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Garret Mountain was formed from a lava flow 190 million years ago. It is now an isolated plateau, rising to about 500 feet, which doesn’t sound like much, except that the surrounding cities, Paterson, Clifton, and Woodland Park, are in the Passaic River Valley and are at more or less sea level. From that vantage point, Garret Mountain’s altitude makes a statement.
Today Garret Mountain is a public park, a green oasis surrounded by the urban sprawl of the Boston-Washington corridor. The air above Garret is the Atlantic Flyway, a migration route that billions of birds have been using for at least hundreds of thousands of years. In May, birdwatchers come from around the state and in some cases other countries. In gritty and dangerous Paterson, NJ, they witness the miracle of migration. Eagles, ospreys, and peregrine falcons punctuate skies usually monopolized by jets approaching Newark airport. The red-carpet stars of this show are the warblers.
Warblers are tiny, usually about five inches in length. The smallest weighs less than a quarter of an ounce. Don’t let that tiny size fool you. The blackpoll warbler covers a route that could awe any Olympian. “Blackpoll warblers undertake an astonishing non-stop flight over the Atlantic, ranging from 1,400 to 1,700 miles … in just two to three days.”
At Garret, most warblers keep to the treetops and they move rapidly, using newly emerging leaves as cover. Warblers arrive shortly after insects awaken from their winter sleep. Given their job, chasing bugs in high treetops, their tiny size, their acrobatic moves and speed, warblers are devilishly hard to see. In May, numerous adults get up before dawn and delay reporting to their day jobs. They spend the morning on the forest floor craning their sore necks upward, struggling to catch a fleeting glimpse of a favorite warbler.
Civilians tend to stereotype birdwatchers as eccentric outsiders. When I am at Garret in May, that stereotype never makes less sense. Beauty transports me. I lose all sense of time. I forget whatever worries I have. Birdwatching is my favorite drug. That isn’t a joke or a metaphor. I don’t require the illegal substances pushed on Paterson’s streets. I have Garret Mountain.
Something really obvious struck me hard the other day. I have been enjoying birds’ beauty for decades. But the apparently carefully designed quality of their beauty suddenly demanded my cognitive, as well as my aesthetic, focus. Their beauty is not the unstudied result of impersonal physics like a cresting wave. No. The warbler’s beauty gives every appearance of being the handiwork of an orgiastic artist exhausting every color in his palette, every calculation of his abacus, every contortion of his physics, to pack every inch of his creation, his earth, with more beauty than one human could see in a lifetime.
The yellowthroat is one of the most common warblers. Across its eyes runs the black slash of a Zorro mask. This mask contrasts with its striking, thin, white monobrow and chrome yellow breast. I understand evolution, I’m okay with believing in evolution till a better explanation comes along, but I can’t convince myself that evolution alone crafted that bauble.
The Blackburnian sports a maze of black racing stripes. His throat appears to be on fire. You feel you could hold your palms up to a Blackburnian warbler’s throat and toast your fingers against the morning chill. The glistening black of the black-throated green warbler is so utterly black it is shocking, like the very black coloration of a black bear you stumble across on the trail. The black of the bear and the black of the green warbler appears inorganic. It doesn’t fit in the treetops; it’s not the black of a shadow. It’s the black of onyx, a mineral mined deep underground. The contrast between the bird’s green back and the black throat is stunning.
Beauty speaks. Listen, and discover what the warblers’ beauty communicates. The males are the show-offs. This indicates that males are taking risks that females do not take. Why? The males want to mate. In order to mate, they must be fit, and they must compete with other males by exhibiting their fitness in plumage and song. The males’ bright colors also make the males easier to see, and to be picked off by sharp-shinned hawks. Once mating is finished, fall warblers all tend to look a lot alike. Garret Mountain is not overrun with birdwatchers in autumn. No one drives a hundred miles to see blandly plumaged birds.
The females’ subtler, more quiet beauty speaks as loudly as the males’ ostentation. The females also have important work to do. They are not to take the same risks as the males. Their job is to nurture new life. They need to brood and feed the young.
House sparrows are one of the world’s most common birds. If you are near a window, you could probably see a house sparrow right now. Males wear a black bib. The larger and blacker that bib is, the more dominant that house sparrow is in his flock’s pecking order. One advantage of that visual cue: if you are a go-along-to-get-along kind of male, you avoid fights with the guy with the big, black bib. If you want to be the next top man, you have to take on the guy with the big, black bib.
Birds’ beauty ornaments the world. In Africa, I saw hornbills, birds with gigantic beaks, beaks that seem to require their own navigation system separate from that of the rest of the bird. The beaks are used in jousts between males, to capture prey, to excavate nest cavities, and to amplify birdsong. The bills are so heavy their support requires modification of neck vertebrae. I watched great blue turacos float up and down in a rain forest tree. Two feet long, powder-blue, a black crown permanently adorning their heads, they were one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. A friend had a fish pond stocked with edible tilapia. The pond was stalked by a hamerkop, a fish-eating bird whose head is shaped like a hammer.
In Poland, storks, three and a half feet tall, mostly white but with black primary feathers and bright red bills and legs, built nests on roofs. As I walked along the rye fields surrounding my mother’s Slovak village, a hoopoe rose up from the side of a dirt road and almost blinded me with its vivid black and white striped wings. In Nepal, I watched a lammergeier, a bone-eating vulture with a wingspan up to nine feet, repeatedly drop a cow’s pelvic bone on rocky ground to facilitate the bone’s consumption. In Berkeley, California, I watched hummingbirds dive bomb a great horned owl. Hummingbirds are almost weightless; “you could mail 8 or 10 with a single postage stamp.” Yet they have been seen dive-bombing eagles, 1,600 hundred times their weight.
Beauty is not just about spectacle, rarity, or brilliance. Consider the gadwall, a common dabbling duck. They are gray – the least glamorous color. But close in on a gadwall with your binoculars, and you will see that these ducks are as painstakingly composed as a painted bunting, a bird that spills the contents of a Sherwin-Williams store onto its tiny surface. The male gadwall’s breast and side are vermiculated; charcoal gray, off white, taupe, and glints of gold, culminate in the deep black rump and white outer tail feathers. “That’s just camouflage!” you may sniff, as if costuming a duck in camo is no mean feat in itself. But it’s not even just that. The military mass produces camouflage; it is functional. It is not beautiful.
Birds range from tiny hummingbirds to three-hundred-pound ostriches. Their feet, beaks, sizes and shapes would outstrip any hardware store or Lego set. The sword-billed hummingbird has a bill as long as its body. It uses that bill to plumb flowers with long corollas, and sip their nectar, nectar never to be tasted by shorter-billed birds. The black skimmer uses its asymmetrical bill, long on bottom, short on top, to trace a line in water and thereby attract and catch fish. The wood stork wiggles its bright pink feet to feel for fish. Chimney swifts are so aerial that it was long believed that they have no feet at all, thus they are members of the family Apodidae, Greek for “footless.” Their tiny feet are specially designed for clinging to the vertical surfaces of hollow trees; their modified tail feathers help them to land and move on surfaces other than air. Even the almost totally aerial swift is outdone by the wandering albatross. That bird’s eleven-foot wingspan allows it to travel 500 miles in a day, barely flapping its wings, and to go up to six years without touching land.
