Fwd: [EXTERNAL] Story of the Week (The Hills of Zion)

During the Scopes trial, H. L. Mencken observes a religious revival meeting in the hills near Dayton, Tennessee. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

No images? Click here H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) The Hills of Zion A century ago, between 1919 and 1927, H. L. Mencken published six volumes of essays under the title Prejudices. The initial suggestion that he gather his periodical writings in book form came from Richard Laukhuff, a Cleveland bookseller, who proposed such a collection to Mencken's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Mencken revised the original articles extensively — rewriting, and adding new material — before he submitted his finished work. In "The Hills of Zion," probably the best-known essay from the series, Mencken visits Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the Scopes trial for The Baltimore Evening Sun and describes a religious revival meeting in the nearby hills. . . . Far off in a dark, romantic glade a flickering light was visible, and out of the silence came the rumble of exhortation. We could distinguish the figure of the preacher only as a moving mote in the light: it was like looking down the tube of a dark-field microscope. Slowly and cautiously we crossed what seemed to be a pasture, and then we crouched down along the edge of a cornfield, and stealthily edged further and further. The light now grew larger and we could begin to make out what was going on. We went ahead on all fours, like snakes in the grass. From the great limb of a mighty oak hung a couple of crude torches of the sort that car inspectors thrust under Pullman cars when a train pulls in at night. In the guttering glare was the preacher, and for a while we could see no one else. He was an immensely tall and thin mountaineer in blue jeans, his collarless shirt open at the neck and his hair a tousled mop. . . . Read the selection Above: Thomas Theodore Martin, dean of the School of Evangelism at Union University, sets up a book table in support of William Jennings Bryan in Dayton, Tennessee, for the opening of the Scopes trial. "There was the eloquent Dr. T. T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss., come to town with a truck-load of torches and hymn-books to put Darwin in his place," writes Mencken in "The Hills of Zion." Bettmann Archive / Getty Photos.     Last week's Story of the Week selection   Wiser Than a God Kate Chopin In Chopin's first short story accepted for publication, a pianist just beginning her career falls in love, in spite of her reservations, with a wealthy and handsome (if occasionally self-important) young man.     Previous Story of the Week selections   Portrait of an Immortal Soul H. L. Mencken The editor of one of America's leading literary magazines reluctantly agrees to critique a manuscript mailed to him by a complete stranger. The Fifth Planet Loren Eiseley A fossil hunter visits with a friend obsessed with a once-held theory that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the remnants of a "lost" planet. Natural History, the Forgotten Science Aldo Leopold Worried that the study of the natural world has been relegated almost entirely to the classroom and laboratory, Leopold urges young zoologists and botanists to return to the outdoors. A Perfect Moment Maud Wood Park After the Tennessee legislature became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage movement leaders still had to fight off desperate last-minute shenanigans by their opponents.     This week's selection is from the Library of America edition Two-volume boxed set Clothbound • 1222 pages List price: $75.00 Web Store price: $55.00   H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers H. L. Mencken was the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a writer of boundless curiosity and vivacious frankness. In the six volumes of Prejudices (1919–1927), Mencken attacked what he felt to be American provincialism and hypocrisy and championed writers and thinkers he saw as harbingers of a new candor and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller coaster ride over a staggering range of thematic territory: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink, music and painting, the absurdities of Prohibition and the dismal state of American higher education, and the relative merits of Baltimore and New York.   Please note: Because of ongoing warehouse and deliverability issues, we are still unable to ship orders outside the U.S. and its territories.   Story of the Week Indexes Browse the complete list of previous Story of the Week selections. Stories sorted by author Stories sorted by title   Follow us on:       Tweet    Forward  Library of America 14 E. 60th St. | New York, NY 10022 www.loa.org Library of America sends e-mail only to subscribers and customers who have provided their e-mail addresses and wish to receive additional information about events and publications. 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Mencken on the Sabbath

	FFRF ⁦‪@FFRF‬⁩ Freethought of the Day: buff.ly/2xSEN2H pic.twitter.com/jGC4bUKa1X   9/12/22, 7:00 AM

Lucretius and Epicurus on the radio

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001bkw8?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Thomas Paine memorial

FFRF is delighted to announce that the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission has unanimously voted to support the proposal for a memorial to Thomas Paine in Washington, D.C. https://t.co/Y7iiPr65Lh pic.twitter.com/YV0L2KIdYx

— FFRF (@FFRF) July 27, 2022

Agnosticism and pragmatic pluralism

William James wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic 

(Part 8, of an 8-part series by Mark Vernon beginning with Part 1: "A Religious Man for Our Times")

"The most important thing about a man," wrote Chesterton, "is his philosophy." William James agreed. He was fond of quoting the saying. Our philosophy, or "over-belief", shapes our "habits of action", which is to say our ethos – who we are becoming. Pragmatism, the philosophy of "what works", is taken to be James' philosophy. And yet, his pragmatism is different from that of his confrères.

