. "The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."

3. "Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."

4. "At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."

Philosophy and theology are nice sciences to talk about, but rarely put food on the table, give you shelter from storms or enemies, etc.

No, they're essential to a true education.

(Yes, I'm an engineer!)

I have a degree in mechanical engineering too. But if you want to read something truly challenging, try the Summa Theologica (and then consider that St. Thomas considered it theology for beginners).

[RomanCatholicProlifer]

Um, Catholics do not pray to saints, we pray to God. We ask for the intercession of the saints to pray for certain causes, in the same way I would ask you to pray for a cause....no difference.(remember, the soul is immortal, ergo, the saints are very much alive in heaven).

Catholics do not worship Mary, the Mother, of God, we worship God. Catholics venerate Mary, as did Luther. Venerate means To regard with respect, reverence, or heartfelt deference.

In regard to the celibacy issue, the custom is not random, but is well established in the early Church, and can be traced to the spousal relationship Christ has with his Church on earth, a bride/bridegroom relationship that is gender based. Priests are the bridegroom of the Church, which is the bride. This is entirely biblical.

Protestants really need to stop rehashing this nonsense. It makes them look silly.

[hedgetrimmer]

He had a saying: "If you want a degree, go to college... If you want an education, go to the library."

Sadly, the libraries in Santa Cruz county don't give you much of an education. When my son had to do a report on nuclear power plants, how they work, there was not one book on the subject. There were however 8 books on the shelves about the deadly human race destroying nuclear power plants that dot our countryside.

[Blzbba]

thanks for your reply.

Based upon the idea that Christianity did much to usher in an "age of Science" (so to speak), I wonder why I am starting to see such a backlash against science from fundamentalist Christians. Fundies who still stick to the myth of Creation and a (approx.) 10,000 year old planet, even in the face of ridiculous amounts of geological evidence that age the planet to 4-5 billion years old. Fundies who'll use the various methods of dating to try and verify a piece of the Ark, or the Shroud of Turin, or the Cross...but vigorously deny the validity of these exact dating methods when they date layers of bedrock to pre-Cambrian periods. Then you have the Roman Catholic Church and many other Christian denominations vigorously opposed to stem-cell research of ANY kind, regardless of the positive health implications it has, and regardless of the source of the stem cells (it doesn't have to come from an aborted fetus, for example).

This really has little to do with your informative post, but I've found the anti-Science movement by religious groups to be rather nauseous and kind of scary, in that some of these groups would apparently be happy to attempt living without any of the knowledge our species has acquired and even frown upon the acquisiton of such knowledge.

oh well - thanks for you information again. I learned a few things, which is always good.

[Aquinasfan]

Then you have the Roman Catholic Church and many other Christian denominations vigorously opposed to stem-cell research of ANY kind, regardless of the positive health implications it has, and regardless of the source of the stem cells (it doesn't have to come from an aborted fetus, for example).

For the record, the Catholic Church only opposes stem cell research which uses stem cells taken from aborted fetuses. This is a provisional and prudential position, as far as I know.

[nickcarraway]

If that is true, then how come when they became the establisment, they replaces high culture with the plastic culture?

[Centurion2000]

bump

[Mr. Mojo]

BTTT