Someone – or just blind evolution – juggled a massive amount of data. This was multi-dimensional juggling: color and function, bone structure and mating ritual, climate and terrain, predator, and prey. Somehow every last bird on the planet is beautiful. Colors, shapes, and functions all complement. Giant beaks, tiny feet, extra long wings, every known color: they never clash. I can spend an hour trying to find the right shade to serve as background for a photo on my computer desktop and somehow I never get it right. I can spend a month trying to figure out what to wear to a job interview and I always end up looking like a bag lady. And somehow the vermiculated gray of the gadwall melds exquisitely into the true black of its butt, with all the grace of the resolution of Pachelbel’s canon. And that coloration serves beautifully for the life the gadwall lives, on ponds, its butt in the air, its beak underwater, nibbling on submerged vegetation.
Strangely enough for a girl who spends as much time in nature as she can, I have a lifelong horror of insects. I follow, on social media, several nature photographers. Some take close-up portraits of insects. I’ll probably never assess as beautiful the insects with which humans compete for food, like houseflies, or those that parasitize us, like ticks. But close-up photography of insects, such as is found here, convinces me that someone, somewhere, could find even insects beautiful, in the same way that I find birds beautiful.
Move in even closer, and the beauty doesn’t stop. Both this cross section of a stem and this stock photo of a cell bear resemblance to a rose window from a Gothic cathedral. Given that the rose window is evidence of master craftsmanship, I see those same qualities in nature. Indeed, CBS news referred to cell photos as revealing the “artistry” of microscopic life – including in the mouth parts of a lone star tick.
I got a real shock the other day – the amount of money in my checking account actually matched what my calculations suggested the number should be. I am not good at math. I don’t understand mathematicians when they talk about beauty, or anything else. I understand poets better, and John Keats, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” declared that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But Edna St. Vincent Millay handed beauty back to the mathematicians. She wrote that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.” Physicist Michio Kaku addresses math, truth, and beauty in this YouTube video. Mathematicians and physicists insist on the existence of beauty and lay claim to beauty, every bit as much as poets and birdwatchers do.
As has been argued by minds far superior to mine, beauty does exist outside of us. It is not something we invent. It is something we discover. Beauty is made up of measurable properties, and it is universal. In 1994, David M. Buss, in his book The Evolution of Desire, cited many studies to argue for the universality of beauty. A beautiful woman is assessed as beautiful in a variety of cultures. The features that make her beautiful are constant. The human eye seeks symmetry, proportion, clarity, economy and efficiency. I would add “surprise.” The shiny, night-sky blackness of the green warbler’s throat, the mole on Marilyn Monroe’s cheek, the regal remoteness exhibited by both Nefertiti and Greta Garbo, the rapid deflation of the line of the Eiffel Tower as it approaches the ground: all surprise the eye and make the beauty emerge from its surround, perhaps equally beautiful, but unsurprising, and therefore less arresting.
I’ll venture a potentially shocking statement here. I used to work as a nurse’s aide among the ill, elderly, and dying. When I first arrived on the ward, I saw wrinkled, old, and distorted faces. After a week or less, I recognized beauty in every face. Beauty is found throughout our world, and beyond, in space itself. That beauty, in all its attributes, is so widespread, suggests to me that beauty is doing important work, and speaking important messages.
Exactly because beauty is so powerful, beauty has been weaponized. Beauty is a hugely important factor in the lives of women and girls. Beauty plays a big role in determining mate choice, lifetime income, and even courtroom judgments. A 2019 peer-reviewed study argues that “More attractive persons were less likely to be arrested and convicted than less attractive persons … the beneficial effect of being attractive was confined solely to females.” Conversely, women assessed as unattractive are punished. Girls who were overweight in high school tend to have lower lifetime incomes, even if they lose the weight, studies have shown.
I’ve been subject to teasing, bullying, and unwanted comments all my life because I am an unattractive woman. A teacher called me a “big ox” when I was in second grade. Around fifth grade, I was rejected for a part in a school play because I was taller than “Jesus.” An eye doctor, in my presence, told my mother that when I needed glasses, I should get the fancy kind, because their fanciness would detract attention from my face. When I was a teenager, I signed up for a night school dance class. The teacher pulled me aside and told me to stop attending. “With a body like yours, you will never be a dancer.” I’ve got a million stories like this, but you get the idea. I know what it is for the word “beauty” to be used as a weapon cracked against your skull.
White supremacists insisted that black people are ugly because they do not look like white people. Malicious caricatures, for example in Minstrelsy, cruelly exaggerated black features. Well-meaning blacks and whites alike worked to demolish that hateful abuse of the concept of beauty. Black female celebrities like Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Beverly Johnson, Nichelle Nichols, Pam Grier, Diahann Carol, Diana Ross, Iman, and Tina Turner began to achieve fame in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. They demonstrated that “Black is beautiful” was not just a slogan.
Not just black people have been stereotyped as irredeemably ugly. The movement variously known as scientific racism, social Darwinism, and eugenics also condemned entire populations to the “ugly” category. In the Saturday Evening Post, bestselling novelist Kenneth L. Roberts painted ugly word portraits of Slavic immigrants to the US. A nineteenth-century physiognomy text compares a beautiful English woman to a subhuman Irish woman (see here). As a child, I wasn’t just teased for being fat, I was teased for being a “Polak.” “How do you tell the bride at a Polish wedding? She’s the one with the braided armpits.” I’ve got a million of those stories, too.
Nazis exploited extreme and ugly caricatures of Jews in their propaganda. Nazis claimed that their hate was rooted in nature. The first and last victims of Nazi genocide were handicapped Germans. Nazi propaganda contrasted idealized images of attractive Aryans with distorted images of handicapped people. Their physical handicaps, Nazis argued, violated nature’s law against the unfit. This history erects a giant red flag. Uncritically worshiping beauty or nature leads to bad outcomes.
The concept of beauty can be as deadly as knives and guns when in the wrong hands. But where would humanity be without knives and guns in the right hands? We need beauty, we need to recognize beauty, and we need to listen to what beauty is saying.
Woke is weaponizing the concepts of beauty and ugliness in new ways. Woke is now exploiting fat people and people who identify as transgender. I’ve been overweight all my life. I’m a tomboy, that is, I am “gender non-conforming.” Even so, Woke attitudes toward obesity and toward gender-non-conforming people are alien to me. Woke’s use of the concept of beauty and ugliness to insist that people find fat bodies and gender non-conforming bodies – bodies like mine – sexually alluring is totalitarian. It will never help me or anyone else. It’s just another strategy to undermine society.
The Woke have insisted that not finding obese women sexually attractive is an act of bigotry, bigotry for which the bigot must be punished. The insistence that viewers publicly acknowledge that fat bodies sexually arouse them is dystopian. It reeks of China’s Cultural Revolution. It is an effort to colonize our aesthetics, our desires, our limbic systems. Activists also insist that there is no downside to being fat, including health risks. In fact being overweight significantly undermines health.
In 2021, self-described “fat content creator” Lexi Nimmo released a TikTok video insisting that rejecting fat women as sex partners is “problematic.” You can watch some of her video here. On January 8, 2020, fitness celebrity Jillian Michaels was asked about famous, and famously obese, pop star Lizzo. “Why are we celebrating her body? … It isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes. I’m just being honest. Like, I love her music. Like, my kid loves her music. But there’s never a moment where I’m like, ‘And I’m so glad she’s overweight!’ Like, why do I even care? Why is it my job to care about her weight?” Michaels was attacked by self-appointed virtue police. She was called a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a hater, and fatphobic. Of course Michaels had to issue several statements that sounded like apologies.
