An interview with Jacques Barzun - audio from Liberty Fund

Quotes and comments;
- the interview (60 mins.) was conducted about the time 'From dawn to decadence' came out.
- I don't share Barzun's worldview, but I find him an interesting writer. (I recommend the above book highly.)

1. Barzun is good on why our academics favored the communist countries and collectivism in general. (They felt that society needed a large tyranny - the state - to counter the smaller tyrannies... ie. business, the church, etc.)

2. I guess we'd have to call Barzun the classic agnostic. (He doesn't seem to understand that the agnostic can only exist because others have definite beliefs. We can't all be agnostic :=) He also seems unaware that agnosticism is an absolute truth claim. ie. to claim there is no truth is to make an absolute truth claim.

3. The interviewer asks him, "is there no standard?" and Barzun apparently feels there isn't any. "Where are we going to get the standard?" he asks... as if this were utterly impossible.
"How can we then judge whether things are right or wrong?"
"We have to judge things by their consequences... by their fruits..."
(He wasn't too pleased when the interviewer pointed out we have to judge consequences by a standard.)

Mars Hill audio Journal - you can download a copy of this audio magazine from Marshillaudio.org


Quotes and comments;
- In this sample (hosted by Ken Myers) you get nine short interviews with various people.
- on one section Dana Gioia reads a poem (I enjoyed) called Words.
- one section features Mary Midgley, speaking about her book poetry and science. In the interview she talks about metaphors in science... and how Darwin scored a big triumph for evolution by speaking of 'selection' - natural selection being a metaphor based on (playing off of) the idea of artificial selection (of qualities) in animal breeding.
- M. also speaks of the greeks atomists as being motivated by a desire to depersonalize the universe.

Media, modernism and worship - audio lectures by Ken Meyers

Quotes and comments;
- a series of five lectures on modern culture, the church and worship.

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.

Truth and Myth: Unlocking the Lord of the Rings - audio lecture by Joseph Pearce

Comments;
- on the same page you'll find 3 additional audio resources.
1. "Creator, Creation and Creativity: Understanding Tolkien's and Lewis' Philosophy of Myth"
2. Forum with Joseph Pearce, Russell D. Moore, James Parker, and Jim Orrick—Part 1
3. Forum with Joseph Pearce, Russell D. Moore, James Parker, and Jim Orrick—Part 2

Dawkin's delusion; Peter williams dicusses 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. This is an audio presentation (in four parts) from Culture Watch

Comments;
- you might have to scroll down the page a bit.
- in a recent issue of the english Spectator (a wretched magazine) somebody had listed the GD as their book of the year. People apparently don't understand that the very worldview Dawkins propounds makes it absurd for him to make moral pronouncements. If the bizarre scenario (of selfish genes) that he propounds were true morality and ethics (not to mention free will) would be ruled out. In terms of his own wview he has no basis for making any moral judgments of any kind. His moral pronouncements against christianity in fact rely on christianity to make any sense; as they can't be based on his brand of evolutionary theory. Only if there is objective, public truth can his arguments make any sense; but his wview rules these things out. He can't in any way argue consistently in terms of his own stated beliefs. If man is 'ordered' by selfish genes our lives are absurd, and rationality is lost.