C.S. Lewis: MERE CHRISTIANITY

Posted on Friday 4 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

(First published 1952. This edition: HarperOne, trade paperback, 2001, xx + 227pp)

This is famous as one of the most popular ‘apologetics’ for Christianity. (Coincidentally, I did recently see a poll of the most popular books about Christianity of the 20th century, and this was #1.) I’ve heard about it for years, mainly for its claim that Jesus was either really God or else he was crazy. Therefore, obviously!

Unlike most books I read, I didn’t come to this one expecting to ‘agree’ with it, or even to learn anything factual from it, but rather to learn what kind of arguments Christians find persuasive. In this book these arguments boil down to two types: not understanding why something exists in the natural world (in this case human morality), and so therefore God (this is the God of the Gaps argument), and second, making assertions without any factual basis (about God, Jesus, and that humans who believe will live forever) and then drawing from them abstruse, convoluted conclusions about rules for living and abstract concepts like the Trinity.

Key points (with my comments):

  • The ‘mere’ in the title simply means the author isn’t focusing on any one particular denomination of Christianity.
  • Lewis appeals to the existence of moral intuitions in human nature as evidence of God. (He’s wrong; he knew nothing about evolution and the nature of social animals; over the past 60 years we’ve come to understand in considerable details why human nature is what it is, and why we have notions about right and wrong. God is not required. This closing of the gaps has gone on for centuries.)
  • Lewis accepts that Jesus was God because otherwise he would be a liar or a lunatic. This is his famous “trilemma.” (But it’s not a logical conclusion, it’s simply the option Lewis prefers. Also, there were many other would-be messiahs in that era who said similar things, of which Lewis seems unaware. See Ehrman, and Asimov.)
  • He goes on simply making assertions: the world is flawed; Jesus came to create a new man; the world will end etc etc
  • His discussion of morality is OK at a very broad level, but goes off the rails with his completely unjustified assertion that human beings are destined to live forever.
  • His discussions about what Christianity ‘says’ is full of assertions without rationale or evidence. Marriage is for this; God wants you to be that. (At best these ideas might be mapped onto the protocols of primitive tribal life, and so have a superficial conservative appeal, even as they are less applicable in the modern world.)
  • And then he tries to justify the trinity, via increasingly bizarre speculations that he calls “science” i.e. theology.
  • And concludes by claiming that a New Man will soon emerge, apart from nature, that will amount to a unification with Jesus, or God, or whatever.

Comments:

  • He reminds me of Paul in the epistles, who just made up a bunch of stuff, based on his personal biases (against women, against education), that later church officials thought was useful enough for their cause to canonize.
  • Is it significant that the ideal society of God is called a ‘kingdom’? The bible writers didn’t know of any other possibility. It’s the innate hierarchy of base human nature.
  • Books like this reassure the casual believer that what they’ve committed themselves to is really quite serious and weighty, not a collection of incoherent and contradictory writings from over many centuries by many different writers.
  • Apparently Lewis was an atheist early in life and then decided to convert to… well, to the local religion where he lived, which was the Church of England. I can understand people inculcated into religion early on, so that religious tenets are ground into their very conception of the world (thus undermining to some extent their ability to think rationally), and then wanting to justify these childhood beliefs on supposedly rational grounds. I’m not sure it’s to Lewis’ credit that he ‘converted’ as an adult, by which time he should have known better. No doubt it made his life easier. He married late in life too.
  • I could go through this in much greater detail as an example of motivated reasoning, and wishful thinking. But I won’t. It’s not worth the trouble.

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Detailed Summary [[ and comments ]]

Preface, p.vii

Author discusses differences between speech and print. Nothing here about denomination. Author is a layman of the Church of England. Differences among denominations are matters for experts. Not all are solved. This isn’t about ‘my religion’ but about ‘mere’ Christianity. Thus numerous contentious points are avoided. And in Book III he avoids discussion of certain sins. Gambling. Birth-control. Some complain about his use of the word ‘Christian.’ Author responds by discussing the word ‘gentleman’ and how meanings change. Some words are now useless. Rooms and doors.

Foreword, p.xvii (by Kathleen Norris)

Context: It was 1942, middle of another war. Lewis served. Gave three speeches now in this book. Notions of modernity and progress had not brought an end to war. The problem is us. At the time many considered England to be part of a “post-Christian” world. Lewis came to explain what Christianity is all about.

Book One: Right and wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

1, The Law of Human Nature, p3

He describes the sounds of people arguing. Everyone seems to appeal to some standard of behavior that everyone should know about. Quarrelling. Trying to establish right and wrong. This used to be called the Law of Nature. Or, Law of Human Nature. It did not need to be taught. But haven’t different civilizations had different moralities? No. They have all been very similar. Think what a really different morality would mean. Even when they break this real law, they appeal to it. So we’re forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. But none of us is keeping it. We fail to practice the behavior we expect from other people. We all have excuses for our misdeeds. This just proves how deeply we believe in this Law. Those are the two points: we believe in a Law of Nature; and yet we break it.