Lexi Nimmo’s “You must find me sexually attractive” video is obnoxious. I don’t find Nimmo attractive. I would not want a body like hers. I would not want Lexi Nimmo as a friend or neighbor. I would not even want to talk to her on the phone.
Lizzo is obese. But there’s more than that. I don’t share her attitude of what constitutes appropriate public behavior. I think women should be modest and dignified. Lizzo appears naked in public. She has repeatedly twerked on camera. She speaks obscenely. When trying to be thoughtful or uplifting, Lizzo says things like, “Go home tonight and look in the mirror and say, ‘I love you, you are beautiful, and you can do anything,'” I don’t share Lizzo’s value system. My value system tells me to “Go home tonight, avoid the mirror, examine your conscience and discover how you failed to live up to your highest ideals that day. Then resolve to do better tomorrow.” In an NBC news op-ed, Lizzo wrote, “I don’t think that loving yourself is a choice. I think that it’s a decision.” How did that make it past an editor? Decisions are choices. Lizzo’s attempts at wisdom are vapid.
If you enjoy watching Lizzo twerk naked and listening to her spout obscenities, I’m happy for you. You live in a world that will satisfy you. If Lexi Nimmo is your idea of a great best friend, again, I’m happy for you. I would never make any attempt to limit Nimmo’s or Lizzo’s ability to produce profitable content, or audiences’ ability to access and enjoy that content.
What don’t I like? Totalitarianism directed at my ability to identify beauty and ugliness. If I were looking for a teaching job right now, my comments here about Lizzo and Lexi would sabotage my job search. People have been doxed, harassed, threatened, and beaten up for expressing opinions like these. And that’s why I care. The concepts “beauty” and “ugliness” are now contested commodities in the culture war.
On December 20, 2021, New York Magazine’s cover was ugly. It was a photo of a woman, naked except for Calvin Klein briefs. The woman wears a chin beard and a smug, confrontational expression. Large earrings hang from her ears. Her breasts have been removed through mastectomy. She has also had a hysterectomy. There is a deep wound in her thigh. The flesh removed from her thigh now bulges from her Calvin Klein underwear. “My penis, myself. I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me,” the headline blares. “I could not have gotten my boobs cut off fast enough … I spent weeks before my 2019 hysterectomy up late in bed, hot and sleepless, fantasizing about the moment the medical waste disposal team at UC San Francisco would batch-incinerate my uterus, which swirled with dysphoria like nausea from the depths of my soul.”
The naked woman is Gabriel Mac. Mac has a history of mental instability, including alcoholism, insomnia, post traumatic stress and obsession with self harm, including wanting to plunge scissors into her “fatty” thigh, “gouge open my thigh,” “gash in a good hole” in her thigh and watch “blood and badness seep out.” Mac also reports having been sexually abused by her father when she was a child, see here.
Mac had staged her own violent rape and published a detailed account of that rape. Her volunteer rapist “suddenly smothered me with a pillow, not to asphyxiate me but so that he didn’t break my jaw when he drew his elbow back and slammed his fist into my face. Two, three, four times. My body felt devastated but relieved.” Mac wrote further, in a book and in articles, about this staged violent rape.
Mac claimed that the mental health issues, rape, and obsessive writing were a reaction to her journalistic coverage of sexual violence in Haiti. Other reporters rejected this. Haitian-born journalist Marjorie Valbrun wrote, “Really? You need to get punched in the face by a man during sex in order to get over Haiti? So I guess mimicking a violent sexual assault is acceptable as long as it is wrapped in compelling prose and sold as self-healing.” “Dozens of Haiti-based female journalists and NGO” workers condemned Mac’s behavior to Mother Jones. At least one Haitian woman begged Mac to stop using her own story in Mac’s work. She pointed out that Mac was endangering her life by doing so. Mac apparently ignored her and continued to use her story.
I lived and worked in Africa and Asia. A friend was raped. I was sexually assaulted, and also sexually menaced, although not raped while overseas. I did, at times, have to fight physically to avoid further assault. Neither I nor anyone I know who worked overseas developed conditions comparable to Mac’s. Journalists Mona Eltahawy and Lara Logan were both sexually assaulted in Egypt; neither has reported the reactions that Mac reports. It does not follow that staging your own violent rape or undergoing medically unnecessary mastectomies and phalloplasty are somehow the result of having been a journalist in Haiti.
Both New York Magazine and Mac herself know that that photo is ugly. They know that it constitutes a misogynist insult to, and assault on, women. That’s exactly why the photo is on the cover of New York Magazine. Legacy print media are struggling for sales against inevitable extinction in an increasingly fractured and online media market. Mac wants attention. The magazine and Mac colluded to produce as confrontational and perverse a photo as possible.
In the past, circus owners profited from selling tickets to geek shows. Geek shows were ugly assaults on human dignity. An often addicted geek, paid with alcohol or narcotics, bit the head off of a live chicken and swallowed it. And the audience cheered. Today, enablers of trans extremism and “fat acceptance” costume their thirst for ugliness with pretend virtue. “You think that photo is ugly? You are a bigot and you must be doxed, threatened, fired, made unemployable, silenced. We do this in the name of our new Woke faith.” The new Woke-flavored Marxism is a combo of secret police and P.T. Barnum. (Ben Shapiro outlines how trans extremism services Marxism here.)
One does not have to know Gabriel Mac’s troubled history to recognize pathology in the New York Magazine cover. The photo’s ugliness speaks loudly enough. Mac’s new body violates beauty. Her waist is narrow and her hips are broad. She is clearly female. Her body is hairy in masculine pattern. The human eye immediately recognizes that there is something amiss. Further, Mac’s nudity and exhibitionism are undignified and depressing. Mac is forcing us to view and assess what her self-loathing, self-harm obsessions, and misogyny have done to her body. She takes the urge for display to an unseemly extreme. She could have chosen to be photographed in swim trunks, clothing that one wears in public. Instead she chose underwear, a garment one exposes at home, in the bedroom or bathroom. Anti-social elements will scoff. Both swim trunks and underwear reveal the same human geography; why is one unseemly and the other appropriate? I turn, again, to the house sparrow. That black bib communicates much. Appearances do matter. In any case, Mac got exactly what she wanted: to claim victimization. She disseminated an ugly photo and her own pathological misogyny. People didn’t like it. She is now an official victim. Mission accomplished.
On February 14, 2023, Matt Walsh released a “heartfelt message” to Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney, an adult, male actor, announced in March, 2022, that he is a “girl.” Mulvaney further announced that he was so attractive that he could steal women’s husbands. Walsh responded. Walsh said, “You do not pass as an attractive woman, or as a woman at all … You cannot escape what you really are and what you will always be … You may not be masculine, but you aren’t feminine. You are weird and artificial; you are manufactured and lifeless; you are unearthly and eerie. You are a human deep fake … even your personality is contrived … the people who pretend to accept you are pretending because they are afraid of being lectured if they don’t or because they want to use you as a platform to virtue signal.” Walsh was punished for speaking truths that everyone knows to be true. He was widely criticized and his presence on YouTube was greatly reduced.
