Still Life with Game Fowl, Juan Sánchez Cotán
Posted on 04/02/2008 5:50:31 PM PDT by a_chronic_whiner
The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre* came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the illegitimate child!”
Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Still Life with Game Fowl, Juan Sánchez Cotán
Must everything British be this insipid?
Thanks for posting this very good article by Theodore Dalrymple. Thanks for posting Cotan’s painting.
We were all created. Many devolve.
They’re a weird bunch, but what do you mean by insipid?
Your Welcome =D
“you’re”*
posted too soon,
Lots of good reading from City Journal.
I have read many good articles by Dalrymple. Thanks again.
Welcome to BBC central.
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