2, Some Objections, p9

He’s gotten letters. It’s not just herd instinct. It’s how we decide among our instincts. It often decides for the weaker instinct. Nor can we identify any instinct to be always good or always bad. The Moral Law is what enables us to direct the instincts. Others: isn’t just a social convention, taught by education? No, no more so than the multiplication table. Two reasons: the law runs through all human cultures. And we believe that some moralities are better than others – thus moral progress. That requires there to be a standard, i.e. a Real Morality of Right and Wrong. There was nothing wrong with burning witches, since they really believed witches existed and were evil…

3, The Reality of the Law, p16

Go back to the first chapter, about how we don’t follow the law. People aren’t perfect? They’re different than stones when they fall, then. … People realize that society wouldn’t work without everyone playing fair and behaving decently. But how does that benefit them? This gets us nowhere, author says, p19; it’s circular. The Law of Human Nature is about ought, not what is. (my words) It must be something real, not made up by ourselves. As if there is more than one kind of reality. Something above and beyond…

4, What Lies Behind the Law, p21

Smry. What does this mean about the universe? There are two views: the materialist, in which everything has happened by chance. [[ No no no. Evolution is not chance. ]] The other is the religious view. A mind is behind the universe. Both views have been around, and ordinary science cannot determine between them. Why anything exists is not a scientific question. If science knew everything, it still could not explain why we are here. There’s no objective way to detect this moral law. But we know that something is compelling us to behave in a certain way. Nothing like the God of Christian theology, not yet, but something like a mind. End note: also, not mentioned on the air: a Life-Force philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. Shaw, Bergson. It comforts people, author says, calling the Life-Force wishful thinking.

[[ the obvious thing to be said here is that this is a false dichotomy; either god, he implies, or everything “happened by chance.” No. Complexity and life evolved via basic physical principles; even morality evolved to enable survival. ]]

5, We Have Cause to Be Uneasy, p28

Author cautions he is not playing some kind of trick, that he’s talking about religion all along. First, you can’t put the clock back. [[ he means undoing a mistake, I think. ]] The present state of the world suggests humanity has made a mistake and needs getting back. Second, this is not a ‘religious jaw.’ But we know that somebody or something provided this Moral Law. [[ Nope ]] We know the universe as He made it, and we know the Moral Law which He has put into our minds. [[ He’s jumping the gun – already using “He” ]] From that we know that the universe is interested in right conduct. This is not to say that God is necessarily ‘good’. (etc etc) Third, we need these facts to understand Christianity. To understand what it means to repent. We must understand the world as it is before we can understand that Christianity can provide comfort.

[[ So at this point he seems to be done justifying his belief in God – because morality – and pivots to rationalizing Christianity. There are a lot of steps missing in the middle. ]]

[[ Also, step back a bit. If human morality had to be defined by God, that it isn’t in some sense inherent in the nature of the human species, then it could have been different, yes? So, suggest an alternative morality that would work for human beings. ]]

Book Two: What Christians Believe

1, The Rival Conceptions of God, p35

You don’t have to believe that all the other religions are wrong all through. But where Christianity differs from them, it is right and they are wrong, 35.7. [[ Sigh; how does he know? ]]

The first big division of humanity is between those who believe in God or gods, and those who don’t. Next, of those who do, some believe in a god who is beyond good and evil. And others think God is definitely good and righteous. The former is Pantheism; the latter is held by Christians and others. Another difference is that the former think the universe almost *is* God; the latter, that God invented or made the universe. Yet things have gone wrong in the world God insists on putting them right. But why is it going wrong? What are these ideas of just and unjust? Author somehow concludes that atheism is too simple; if the universe has no meaning, we would never have found that out. [[ this is wordplay ]]

[[ Because ideas of good/bad, just/unjust, are human inventions at the simplest level, driven by us/them tribal preferences. ]]

2, The Invasion.

So atheism is too simple, author says, and so is the simplistic Christianity-and-water view, a boys’ philosophy. Things are not that simple. People who want to attack Christianity do so by attacking this simple version. Reality is complicated, and odd. There are no obvious patterns in the arrangement of planets, for instance. You would not guess them. Just as you would not guess Christianity. The answer will not be simple.

So what is the problem? That there is much bad in the universe or meaningless; and that there are creatures like ourselves who realize this. Christianity says there is a good world that has gone bad. The other view is Dualism, a belief in two independent powers, one good and one evil. The problem with the latter is how to tell, is it just our preference? If one is actually good and the other bad, there must be some third thing, some standard or rule that one side meets and the other doesn’t. Whoever made this standard must be God. Further, we don’t know of anything that like badness for its own sake, except sadists, or in pursuit of something for which cruelty is useful. More simply: to be bad, He must exist and have intelligence, which are themselves good. … so dualism will not work. Christianity believes that the Dark Power was created by God and went bad. More like a civil war. So yes author does claim… the devil.