Dr. Rachel Levine is ugly. Andrea Long Chu is ugly. Tiffany Moore, of the notorious “It’s Ma’am” viral video, is not a bad looking man, but he does not pass as a woman. Tara, formerly Thomas Jay White, who identifies as a woman and posted a video threatening to shoot to death any woman who tried to stop him from using a women’s bathroom, is not beautiful. He does not pass. Drag performers do not look like women. They look like men engaged in hostile and contemptuous misogyny. Bruce Jenner the Olympian was one of the most handsome men on the planet. Caitlyn Jenner, in candid photographs, without all the careful lighting and photoshopping, shows a face full of plastic surgery’s manipulations.
One must say of men who identify as women that they are “beautiful;” that they look “real;” that they can “pass.” Most aren’t beautiful, they don’t look real, and they can’t pass. To say this is not to advocate for any harm or discrimination to come to men who identify as women. No one should tease or bully or discriminate against any of these people. People who identify as transgender should enjoy the same rights as any citizen. But the insistence that we all say, “Beautiful. So beautiful I desire you” about fat people or trans people is an attempt to control our perception and our desire. It’s right out of Clockwork Orange. It is that totalitarian control of our aesthetics that we must protest.
I don’t think that Keats is right. Beauty and truth are not identical. But there is some truth in beauty, and some truth in some ugliness. In “Binsey Poplars,” Catholic priest, gay man, and great poet Gerard Manley Hopkins articulated how man’s interference with nature can destroy beauty that can never be reconstituted. He speaks of chopped down poplar trees, and a pinprick that destroys a human eye.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Humans aren’t poplar trees, but we are part of the same creation, and when we mess with our own beauty, we sometimes mar it beyond repair.
Dr. Helen Joyce feels about evolution the way that believers feel about God. In the way that believers respect creation’s beauty as the handiwork of God, those who revere evolution feel that it can’t be defied by something so puny as a human being. “Sex is a reproductive strategy that goes back more than a billion years. It shapes everything … There are at least ten thousand known differences in the genetic expressions of males and females. Female blood is different … everything is different … Hundreds of millions of years of evolution is shaping everything about you. Every cell is male or female.”
Joyce’s words come to mind when viewing a recent video made by a woman who identifies as a man. The woman has a beard, a mustache, and a deep voice. She says she has been identifying as a man for eight years. She cries in the video. She says how lonely she is. She says that when she identified as a woman, people wanted to hug her, talk to her, and share community with her. She mentions how even women who are strangers to each other can form instant fun and supportive communities in women’s restrooms. “Friendships are so much harder to build,” the woman says, wiping tears from her eyes. “This s–t is lonely,” she cries.
Under the video, numerous men comment that the woman is lonely because she is a woman identifying as a man. Women and men are different, they point out. Growing a beard and mustache and deepening the voice through testosterone injections does not make a woman a man. A recent study reports that people who have attempted to “transition” to the sex opposite to their own are more lonely. “Our data indicate that transgender and gender diverse people, who have undergone gender reassignment surgery feel lonelier.” The thousands of measurable differences between men and women make it difficult for a person to be a beautiful member of the opposite sex. The human body is a composition, like a symphony, like a cultivated row of poplars, and removing one element throws the rest out of kilter. Similarly, changing one element makes it harder for the person making the change to find community. What that element is may be difficult to isolate and rejigger. That we can’t name every difference between men and women doesn’t make those differences less real.
Surgeons and pharmaceutical companies can insist to vulnerable people that their drugs and their blades can change one sex to the other, but they can’t. These drugs and blades can’t touch the thousands of differences between men and women; they can’t even find them all; they can’t even name them all. The odd reaction we have looking at someone like Dr. Rachel Levine informs us of much.
Previously in this essay, I mentioned house sparrows, small, common birds you can see from almost any window in the US. House sparrows are not native to the United States. They were introduced to this country. They prefer the same nest sites as bluebirds, a colorful, beloved, native American species. House sparrows kill bluebirds. There are numerous, grisly photos on the web of baby and adult bluebirds pecked to death by house sparrows, see, for example, here.
Champions of bluebirds recommend to homeowners that if house sparrows nest on your property, you dispatch them. “The bird must be eliminated from the population by humanely killing it,” one of many websites recommends. “This may sound harsh but remember, these birds are not native to North America and not part of our ecosystem. They are an invasive species … Put the bird in the palm of your hand and wrap your fingers around the chest. Apply firm pressure for a full minute.” Otherwise, you can “Break their neck.” Or “gas them.”
Nazis were neo-Pagans. They argued that nature demanded that the same approach one might take to an invasive species of plant or animal should be applied to human beings. The Judeo-Christian tradition has been at war with that “natural” approach for thousands of years. It has insisted that we care for the weak, the vulnerable, and the stranger. In doing so, we defy “survival of the fittest.” In loving and serving, we find beauty even in the faces of the old and infirm.
I am not arguing for the worship of nature or the worship of beauty. Similarly, as a woman who has been relentlessly bullied by my fellow humans for my failure to live up to beauty or femininity ideals, I am not arguing for bullying’s revival and sanctification. Bullies are sinners and they do great harm.
I am, rather, saying that Woke is invading language. Among other words they demonize or sanctify, the words “beauty” and “ugliness” have been weaponized. I’m recommending here, that we resist that, and that we think about, and reclaim, in a way that corresponds with our Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition of compassion and fairness, and also of truth, the words “beauty” and “ugliness.” Given how pervasive beauty is in creation, and how much it communicates to us, it is clearly too important for us to surrender this word, and our ability to recognize it.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
“Nazis were neo-Pagans.”
Nazis were neo-Christians demanding that the individual be sacrificed for the common good. Demanding that reason be sacrificed to faith.
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three philosophical fundamentals in the Western mind, in metaphysics the worship of the supernatural (that which is beyond reason to understand), in epistemology the reliance on faith (belief in contradiction to reason and reality), and in ethics the reverence for self-sacrifice (your “self” is your mind, the Nazi ultimately sacrifices his mind to the commands of his God — his Almighty Fuhrer).
“Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency to imitate the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some Nazis went all the way on this issue. A tendency never given official ideology yet fairly prominent in the movement was voiced in a demand made by several of its leading figures (although Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the Nazis won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-fledged religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting the older creeds, with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its own zealots avid to convert Christians into fanatic Hitler-believers, as, once, ancient missionaries had converted pagans into fanatic Christians. “Adolf Hitler,” exclaimed one such believer (the Nazi Minister of Church Affairs), “is the true Holy Ghost!”
The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development. To the end, they could not decide whether to retain Christianity, construing Nazism merely as its latest, truest version (“positive Christianity,” this wing often called it) — or to concoct a distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodge-podge of elements drawn from pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In either case, however, whether as advanced as a form of or successor to Christianity, what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful adoration. “We believe on this earth solely in Adolf Hitler….” intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of 15,000 Hitler Youths. “We believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels”
There are several words that you always respond to. You see the name Goska, and in this case, Nazi, and your mouth starts to water. Like Pavlov’s dog and the ringing bell. You even trot out your tired stock phraseology. And your obsession with Nazis is obvious. At least you avoided the self indulgent Lutheran smear
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Objectivist reason and reality….good
Altruism…bad.
Repeat ad infinitum. The Big Lie in practice.
