The line of despair - audio lectures by Jerram Barrs

Quotes and comments;
- you'll have to scroll down the page to lectures 12 and 13.
- these lectures are part of course on the life and work of Francis Schaeffer.

1. In lecture 1. Barrs talks about the poetry of Thomas Hardy. It's interesting to me that while materialists like Hardy expressed a total lack of meaning, we have more recent materialists like R. Dawkins telling us life under the cloud of darwin is full of meaning. Maybe our 'new atheists'would like to tell us how they got from the pessimism of Hardy to their new found optimism. It seems unwarranted and hollow to me.

2. In lecture 2. Barrs talks about the (nihilistic) poetry of Ted Hughes. What is strange about his poetry is that in the age of darwin (and materialism) he personifies nature. (ie. stones are blind, the sea is bored, can't sleep, a tree loses her mind, etc. This is indicative of the intellectual 'schizophrenia' secular people live with. You wonder how a Materialist can write in such a way as Hughes does. Couldn't he see that Darwin hads ruined nature poetry? Didn't anyone tell him nature is a blind machine? (That the english elite made him poet laureate is surely expressive of some kind of death wish on their part.)
- people are taught in government schools to be materialists and evolutionists, but in life they can't live out this worldview. We see this in Hughes; there's a wild disconnect between his materialism and his mysticism. Evolutionists can't find any kind of integrated view of life. What they end up doing is tying two or more disparate wviews together.