Thursday, March 25, 2010

Skeptic


Immanual Kant wrote: "Skepticism is a resting place for human reason, where it can reflect upon its dogmatic wanderings, but it is no dwelling place for permanent settlement. Simply to acquiesce in skepticism", Kant wrote " can never suffice to answer the restlessness of reason."

So in Kant's view skepticism is the abdication of reason, all be it for a season. Isn't it high time the holiday was over?

Christian philosopher Dallas Willard had this to say about our age, these words taste better than a cool Tui!

“The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.”

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