Slide rules, chamber pots, and buggy whips-

My first time in college was a few years back. For one class a tool was required. It is called a slide rule. It is a calculating device, used much like a calculator is used today. This was way back in 1971. Though electronic calculators existed, they were rare and expensive. The slide rule had been around for some time, and they were affordable to college students.

I learned to use it, after a fashion, but never mastered the tool. Now they are relics of another time, collectible in like fashion to abaci. Just for fun I also learned how to calculate with an abucus. I have considerable respect for the electronic calculator after having learned these more ancient calculating systems. I also have great respect for the people who built the present using such interesting tools.

How do they relate to chamber pots and buggy whips? Well, they were all produced through maufacturing, were once common and sold in sufficient numbers to be relatively inexpensive. They are now less common, rarely used, and more of a curiosity than a common element in modern life.

I can imagine that an owner of stock in a company producing these items would have seen a steady income for a good many years. However, if that owner of stock did not occasionally assess and update their portfolio, reliance on these particular sources of income would eventually have dried up and left the owner destitute.

Few people have a fondness for slide rules. An occasional collector, perhaps. I don't actually know anybody who depended on a buggy whip to accelerate their vehicle, but I can't see it being something that encourages feelings warm enough to want to return to those old ways. Having actually used a chamber pot, I know by experience that more contemporary plumbing improves the experience of eliminating waste by an astronomical degree.

Sure, collecting some anachronistic items can be fun. However, there are reasons people have moved past such things. It is good to retain the concept and some skills with old ways of doing and thinking. Keeping blacksmithing skills and similar arts alive in our culture provide educational perspective. They also insure a fall-back resource in the event of a catastrophic breakdown in culture.

Similarly, keeping alive some sense or flavor of old ways of thinking can serve to provide cultural perspective, and also add some leaven in thinking toward the future. To consider ancient ways of thought and hold the people of ancient times in disdain simply because they were "backwards" is disrespectful and unwise. Those old ways of thinking were steps toward how we think in our own time. A little effort to understand and respect old ways and how they became modern ways can yield a richness and depth of experience in living today.

I have intentionally sat at night on several occasions, writing with a steel nibbed pen (the kind you dip in a pot of ink) by the light of a candle. Giving myself over to the mood I used my imagination and felt an emotional link with the hundreds of generations of humans who sat similarly lighted at a similar task. I have used old methods for performing calculations to get a sense of history to enrich my understanding of applied modern mathematics.

Now is a good time to be alive, because it is the only time we are alive. The past is a resource, a source of information, richness and pleasure. The future is an adventure yet to be set out upon. Here and now is the place where potential becomes real, and where history begins.

The intersection of Here and Now. A great place to be alive.

A well reasoned faith-

In my prior post I presented a little video indicating (among other things) that one cannot argue unbelievers into the Kingdom of Heaven. I concluded with the statement that belief is a choice. I hold to that, because I believe it to be true.

If our faith is not based on reasoned arguments, but on something else, what is that "something else?" Ultimately, it is subjective experience. For the individual it is all that came to pass in their life that compelled them to believe in the existence of God, and all other subsequent related beliefs. 

For some it is a culture so entwined with a belief in God that it is a small step from unbelief to belief. It comes so naturally that the very thought of unbelief is itself unbelievable. For others it is a complex amalgam of internal and external compulsions driving toward a dramatic change of core beliefs. I suspect that most believers have an experience somewhere in between these extremes.

Being social creatures, the outworking of such subjective experiences in concert with other human beings leads to faith centered social orders. In other words, churches and like social bodies. Modes of organizing thoughts regarding subjectively acquired beliefs have eventually formed vast libraries of reasonings. These would be the libraries of religious thought, vast bodies of documentation. Reasons for believing, brought together from a vast history of subjective experiences relative to the creator of all things.

