Philosophy

I want to focus. I want to narrow down the things I think about, the things I am paying (notice the verb) attention to. Such things are receiving my attention like money that I am paying to them. The question is, what am I getting in return for my "investment"? It seems as though the broader the base, the larger the group of diverse items, that I pay my attention to, the less any of them can give me back. Another way of putting it is that I can only pay a little to each one at a time; therefore they can't give me much at a time.

So last night, in the dark, I pulled out my little notebook, the one I consider "disposable," for short-term to-do lists, grocery lists, and the like, and wrote something a little more important in it. I will copy it below, for posterity's sake.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Death on Demand

A number of months ago, as the small group I'm in was reading an article about the biblical basis for opposing animal cruelty, we read about how Sweden banned confinement in animal production.  Some people in the group tried to argue that this is an example of how Europe has a better society than America because they don't have the death penalty, they have universal health care, etc.

I tried to point out that insofar as any of these things is desirable, we should notice that they are not arriving at these conclusions by biblical logic that acknowledges the existence of God and takes its cues from the way He created the world and still sees the world today.  Instead, Europe's current culture has derived the logical basis for its choices primarily from an atheistic viewpoint that has elevated the value of animals (largely a good thing) as it has lowered the inherent value of human beings (a very bad thing).

From the article:

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.”