Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Middle America was in despair over what its revolting children were up to, though it seemed to have fewer qualms about pouring fire onto the people of Vietnam.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Another display of sectarinism. A perfect example of dangerous ignorance. But i cant point fingers. There is so much suffering i am contetly ignorant of.
Augustine believed that had Adam and Eve never eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would have propagated children ‘without shame at the uncontrollable stirring of their genitals’. Procreation would have been without pleasure or desire.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
‘narcissism of minor differences’, and he said its root lay in the aggressiveness which civilisation had insisted we must sacrifice for the sake of the advantages it offered, but which was always there inside us, crouching below the surface, waiting for the occasion of its violent release.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
This notion of the minor differences is not always true. White superiority came about because of major differences between the races and the technological superiority of the colonizers. They ascribed it to ther religion and their skin and said it was what God inherently ordained for them.
The idea of the world possessing agency and the capacity for self-disclosure intrigued our brilliant old friend Martin Heidegger. Heidegger wondered if the failure to accord the possibility of an active as opposed to a passive presence to the world – what he called our ‘forgetfulness of Being’
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
This is a fascinating idea. Effectively, nature itself is agentic and cpable of self-discloure. So effectively, our discovrry becomes nature's revelation. In this way, we objectify nature or the universe when we treat them as ststic environmens only given meaning by our conscious observation. We ignore the possibility that there is some other conscious presence
Unable to live with the suspicion that we may not actually be in possession of the final truth, we punish others for owning what we cannot admit in ourselves: the presence of doubt.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
That’s the arrangement between us and God. And that’s why there has to be the possibility of suffering in such a world, the result of the free choices we have made. That’s why there is so much wrong-doing and misery on earth. It is a necessary consequence of our freedom to choose right or wrong.6
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
It is here religious stories, if we read them intelligently and not as the script for yet another rescue plan, can be a help. They show us what it is like to be this thinking, feeling, troubled creature, formed by forces it had no control over, wandering in the haunted wood of existence.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
belief, as we saw in the case of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, carries its own meaning and justification within itself. It is believed because it is believed.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
has been more than silly or eccentric, it has been actively dangerous. It has hurt women. It continues to hurt them. And it shows how bad stories can kill people. Or to put it another way, it shows how good stories read badly, read the wrong way, can be poisonous.