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX.
You don’t seem to as enamored with Ms. Goska as you used to be.
You have THX 1138 figured out completely! At this point, I doubt he is able to have any original thinking at all.
Thank you. Appreciate it!
What matters is not that an idea is original to me or to you but that an idea is RATIONAL and OBJECTIVE. That the idea corresponds with reality.
How many ideas that you use were originated by you?
Most people have their own ideas and go through their daily lives based on their own ideas.
We don’t worry whether they are rational or objective. And we don’t build our lives based primarily on the work of two long irrelevant faux philosophers.
You have zero originality in your thinking and pretty much base everything on the few stock phrases that are recycled from your two “hero freaks”. Is it any wonder your theories are always wrong and they garner zero support, except maybe from your Mom, down in the kitchen.
Anyone familiar with Hitler’s ideology and writings has to stretch a lot to see Nazism as a form of Christianity or influenced by Christianity.
Nazism was a political movement that made God’s creations the norms. It wasn’t religious (you can believe in God and not be religious). It maintained the obvious, that we were created as we should be, and artifically trying to “mix” and create a new breed of humans are against God’s desire and against nature.
Thank you for your comment. The religious mentality is fungible, mutually interchangeable, as can be seen by your comment.
And they tell me I’m wrong, Christianity has nothing to do with Nazism or Marxism.
You’re confusing Gemeinschaft with Christian beliefs and using a very broad brush there.
And to help you understand the Nazi position on Christianity I’d suggest a book. “Why Hitler Came Into Power”, by Theodore Abel written in 1938. Christianity was a means to an end in the plot to gain control and not part of the philosophy. It’s an excellent book written in the pre-war years and has an honest recount of events. It has interviews that would dispute your perceived stance of the Christainity and the various branches.
Like Dr. Goska’s, “Beiganski”, it’s based on facts and first hand interviews. No bias to support a personal view hammering away inconvenient facts or reality, no cultural fiction. no agenda. I hope you bought and read that too.
My best to Ayn.
The crucial point is that Christianity indoctrinates the individual into the religious mentality just like Islam does. Hence, why Hitler and the Nazis admired both the Catholic Church and Islam. For Nazism and Marxism to spread and be embraced you need a culture suffused and immersed in mysticism, magical thinking, the unreason of faith, and the reverence for self-sacrifice.
It is no mere accident that Nazism and Marxism took hold more firmly and deeply in the cultures of Germany and Russia, when they did, those cultures at the time, were ripe for them. Altruistic self-sacrifice ultimately comes down to mind-sacrifice, the lack of self-confidence in one’s own mind to understand and deal with reality. Altruism requires a fundamental indoctrination into self-doubt, self-abasement, self-denial, self-abnegation, and self-humiliation. The evil Christian doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall of Man is designed to do just that.
Once you succeed in indoctrinating a man into self-doubt and even self-disgust because of UNEARNED guilt, he becomes a willing, obedient, puppet in your hand.
“Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most SELFISH human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.” – Ayn Rand
Man’s mind cannot produce truth. Truth is one of the transcendentals. Your mind is not.
Your mind can use of the tool of reason to discover truth, or at least obtain a closer approximation of it.
Otto K. Gross has given you a resource to help you think with better facts. I leave you to define what sort of person eschews facts in order to preserve cherished falsehoods.
“Man’s mind cannot produce truth.”
Your claim is self-refuting. In order to take your claim seriously it would have to be true that man’s mind CAN produce truth. Implicit in your claim that the mind cannot produce truth is that your mind is proclaiming a truth.
If your claim were to be true, then you would have to sit down and never speak again because if your claim were true your mind could not produce truth either because you are a member of mankind.
If man’s mind could not produce truth you would not have the self-confidence (mind-confidence) to even dare to post such an abjectly self-refuting statement as “Man’s mind cannot produce truth”.
Now sit down and repent for your sinful self-confidence!
Name one truth produced by the human mind.
“Name one truth produced by the human mind.”
1 + 1 = 2 is a truth produced by the human mind.
“Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth….
Truth is the product of the recognition (i.e., identification) of the facts of reality. Man identifies and integrates the facts of reality by means of concepts. He retains concepts in his mind by means of definitions. He organizes concepts into propositions—and the truth or falsehood of his propositions rests, not only on their relation to the facts he asserts, but also on the truth or falsehood of the definitions of the concepts he uses to assert them, which rests on the truth or falsehood of his designations of essential characteristics….
[Consider the catch phrase:] “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” What is the meaning of the concept “truth”? Truth is the recognition of reality. (This is known as the correspondence theory of truth.) The same thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time and in the same respect. That catch phrase, therefore, means: a. that the Law of Identity is invalid; b. that there is no objectively perceivable reality, only some indeterminate flux which is nothing in particular, i.e., that there is no reality (in which case, there can be no such thing as truth); or c. that the two debaters perceive two different universes (in which case, no debate is possible). (The purpose of the catch phrase is the destruction of objectivity.)” – Ayn Rand
So glad you have boiled this down to a simple statement.
Think carefully.
1 + 1 = 2 existed prior to its discovery by any mind. That being so, it cannot be true that man’s mind made / created this truth.
In your example, man USED his mind as a tool to DISCOVER a truth. Therefore, man’s mind cannot be one of the transcendentals of truth, beauty or goodness.
“1 + 1 = 2 existed prior to its discovery by any mind. That being so, it cannot be true that man’s mind made / created this truth.”
“1 + 1 = 2” is both a discovery of reality AND a product of man’s mind. The reality existed prior to man’s discovery but the explicit formulation, the concept, relationship, measurement, definition, numeral symbols, operation symbols, did not. The formulation itself is a product of man’s reasoning about reality.
What an objective, rational, concept refers to out there in reality (the referent) does exist prior to the human concept but the human concept itself is the product of reason.
For example, take the case of Helen Keller, reality existed prior to her conceptualization of reality, but it was only when Anne Sullivan gave her the MAN-PRODUCED tools of knowledge (words, concepts, definitions, grammar, logic) that she could understand reality.
Helen Keller did not receive her conceptualization and understanding of reality through a magical, divine, revelation from a cosmic super-consciousness, or instinct, or magical intuition. But by the product of rational effort and rational (mental) hard work.
You: “1 + 1 = 2 is both a discovery of reality AND a product of man’s mind.”
Me: Discovery is not production. Columbus discovered the new world. He did not produce it. Words have meaning.
You: “The reality existed prior to man’s discovery but the explicit formulation, the concept, relationship, measurement, definition, numeral symbols, operation symbols, did not. The formulation itself is a product of man’s reasoning about reality.”
Me: The man’s use of reason and language to name, describe and explore reality does to mean man produced the reality.
This is where your logic is fatal, THX. If your logic is fatal, then you must re-examine your presuppositions that led you to that error.
“Me: The man’s use of reason and language to name, describe and explore reality does to mean man produced the reality.”
No. it does not. The faulty logic is yours, not mine.
KH: The man’s use of reason and language to name, describe and explore reality does [not] mean man produced the reality.
THX: No. it does not. The faulty logic is yours, not mine.
And here you are no different from a child, incapable of rational argument: “Nuh uh!” You fail to demonstrate my failure of reason or logic. If you could point out my failure of logic, my argument would crumble. Nuh uh demonstrates only that you have exhausted your ability to grapple with my argument (which is a simple one).