3, The Shocking Alternative, p47

So Christians believe that an evil power presides over this world. Is this God’s will? This is the problem with making things voluntary. God made creatures who had free will. [[ Again, he’s jumping ahead and assuming his conclusion. ]] And you can’t do without free will. It’s what makes anything good possible. And God thought it worth the risk. It’s silly to wonder otherwise. We can’t know what made the Dark Power go wrong. Perhaps he wanted to be God. That he gave that sin to the human race. Thinking we could create our own happiness outside God. Thus all human history. But it can never succeed. God made us, and he is our fuel. Human institutions always go wrong. Like cars, they eventually conk out. God gave us the sense of right and wrong; he sent human ‘good dreams’ like stories of a god who dies and comes to life again; and he selected one particular people to special attention. These were the Jews. [[ all very just-so stories. ]] Then the shock: The man who turns up among the Jews making all sorts of claims. Very different than the stories of the Pantheists. A shocking thing. Especially the claim to forgive sins. Which is possible only if he really is God. We see his seriousness in the Gospels. This is why you can’t just accept Jesus as being a moral teacher and not his claim about being God. There’s a choice: either the man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or worse. He was not merely a great human teacher.

[[ As always, the excluded middle; the universe one either or, black or white, this or that. What about all those others who made such claims? Where does author get his impression of what God would be like in human form? ]]

4, The Perfect Penitent, p53

The alternative is: Jesus was who he said he was, or he was a lunatic. Author accepts he was God. For what purpose? To teach. Or to suffer and be killed. In place of humans? The central Christian belief that Christ’s death put us to right and gave us a fresh start. But how? Theories disagree; but even not knowing about vitamins and protein, we go on eating healthy meals. The mechanism doesn’t matter. It is like physicists with their mental pictures vs their mathematical formulae. The death of Christ is like something unimaginable showing through into our own world. So the theories are secondary. But some are worth looking at. Christ taking punishment in place of us. Why didn’t God just forgive us? Perhaps the sense of paying down someone else’s bill. What was owed? Surrender the idea of behaving as if belonging to oneself. Apologize. Repent. Going back to God. And so on… thick. That’s author’s own view.

5, The Practical Conclusion, p60

The next step in evolution has already occurred, but Christ introducing a new kind of man. Very different than the way our ordinary lives began. When told, some children don’t believe it. An odd process you would never guess. [[ well, of course… ]] Christ-life comes to us in three ways: baptism, belief, and communion/mass/Lord’s supper. It’s not up to the author to explain why these three things are needed. But why does he believe it’s so? Because Jesus said so. Authority. As we believe in virtually everything. Science, history (note mention of evolution, 62.4). Just as you maintain your ordinary life, you must maintain your Christian life. It can be repaired. Christ is operating through themselves. (etc., a lot of just-so rationalizations for why god isn’t here, for why he hasn’t returned, because when he does the world will end.) You had better choose your side by then. He’s giving you a chance.

Book Three: Christian Behavior

1, The Three Parts of Morality, p69

To many people morality is about stopping people from having a good time. No, morals are directions to keep the human machine from breaking down. Some speak of moral ‘ideals.’ But different tastes can be distinct ideals. But we can’t all have different, private morals. That’s why we speak of rules and obedience. Humans go wrong in two ways: by getting in each other’s way; or by being dysfunctional themselves. Like a fleet of ships, or a band. But it’s also about where the fleet is going, or what the band is playing. Thus there are three parts of morality. Many people think only of the first. Like thinking something can’t be wrong because it doesn’t do anyone else harm. But we must be concerned with that second thing, the morality inside the individual. It matters whether the ship he owns is in good shape or not. Because Christianity asserts that every individual is going to live forever. [[ An assertion without evidence or rationale. ]] Living with character flaws forever would be Hell. So, three parts. The rest of this book will assume the Christian point of view.

2, The ‘Cardinal Virtues’, p76

Here’s a longer discussion that was too long for a talk on the air. In this scheme there are seven ‘virtues,’ four of them ‘Cardinal’ and the other three ‘theological.’ Prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude. Discussion. The second one was about more than not drinking. The others include more than their simple meanings. …

3, Social Morality, p82

Morality between man and man. Nothing really beyond the Golden Rule, which everyone has always known to be right. There is no particular social program at work. Still, the NT gives us a hint of what a Christian society would be like. Examples, p84. A combination of socialist economics and old-fashioned family life. A design for the human machine. There’s an issue with the ancient advice not to lend money at interest, which seems essential to modern society. And charity is part of Christian morality. Would should give more than we can spare. Author thinks many people look to Christianity for support for their own views.