I have been very general here, to be inclusive of all religious experience and the whole body of religious literature. I now narrow the focus toward the Christian faith, to which I subscribe. Over time a body of that literature became recognized by authorities in the Church as authoritative and inspired by God. Within that context a well reasoned faith will be based on such literature, and cite that literature to support the faith that was acquired subjectively.

For much of history a convert to a faith has been expected to subject themselves to the religious order into which they had been inducted. Such practice insured the new believer a context in which to grow in knowledge, and provided a lot of emotional support for the individual as well as a context for correction of both behavior and thought.

Such subjugation in family, tribe and culture has been pretty much the norm for many centuries. It had the positive effect of insuring a consistent context for living and the protection of numbers. It was a herd, moving together, but far more complex in dynamics. Religious orders grew up in such contexts, shaping and being shaped by them.

Our modern era has several challenges to a well reasoned faith.

First is the growth of individualism. Where in the past a convert would subject themselves to an order which superseded their individuality to a large degree, and which would impress them with their beliefs and the reasonings behind those beliefs, now a convert is left with a lot of that to do on their own. However, a well reasoned faith still exits within the context of a system of belief.

Secondly, our era has been subjected to a new way of thinking. Prior orders depended a great deal on their authority. You believed what they said because they had authority, which was granted by God. They were the context of knowledge and truth.

In an era of individualism such an idea is distasteful in itself. In an era of scientific thinking, it is unthinkable. Truth exists objectively. I hope to address the idea of objective truth in a future post. Suffice it to say that objectivity is a rather elusive quality, and objective Truth with a capital T not all that easy to find.

The body of religious literature was largely written in ancient forms of argument. They were not designed to be subjected to scientific analysis. The religious experience is largely subjective, and the direction of science is objectivity. Religious history and literature is the context of religious experience, and is purposed to support those subjective experiences.

A well reasoned faith need not stand up to the rigors of scientific analysis. Science can dissect your faith, and some information may be gained, but your faith may well die under that cold scrutiny. Faith is a living thing, and should be nurtured as such.

We don't come by our faith through scientific inquiry and analysis. We come by our faith through living, through our experiences and through the openness of our hearts. In my own case I was driven to it, largely against my will. Yet in the end it is something I chose. 

Faith is choosing to believe, every day. Choose wisely. Choose well.

Philosophy of-

Many years ago I discovered a group on the early Internet called the History of the Philosophy of Science (HOPOS) news group. I was just exploring some news groups in the wee hours of the night as I tried to stay awake at work. I made contact with some very interesting people on that site. I still don't know how I was able to join that group. I probably just got missed and somehow authorized.

There was a lot of traffic between these high-level academician. Not a lot of argument or discussion, but much communication. I even participated a few times, though this was a far different world than the one in which I lived.

I had not realized such a field existed. I knew about science and scientists. I knew about history and historians. I knew a bit about philosophy and philosophers. This, however, had some very interesting implications. There was a separate field of philosophy that related to science. In addition to that, there were historians who studied the history of the philosophy of science.

I found this fascinating. A field of scholarship defined in such a way. I wondered what other fields had defined philosophies, and histories of those philosophies. How did they originate? How did they develop?

Since that time I have discovered interesting little niches in academia. The University of California at Santa Cruz has a clutch of scholars dedicated to Charles Dickens. These scholars coordinate with similar enclaves in other universities around the world. All of this energy focused on a popular writer from another century and another land.

Science as a field grew over time. The philosophy upon which modern science is based also developed over time, and helped shape the future growth of science. It makes sense that the development of this philosophy should have a formal history. Knowledge of that history would inform and shape both the development of science and the future of the philosophy of science.

Any other field of human endeavor could be similarly defined by a history, a philosophy, and a history of that philosophy. It is unlikely that most fields would be formally defined and studied in this manner, yet it is interesting to see that at least informally most fields develop in this way.

There would probably not be a very large amount of money available for scholars working on the history of the philosophy of tatting, but it seems a sure bet that both the history and philosophy exist informally in the minds of those who tat.

It almost seems worth writing the grant application, doesn't it?