So this will be my new mantra: THX believes reason produces preexisting reality. Do you really want to go with that? It is ridiculous and indefensible. But, I give you this: it is a necessary non-negotiable if you want to assert that man’s mind / reason is among the transcendentals. Just as you previously had to cling to the idea that the definition of reason was “man’s mind.” But it is a silly and irrational presupposition you are making.
Your religion’s preliminary tenets / presuppositions are unsupported by reason and evidence – matters of FAITH without evidence. If my conclusions are wrong, then give me ONE example of how reason creates reality. Not describes it or communicates it, but creates it.
Number existed prior to our discovery of it. Rocks, stars, leaves – all had number before we noticed and described it. Giving a word to something or describing it does not make you the producer of the thing the word describes. The vast expanse over me? The sky. Blue color. Composed of primarily of nitrogen. Voila! I produced the sky!
“If my conclusions are wrong, then give me ONE example of how reason creates reality.” – Kynarion Hellenis —– I did NOT claim that reason creates or produces reality metaphysically! NOWHERE did I claim that!
The conceptual IDENTIFICATION of reality requires the man-produced tools of knowledge — words, concepts, definitions, language, grammar, logic.
The identification of reality by the use of concepts does not mean that man produces or creates reality. Man produces the tools of knowledge to IDENTIFY reality and UNDERSTAND reality. Man produces words and language, concepts, to identify and understand reality.
What is so difficult about that to understand, or are you REFUSING to understand that? Producing tools of knowledge, i.e., producing the mental tools for IDENTIFYINF and UNDERSTANDING reality does NOT mean man is producing or creating reality itself.
Helen Keller did not create reality but without concepts whose symbols are words her mind could not IDENTIFY and UNDERSTAND reality.
You are absolutely right about me misquoting you. Apologies. I got lost in our long thread.
My point is that objectivism has no transcendentals. It must parasitize these from elsewhere (primarily Christianity). I substituted “reality” for “truth.” Reality is NOT a transcendental. Truth is. My bad.
You claim truth is a product of the mind. I claim truth cannot be a product of anything because it exists as one of the transcendentals. Here is what you said in response to my challenge to prove that truth is product of the mind:
THX: “1 + 1 = 2 is a truth produced by the human mind.”
THX: “Reason is the most SELFISH human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler.”
So your claim is that the mind (not a transcendental) produces TRUTH (a transcendental). I think you cannot produce a single, clear, strong, valid example of one truth PRODUCED (not discovered) by the human mind. It is my position that truth is discovered. It is appreciated. It is mimicked, it is loved and hated, but it is never produced. “Discover” and “produce” are not synonyms.
And this is the fatal flaw of your religion. It would be nice if you could correct me. If you could, I would have to re-think a lot of my presuppositions – because they do not enslave me. If you cannot, then you can either re-think yours, or you can cherish them against reason. This is the same as your definition of “faith” which is “belief against or without evidence.” You are so passionate and confident – I would think you might enjoy this.
I’ve made myself exceedingly clear. Exceedingly easy to understand. There does come a point where the student has to put her own effort at understanding. Good luck to you, go in peace, live long and prosper by the correct use of reason and logic to produce the tools ok knowledge needed to discover and identify reality.
“Concepts are the PRODUCT of a mental process that integrates and organizes the evidence of the senses. (See my “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”.) Man’s senses are his ONLY direct cognitive contact with reality, and therefore, his only SOURCE of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can be no knowledge and no science.” – “[Immanuel] Kant versus [Anne] Sullivan”, Ayn Rand
Rand’s “Kant Versus Sullivan” | James Valliant
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.” – Ayn Rand
Very true. And I would say your religion fits the bill perfectly.
Altruism Bad. Christianity Bad.
Altruism Bad. Christianity Bad.
Altruism Bad. Christianity Bad.
Altruism Bad. Christianity Bad.
Altruism Bad. Christianity Bad.
Repeat the Big Lie ad infinitum
Nazis were not “Neo-christians”. Hitler was a proud atheist. It wasn’t hidden so one must view history with one eye closed to proclaim otherwise. Miss Goska cannot claim “truth” while saying she doesn’t know its source. If her lauding of evolution is consistent, then she must embrace all the manifestations of that worldview. Its revelations are not pretty but barbaric and defy her otherwise beautiful prose.
“Nazis were neo-Pagans. They argued that nature demanded that the same approach one might take to an invasive species of plant or animal should be applied to human beings. The Judeo-Christian tradition has been at war with that “natural” approach for thousands of years. It has insisted that we care for the weak, the vulnerable, and the stranger. In doing so, we defy “survival of the fittest.” In loving and serving, we find beauty even in the faces of the old and infirm.”
Neither Nazism with its racism and Social Darwinism nor Christianity with its supernatural doctrine of Original Sin, altruist self-sacrifice, and Supernatural Salvation, have anything to do with the natural and the natural nature of man.
As Ayn Rand correctly observes, “[Racism] is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.”
Social Darwinism fails to differentiate between animals and men. Man is the rational-productive animal, he does not flourish like other animals do, by predation, cannibalism, or parasitism. Mankind flourishes only when mankind chooses to reason and to be productive.
Christianity is not simply another word for compassion, charity, kindness, and generosity. The central moral doctrine of Christianity is not charity but altruism. Self-sacrifice. Self-denial. Self-immolation. Self-destruction. Dying on a cross for others. Pat Robertson was not the serious Christian, Kayla Mueller was.
Altruism makes compassion, kindness, and benevolence impossible.
Original Sin is the evil doctrine that claims that man is born morally depraved, sinful, UGLY. And the only way he can ever be beautiful again is to sacrifice himself for God and neighbor and maybe he will be rewarded with eternal life after his UGLY self has died.
“Ayn Rand – Why Altruism is Evil”
Ayn Rand gets some big things right.
But then she bastardizes those things and comes to an extremely misguided conclusion.
The first commandment of the pagan is……….”Might makes right”.
So she was right about the Nazis.
But the antidote to that psychology is not an atheistic worship of self. Your “inner godhead” is not the answer.
Unless you’re a Hindu/Buddhist.
Which pagans are you talking about? Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, etc. were pagans. Pagan Greece gave the West rational philosophy, logic, math, science, drama, and BEAUTIFUL, magnificent, man-glorifying art. it gave us the base of modern civilization in every field; it taught the West how to think. Western civilization is Greco-Roman and pagan.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are invading Oriental religions from the Middle East. It was the slow and gradual but eventual Hellenization of the Jewish mind, the Hellenization that the Maccabees and other orthodox Jews fought tooth and nail against for one thousand years, that released the brilliance of the Jewish mind from the crippling shackles of Judaism.
Without the mysticism and supernaturalism of the pagan Plato, the Cult of Jesus could never have developed the sophisticated theology of Christianity. Augustinian Christianity is Neo-Platonism applied to the magical thinking of the Cult of Jesus.
The pagan Aristotle, not Jesus or Moses, is the actual philosophical and ethical father of America. Without Aristotle’s philosophy and his ethics there could be no America.
“For Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”
A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.
