Yatterings

In a piece on the arrival of the Right Rev Gene Robinson in England for the Lambeth conference and his subsequent heckling during his sermon, Gareth Maclean comments:

‘What, I found myself wondering when the Right Rev Gene Robinson was heckled with calls of “Heretic!” and “Repent!”, happened to the Enlightenment? Two hundred years after Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, attacking the corruption of institutionalised religion and challenging the inerrancy of the Bible, and here we still are, spending an inordinate amount of time obsessing over the same issues.’

Perhaps or perhaps not. Reason itself is perhaps under attack from both sides - religion and science. The Principia in Last Witchfinder says “I’m quite simply the greatest single work of science ever written… But the curious among you want to know about my soul” (p4). We need to be curious and maintain that curiosity.

In the The Last Witchfinder, James Morrow argues for something a little different, perhaps more pertinent. The Principia comments:

“There is something the matter with Reason… Technology induces spiritual suffocation… The Enlightenment  may have outlived its usefulness, but it is only through Reason’s protocols that one can make a coherent case for Reason’s limitations” (p 58-59)

It would need further reading but I always wonder if Neal Stephenson is doing a similar thing in the Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle series.