Pragmatism is often associated with deflationary accounts of truth. Truth, with a capital T, is a pipe dream, it implies. No fact, rule or idea is ever certain – nor is even the possibility of facts, rules and ideas. Philosophy and science can make progress, but only in relation to current experience. "Truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate", wrote one pragmatist philosopher, John Dewey Charles Sanders Peirce. Or as Richard Rorty pithily averred: "Time will tell, but epistemology won't." When it comes to religion, such pragmatism implies that theologians are more like poets than metaphysicians. They are aestheticians – conjuring meaning with their descriptive powers, as opposed to capturing Truth in their formularies.

It's called ironic pragmatism. "There is an all" is inverted to "that's all there is." Such a stance requires the philosopher, or scientist, to be committed to finding the truth as it if existed, though it probably doesn't. It's truth as a "regulative ideal", to use another phrase. So, if James is a pragmatist, what of his religious quest? Is he condemned to perpetual agnosticism – longing for more and never finding it? It's a big debate amongst Jamesian scholars. But I think his ethos, his philosophy, can be summarised like this.

In the Varieties, he had found that the higher religious emotions – those associated with profound conversions and saintly lives – commonly give rise to a monist view of ultimate reality. (There is an all, and it is One.) But he wondered about such absolutism. What he disliked about it was its reifying tendency. He feared that the abstract language it fosters forgets the "thickness of reality". He wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic. In this sense, he was an empiricist, and a "radical empiricist" to boot – as in "rooted". He believed our experiences are rooted in reality, for all that we will misunderstand what's real, and get it wrong.

The process was captured in one of his many pregnant phrases: "stream of consciousness". The flowing waters of our experience – with its eddies, torrents and occasion pools of stillness – are steeped in the wider waters of consciousness that surround us. We perceive things from our point of view, sure. But that is not to say we cannot glimpse a fuller perspective too, as we're touched by other flows.

It's the usually unseen reality that spiritual virtuosi detect – the "more". But while we can hope that our experiences participate in these truths, our understanding of them must always be hedged with doubt: no-one ever perceives the whole of reality – the dream of the monist. We live piecemeal, in what he came to call a "pluralistic universe". (His final theological position is not contained in the Varieties, but in A Pluralistic Universe – the book of his Hibbert lectures of 1908.) To put it another way, truth is found in the quest itself. This is what his pragmatism means.

Ludwig Wittgenstein read James, and he offers an illuminating reflection on this quest in the Philosophical Investigations. He imagines James listening to some music and, whilst knowing that it's glorious, not being quite able say why it's glorious. "Our vocabulary is inadequate," he has James conclude, which raises the possibility that a richer vocabulary might contain a word for the way in which the music is glorious. Only, that's not the point, Wittgenstein notes. It's not that we don't have the words. It's that language itself is inadequate.

For much of his life, James devoted his imaginative energies to finding words that might better capture the superabundance of our inner lives. In the Principles of Psychology, his major work before the Varieties, he'd revolutionized the vocabulary used by the discipline. But there is always the more that lies beyond words too – the ineffable quality of the music. And so this opens up a second dimension to James' pragmatism. If truth is in the quest, the quest is never over too.

In another inventive phrase, James wrote that he was "ever not quite" at home with the existence of God. He couldn't easily live with belief in God. But he couldn't quite live without it either. It could never be otherwise for him. It's implicit in his perspectival empiricism.
It's a religiously-inclined agnosticism that demands an ethos of toleration coupled to curiosity. James wrote an essay entitled "On a certain blindness in human beings", that blindness being a tendency to forget that different people see the world in radically different ways. It leads to the mutual misunderstandings that lie at the root of so much human discontent, warfare and strife. Toleration is the necessary corrective to this blindness.

And we can recognise our blindness – which is why curiosity is a virtue too. By respecting another's point of view we might not only save ourselves the embarrassments of narrow-mindedness, but open ourselves to the unexpected and new. "Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer," he writes in the essay, "although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands."

"Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe," he affirms. That is to remain committed to the reality of the ineffable about which we'd speak, and to admit we'll never be able completely to capture it in our words. But our best mutterings will address us body and soul. Our deepest musings will "hover around" deeper insights. There's reason to have faith. As Wittgenstein observed: "The unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered."

Mark Vernon
Guardian

Infancy of reason: Lord Russell

“I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.”

― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

Humanist rationality

	Humanists UK ⁦‪@Humanists_UK‬⁩ Professor Brian Cox on the one life we know we have ❤️ pic.twitter.com/s3cR3EGupX   7/12/22, 2:00 AM