Although Aristotle’s writings do include a polemic against the more extreme features of Plato’s collectivism, Aristotle himself is not a consistent advocate of political individualism. His own politics is a mixture of statist and antistatist elements. But the primary significance of Aristotle, or of any philosopher, does not lie in his politics. It lies in the fundamentals of his system: his metaphysics and epistemology.” – Leonard Peikoff
Pagan Greece gave the West rational philosophy, logic, math, science, drama, and BEAUTIFUL, magnificent, man-glorifying art.
So did Medieval Europe. I can’t imagine a person who hates his own history as much as you. And your so-called “rational pride” is simply your own blinkered ego trying to tell us how “wonderful you are”.
The Greeks, The Greeks, The Greeks.
Greek philosophy, your foundation and bedrock of the rational and scientific beginnings and aspects of Western Civilization, folded like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes. Your heroes worshiped many Gods. So what is your problem with God? Without Christianity Greek history would resemble those ruins that everyone takes selfies at. Without Christianity no would remember or care about the Greeks.
The apostle Paul, student of Gamaliel and well-versed in Greek philosophy, went to Athens. The Greeks were then a degraded people, whose reason and philosophy did not prevent their descent from the heights of civilization 400 years before Paul’s visit. They fell generally into two camps: Epicureans (atheists) and Stoics (stoics).
Athens was filled with altars and statues of the gods of both. Stoics had their monuments. Epicureans erected altars to Reason and Virtue. Paul’s speech to them is still a masterpiece today (Acts 17).
So Reason, as a god, has been worshipped by atheists for thousands of years. There really is nothing new under the sun. The Greeks were early to record the idea of the transcendentals: Beauty, Truth and Goodness.
THX always tries to shoe-horn “man’s mind” or “reason” as a transcendental. It is one of the several serious foundational errors and logical fallacies which he will NOT examine. But, if my analysis is good, he is the one actually committed to mysticism and cult. I will not, as he does, make naked assertions without evidence:
Mysticism because in THX’s religion, “reason” is god, and man’s mind is reason (so no transcendental there), and therefore he has direct access to God – the core tenet of mysticism. Cult because he is enslaved to it and cannot be made to subject his core tenets to true reason. He suppresses the truth in unrighteousness because he prefers a comfortable lie. Wretched Ayn Rand is god, and he is either her apostle or in trinity with her and Peekaboo. God is contained within his skull. Ayn Rand said so.
And that also explains why nothing is valuable unless he knows it. He even goes so far as to suggest that nothing CAN exist unless he can know it.
You are confusing the art of Medieval-Augustinian Christianity with the magnificent art of Renaissance-Aristotelian-Thomist Christianity — two essentially very different philosophical periods of European history.
Medieval Christian art is hideous, UGLY, man-hating, this-world rejecting, superstitious art. It is the art of gargoyles, devils, and demons.
Renaissance art is the philosophy of Aristotle slowly and gradually breaking through the Augustinian Christian religious mentality telling Europeans, “It’s OK you can think, don’t be afraid of this world, don’t be disgusted by your own rational nature, don’t be afraid of being men, Original Sin is nonsense.”
“For the classical Greek world, its statues of gods and athletes were models of perfection and a source of inspiration. For the medieval world, its pathetic, huddled images of man were constant reminders of depravity and a source of shame and humiliation.
There was no place in the medieval culture for a statue that glorified man; and so, after the collapse of ancient civilization, the classical statues were abandoned to the hostile barbarism of the populace. The early Christian church fathers are said to have considered them dangerous, believing them to be inhabited by devils. Large numbers of these statues were destroyed. Some were hidden in private collections. The rest were forgotten and gradually buried under the rubble of centuries—just as the human spirit they embodied was buried by medieval mysticism. Both the statues and the spirit remained buried until the Renaissance.
The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a conscious rebellion against the anti-human, otherworldly values of medieval Christendom.” – Mary Ann Sures
“Metaphysics in Marble” – Mary Ann Sures
Beautiful. Simple and powerful rendered with few words.
Haven’t you listed this tired video about 100 times before? Here’s the big difference between you and “the one that got away”, Ms. Goska.
She’s respected, famous, well adjusted and extensively published.
You aren’t.
I didn’t know that Gerard Manley Hopkins was gay. How do you know?
Maybe Ms. Goska is gay and therefore the sexual preference of famous people resonates emotionally for her.
I could be wrong, but there seems to have been hints in her essays that I’ve read hear at FPM that seem to point in that direction, but I could be completely wrong.
Bitter, table for one. She still won’t date you. She’s a Christian. You ain’t.
Dumbest reason yet to explain her rejection of you.
Wow! You are a piece of work. But i know as a christian you too are made in God’s image & he desires that you be saved, so i continue to pray.
My favorite bird is the roadrunner, when they are in predator mode they move like a cat.
We have them here! They eat snakes. Gotta love that!
We have quite a few Birds in our area even Bald Eagle Western Tanagers Bulock Oriole Western Kingbirds and Western Meadowlarks Redwing Blackbirds, Etc. and yes lots of Hawks. And our area is still mostly agricultural and we also have Killdeer Northern Ravens and American Crows
Professor Goska is never more scintillating than when writing about nature, or the inspirations and lessons of nature. In this connection, I strongly recommend her book “God Through Binoculars.”
While we cannot observe it directly, the micro-natural world is also sublime. Consider the following from a lecture by Max Planck in 1944:
“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Thank you, Charles.
Professor Goska is a superb critic of all of the elements of the woke agenda that connprise American Marxism
Why must we assume the existence of a cosmic super-consciousness-creator? That which exists must be some thing, it must be a thing, a specific entity with a specific nature. To exist is to be and to be is to have a specific identity. The Law of Identity leads to its corollary, the Law of Causality. What some thing is determines how it acts or does not act. It is self-evident that an entity must act according to its nature, no matter how complex or difficult to figure out that entity and its action/s are to a human mind.
There is no intrinsic complexity in the universe. The universe just is, it simply exists. Complexity is an epistemological concept, not a metaphysical one.
“The religious view of the world, though it has been abandoned by most philosophers, is still entrenched in the public mind. Witness the popular question “Who created the universe?” — which presupposes that the universe is not eternal, but has a source beyond itself, in some cosmic personality or will. It is useless to object that this question involves an infinite regress, even though it does (if a creator is required to explain existence, then a second creator is required to explain the first, and so on). Typically, the believer will reply: “One can’t ask for an explanation of God. He is an inherently necessary being. After all, one must start somewhere.” Such a person does not contest the need of an irreducible starting point, as long as it is a form of consciousness, a person of this mentality refuses to start with the world, which we KNOW to exist; he insists on jumping beyond the world to the unknowable, even though such a procedure explains nothing. The root of this mentality is not rational argument, but the influence of Christianity. In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.” – Leonard Peikoff
So don’t assume the existence of a cosmic super-consciousness-creator, as you so sarcastically put it. And leave the rest of us alone. I have never understood the compulsion in atheists to proclaim to the world that they are atheists.
Guess what, no one cares that you are an atheist. The main thing is you are a haughty, yet immature bore. And you seem incapable of human decency.
1. “Why must we assume the existence of a …. creator?”
It is less an assumption and more of a reasonable conclusion. One that has withstood atheistic attack for thousands of years.
2. “The Law of Identity leads to its corollary, the Law of Causality.”
Perhaps what is has been conceived with purpose. Perhaps matter is not eternal. Perhaps matter has no intelligence and ability to increase in organization and complexity. Certainly science cannot deny these postulates. Neither can reason.
