Read: 2025-10-31
Recommend: 6/10
This book provides many funny moments. The one that made me laugh the most is the second-to-last highlight below.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
infinite regress, a concept that comes up when we ask if there is a First Cause—of life, of the universe, of time and space, and most significantly, of a Creator. Something must have created the Creator, so the causal buck—or turtle—cannot stop with him. Or with the Creator behind him. Or the one behind him. It’s Creators all the way down—or up, if that seems like the right direction for chasing down Creators.
A man is worried that his wife is losing her hearing, so he consults a doctor. The doctor suggests that he try a simple at-home test on her: Stand behind her and ask her a question, first from twenty feet away, next from ten feet, and finally right behind her. So the man goes home and sees his wife in the kitchen facing the stove. He says from the door,“What’s for dinner tonight?” No answer. Ten feet behind her, he repeats, “What’s for dinner tonight?” Still no answer. Finally, right behind her he says, “What’s for dinner tonight?” And his wife turns around and says,“For the third time— chicken!”
For an epistemological pragmatist like the late-nineteenth-century American philosopher William James, the truth of a statement lies in its practical consequences. According to James, we choose our truth by what difference it will make in practice. We say Newton’s law of gravity is true, not because it corresponds to the way things “really are,” but because it has proven useful in predicting the behavior of two objects relative to each other under many different sorts of circumstances
Sorting out what’s good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits, and parents, “Why?”
At a meeting of the college faculty, an angel suddenly appears and tells the head of the philosophy department, “I will grant you whichever of three blessings you choose: Wisdom, Beauty—or ten million dollars.” Immediately, the professor chooses Wisdom. There is a flash of lightning, and the professor appears transformed, but he just sits there, staring down at the table. One of his colleagues whispers,“Say something.” The professor says, “I should have taken the money.”
We all know that that twentieth-century pinko Vladimir Lenin said, “The end justifies the means,” but, ironically, it’s not too far from the view of one of the GOP God Squad’s favorite philosophers, John Stuart Mill. Mill and the utilitarians proposed a “consequentialist” ethic: The moral rightness of an act is determined solely by its consequences.
Similar considerations led English playwright George Bernard Shaw to wryly rewrite the golden rule: “Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different taste.”
What Nietzsche meant by the death of God was that Western culture had outgrown metaphysical explanations of the world as well as the accompanying Christian ethic. He called Christianity “herd morality,” because it teaches an “unnatural ethic”—that it’s bad to be an alpha male who dominates the herd. In place of Christian ethics he substituted a life-affirming ethic of strength, which he called the will to power. The exceptional individual, the Übermensch or superman, is above herd morality and deserves to express his natural strength and superiority freely over the herd. Friedrich was clearly a member of the Tony Soprano school when it came to the golden rule. Consequently, Nietzsche has been blamed for everything from German militarism to sauerkraut: The problem with German food is that, no matter how much you eat, an hour later you’re hungry for power.
Harris fails to mention the downside of being an atheist—you have nobody to cry out to in the throes of an orgasm.
The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that deciding whether or not to believe in God is essentially engaging in a wager. If we choose to behave as if there is a God and we get to the end and it turns out there isn’t, it’s not such a big deal. Well, maybe we’ve lost the ability to thoroughly enjoy the Seven Deadly Sins, but that’s small potatoes compared to the alternative. If we bet there isn’t a God, and get to the end only to find out there is a God, we’ve lost the Big Enchilada, eternal bliss. Therefore, according to Pascal, it is a better strategy to live as if there is a God. This is known to academics as “Pascal’s wager.” To the rest of us, it’s known as hedging your bets.
It has been said that the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer discovered Buddhism philosophically. Like Gautama the Buddha two millennia earlier, Schopenhauer thought that all life is suffering, struggle, and frustration, and the only escape is resignation—the rejection of desire and denial of the will to live. On the upside, they both thought that resignation would lead to compassion for all beings and saintliness. Like, it’s a tradeoff.
A koan is a riddle or story that, when told by a Zen master to a student, has the possibility of shocking that student into a state of consciousness known as satori—sudden enlightenment. In this consciousness, all the distinctions and evaluations of the everyday world evaporate, leaving one with a profound appreciation of the unity of the universe and of all experience in the universe. A Zen response to the one-hand-clapping riddle is not something literal and scientific like, “The soft murmur of air being wafted by a moving, flat surface.” No, the Zen response is more like, “Wow!” Koans catapult us to enlightenment by confounding our minds with impossible ideas. Get beyond those and, bang, you’re in satori.
The twentieth-century German existentialist Martin Heidegger would respond, You call that anxiety, Norman? You haven’t lived yet. And by “lived” I mean thinking about death all the time! Heidegger went so far as to say that human existence is being-toward-death. To live authentically, we must face the fact of our own mortality squarely and take responsibility for living meaningful lives in the shadow of death. We must not try to escape personal anxiety and personal responsibility by denying the fact of death.
Three friends are killed in a car accident and meet up at an orientation session in Heaven. The celestial facilitator asks them what they would most like to hear said about themselves as their friends and relatives view them in the casket. The first man says, “I hope people will say that I was a wonderful doctor and a good family man.” The second man says, “I would like to hear people say that as a schoolteacher I made a big difference in the lives of kids.” The third man says, “I’d like to hear someone say, ‘Look, he’s moving!’”
A man wins $100,000 in Las Vegas and, not wanting anyone to know about it, he takes it home and buries it in his backyard. The next morning he goes out back and finds only an empty hole. He sees footprints leading to the house next door, which belongs to a deaf-mute, so he asks the professor down the street, who knows sign language, to help him confront his neighbor. The man takes his pistol, and he and the professor knock on the neighbor’s door. When the neighbor answers, the man waves the pistol at him and says to the professor,“You tell this guy that if he doesn’t give me back my $100,000, I’m going to kill him right now!” The professor conveys the message to the neighbor, who responds that he hid the money in his own backyard under the cherry tree.
Perhaps you’re asking yourself, “What exactly is the difference between capitalism and communism?” Perhaps not. In any case, it’s really quite simple. Under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. Under communism, the opposite is true.