links and notes

Links and Notes

* John Samson has a nice post on divine foreknowledge at "Reformation

Theology." (HT: Rebecca Writes)

* "The Crusty Curmudgeon" reviews a South Park episode on a certain

religious organization associated with celebrities like Travolta and

Cruise. I confess I'm a South Park fan; I've even used one of its

episodes ("The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000") in a class for the purposes of

review (a delightful subplot of the episode is Kyle's crisis of doubt

when he finds out that the Tooth Fairy and Santa don't exist; the

crisis is overcome in part by the reading of Descartes -- I had the

students discuss what Descartes would agree with and what he

wouldn't).

* Orac at "Respectful Insolence" discusses the recent arrest of David

Irving in Austria for Holocaust denial.

* Mark Grimsley at "Blog Them Out of the Stone Age" critically

discusses the concept of 'fourth generation warfare' in two posts (and

soon to be three).

* Mark Roberts has a thirty-part series of posts on the question Are

the New Testament Gospels Reliable? The posts strike a good balance

between being readable and dealing with the technical issues. He's

currently blogging on the question of churches and politics, which has

become a big issue recently, given the recent furor about IRS action

against All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California for the

preaching of an anti-war sermon. Roberts's analysis, which I found a

bit surprising (and with which I'm inclined to disagree), is that the

sermon probably did violate IRC 501(c)(3).

* "Novum Testamentum" has a post giving a translation of Arius's

Thalia, which sums up the heresiarch's theology.

* At "18th-Century Reading Room" a while back, there was a post with a

selection from Hume's essay, The Epicurean. "The Epicurean" is the

first of four essays on human happiness, the other three being The

Stoic, The Platonist, and The Sceptic. None of these essays portray

Hume's own view. The best way to see them is as a dialogue, in which

each speech needs to be counterbalanced against the others. (There are

two kinds of dialogue, according to Cicero, who is Hume's biggest

influence in these matters; the more familiar dialectical, which

emulates a conversation, and the rhetorical, in which the characters

don't converse but give set speeches.) Each of the speeches is

supposed to sum up a view of human happiness that naturally tends to

arise among the human race. Hume clearly sympathizes most with the

Sceptic, and least with the Platonist; but each of the speakers

captures something of the truth, and the Sceptic's position doesn't

strictly match Hume's position elsewhere. Both the Stoic and the

Epicurean, for instance, say things with which Hume would clearly