But, if you want to assert your usual tautology, let me do it for you. A is A. The universe just is.
The author is an excellent critique iof the many elements of the woke mindset that is metastasizing throiughout the western world.
190 million years ago? Really….? Please think…. What does God say? How does God speak? If we don’t believe the Bible we will be deceived.
You must mean please “obey” the Bible unthinkingly like an obedient Christian must and do not think like a heretic, rationally and scientifically like an Aristotelian pagan.
Cotton Mather, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Augustine, where are you? Danusha Goska is becoming a thinking and disobedient Aristotelian pagan!
At Matthew 22:37, Jesus said: “You must love Jehovah your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind.”
And with your whole mind. It was our Creator who gave us reasoning faculties and He does expect us to use them. So the Christian definition of faith is this:
“Faith is the assured expectation of what is hoped for, the evident demonstration
of realities that are not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1
Of what use is a blind, unreasoning faith? We can believe in anything on that basis – the moon being made of green cheese, father christmas, whatever. But we see the creation and if we reason about it, its beauty and its complexity, can’t we see that it has a Grand Creator?
And, yes, to refer to the subject of Dr.. Goska’s article, God made it beautiful. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11
You must mean we must obey Rand and her unreadable books, and Peekaboo his stupid articles, and their religion unthinkingly, like you, the obedient Objectivist, always do and want us to do. Hypocrisy, thy name is THX
Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, where are you?…..all run over and absorbed into the irresistible force of Christianity and relegated to obscure university courses on logic along with the pinheads who are obsessed with them.
I love it when you talk directly to the object of your unrequited love interest. She still won’t date you.
Know the Times, Don’t be taken in by those who want to mislead and deceive you. The Word of God is Truth., and all scripture is God breathed and useful in teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.2 Timothy 3:16.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 But Mark This: (There will be terrible times in the last days. ) People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungreatful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God….having a form of Godliness, but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
Psalm 1:1-2. Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. Rationality will never come from those who can’t discern the Truth!
I have no problem killing house sparrows. My love of native birds compels me.
“That we can’t name every difference between men and women doesn’t make those differences less real.”
Exactly! But instead that trans lobby wants us to believe that costume plus Frankenstein-esque, cut and paste procedures–both chemical and surgical–somehow covers that multitude of differences. And this absurdity is legally protected in most states. Our president calls it the civil rights issue of our day. We must not stop resisting whomever tries to force us to say 2+2=5.
Danusha, this is a wonderful essay, that really drills down into what we see, and how we perceive it. Your descriptions of people who watch the bird watchers, calling them civilians, tells me how set apart, how sacred you regard bird watching.
I loved the distinction you drew between the beauty of warblers and an inanimate phenomenon like a cresting wave. One is alive, and the other is not, and never will be. There are things going on with that warbler that are more complex than that wave will ever be. It reminded me of the times I called a contrivance or physical phenomenon ‘beautiful.’ Why did I do that? Was it because smarter people than I called them beautiful and I wanted to belong? I remember wondering what was beautiful about whatever it was I was looking at, a glow discharge, a rocket launch, and diagrams of the orbits of the planets. The smart people thought they were beautiful. But why? Was it aesthetics? Or was it more in line with expectations, that the models that were comprised of numerous equations were doing exactly what the actual physical objects, manmade or otherwise were doing? Was it a kind of knowing satisfaction? Later, as an engineer I spent more time with various models, and I realized that the objects were not precisely doing what the models predicted. At least not for very long.
“”That’s just camouflage!” you may sniff, as if costuming a duck in camo is no mean feat in itself. But it’s not even just that. The military mass produces camouflage; it is functional. It is not beautiful.”
This is a great thought! We humans tend to design things as if they are plug in modules that can be interchanged at will, but have no connection at all with the environment. We did some experiments, discovered some ‘hidden visual processes’ and decided that was that. The ducks had to live in the environment forever. They were not just there for a battle, and then left for the suburbs afterwards. The beauty for me is that they ‘belong’ where they are. The clever human camo does not look like it belongs there after it’s discovered. In fact, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We are camo amateurs.
I could go on and on. I love perception pieces, and this is a very good one. Thank you for taking the time to write and share this, Danusha.
Thank you for a beautiful treatise filled with truth (weakened only by some of the unspeakable egos of some who replied).
“…and when we mess with our own beauty, we sometimes mar it beyond repair.” Could this also apply to tatoos?
Yes, [we] are birds lovers, too.
Dios te bendiga.
“ There are at least ten thousand known differences in the genetic expressions of males and females.”
We know this through scientific research, but there’s no genetic homosexual evidence at all.
Nurture not nature seems to be what creates this weird behaviour.
There’s not a single bird that is homosexual, not a single animal, only humans.
I am not blaming anyone for this, I believe that the vast majority have been abused as children and as teenagers. Until we recognise the problem it will continue.
As the pride parades say “We’re here, we’re queer and we’re coming for your children”
Actually I’ve read some animals are gay.
But you’re correct, I do think humans become gay by sexual abuse as kids. In 99 times out of 100. The nazis also realized this which is why they wanted to rid the country of them. They considered a social contagion. It is.
If they were then evolution would wipe them out unless God created them.
Thanks, lovely important article. The author finds beauty in and creates beauty with words.
My view is that the eye perceives beauty with the heart, if that heart is open to it.
Distorting the our sensibilities, our hearts, is the woke agenda. Until no one knows what they perceive, if they are allowed to perceive it or if they are free to react naturally. It is the emperor’s new clothes, In other words, tyranny and self tyranny.
I spend time with older people and I see beauty in many faces. Since childhood, I have seen beauty in older people’s faces. In a way. those perceptions make me beautiful. Some of us respond to different cues, some to more internal cues (who the person is, their voice, their smile) some more external (are they wrinkled?). Appreciation can also be taught. We could be teaching children to find more beauty in people, in nature, in words and in ideas.
(I believe THX is here as a spoiler, a troll. Maybe he has a personal problem. But many fine discussions have been taken off course. Enough, already).
THX has way more than personal problems. He suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. THX is a selfish self-involved mess of a human who is trying to change the world by actually believing he can destroy Christianity and western civilization and somehow re-engineer it into Ayn Rand’s Objectivism
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and the severity of symptoms vary. People with the disorder can: Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration. Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it.
‘Blind evolution’ should be transparently idiotic to one with your glorious perception. How did the bird’s radically different ‘one way’ lung come into existence ‘by a series of fortuitous accidents’? One cannot stop breathing for a few minutes without dying.
Danusha,
Wow another fantastic observation of life, of our world.
And yet you cling to the idea of evolution?
None, zero, zip, nada, zilch of the beauty you described evolved.
God’d hand everywhere.
Beauty, ugliness, His plan, His design.
Please keep writing. I love your voice!
We have the usual new age crack-pots like EO. Wilson and Peter Singer as well as many of the rest of the new age wackos who are always getting on the news and giving us their new age prattle
For Campers and Hikers(We get the PCT Hikers through our area every Summer there are the Grey Jays Bold and Fearless they will take things off your Picnic Table or right out of your Tents their also called Camp Robbers
This is mental illness on full display
If you walk around the streets of any major city, you will see examples of the dunbing down of beauty-never have miore physically unattractive women walked around with as little clothing on in the summer
Thanks for another wonderful article. 18029541
This is a great article. 74026247