4, Morality and Psychoanalysis, p88

How does Christian morality compare to psychoanalysis? [[ Very in vogue in the early 20th century, now mostly forgotten. ]] Note that the philosophies of Freud and Jung contradict each other. And Freud, author says, is very ignorant talking outside his own specialty. And he’s contradictory to Christianity. A moral choice consists of choosing, and of the feeling and impulses that prompt this choice. These may be normal, or abnormal; fear of spiders the first, desire of a man for a man the second. Psychoanalysis seeks to remove the abnormal feelings. The moral choice made is something psychoanalysis can do nothing about. The bad material is not a sin but a disease. Thus we are told not to judge. Christian morality is not a bargain with God. Rather it is what kind of creature you are turning yourself into. The right direction leads both to peace and to knowledge.

5, Sexual Morality, p94

The virtue of chastity. Rules of propriety can change, depending on society. The Christian rule is: marriage with complete faithfulness, or total abstinence. An unpopular virtue. Our instinct to do otherwise must be wrong. A young man indulging whenever he liked could fill a small village. Or compare a strip-tease to a tray of mutton. But people are not starved for sex. And perversions of sex are numerous and hard to cure. Even the current state of sex is a mess. We must want to be cured. Rather we’re encouraged to think that our desires are natural and healthy. This is nonsense. Etc etc. Lots of restraint is necessary. Or you’ll ruin your life. etc . Anyway, unchastity is not the supreme vice. Of the Animal self and the Diabolical self, the latter is the worse of the two.

6, Christian Marriage, p104

Now a more positive discussion. Christian doctrine on this subject is unpopular. The idea is that a man and wife are regarded as a single organism, like a lock and a key. And marriage is for life. Practices on divorce do vary. How this is related to chastity and justice. The idea of ‘being in love’ isn’t consistent with a contract or promise. Even without love there are reasons to stay married: to provide a home for children, to protect women. And a matter of degree: being in love is good, but not the best thing. We realize the ‘being in love’ will not last forever. And our thoughts are influenced by books and plays and movies, more than real life. Thrills do not last; new ones will be found. And ‘falling in love’ is not irresistible. Christians should be careful imposing their views on divorce in the law. Next, why should the man be the ‘head’ of the marriage? The first follows from marriage being permanent; the second, because wives ruling over husbands is unnatural, 113.8. And a man is more just to outsiders; the woman fights for her children and husband against the rest of the world.

7, Forgiveness, p115

Maybe this one is the most unpopular. Forgive our enemies in a war? We need to start with something simpler. Loving your enemies doesn’t mean thinking them nice, any more than we love ourselves by thinking we are nice all the time. … Makes a distinction between kill and murder; the former is fine. He admires the idea of a knight. We kill when necessary. Again he repeats that the basis for this thinking is the belief that man lives forever. 119b …

8, The Great Sin, p121

Is pride, or self-conceit. Opposite of humility. The central evil. We dislike it in other people. It’s competitive. People are prideful of being better in some way than other people. And prideful people will take what is yours just because they can. Power. Pride is enmity to God. The sense that we are better than someone else means we are being acted on by the devil. This vice isn’t about our animal nature, but a spiritual vice, direct from Hell. Pride is spiritual cancer. Misunderstandings: Pleasure in being praised is not pride. And, being ‘proud of’ someone is about admiring. God wants you to know him. And the humble man…

[[ He’s not thinking big enough here. Isn’t thinking that oneself is of personal interest to God, the creator of the universe, a rather extreme kind of pride? ]]

9, Charity, p129

The three ‘theological’ virtues are faith, hope, and charity. There’s more to charity than forgiveness. Today it means alms, but it once had a wider meaning. Love, in the Christian sense. About wishing well. … Act as if you love your neighbor. …

10, Hope, p134

Another theological virtue. It means looking forward to the eternal world to come. It isn’t escapism. You can’t want just health or civilization; you have to aim higher. There are two ways of dealing with this. The fool’s way, who blames things themselves. The way of the disillusioned ‘sensible man,’ who learns not to expect too much. (This would be fine if we did not expect to live forever.) And the Christian Way, where we realize if we have desires, there must be something to satisfy them. Even living forever. Author dismisses those who mock heaven as spending eternity playing harps. (But offers nothing else.)

11, Faith, p138

Two senses. First, belief in the doctrines of C. And this is a virtue. Author realizes the human mind is not ruled by reason; he can understand that anesthetics work fine, but still be panicked down on the table. We accept things on evidence that we can later doubt. As for Christianity [[ what ‘evidence’?? ]] one can believe in it and then find oneself wanting something that it prohibits. Faith is upholding your beliefs in spite of changing moods. You must recognize that your moods do change. Then to keep reminding yourself of C doctrines, e.g. by praying. “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.” Of those who’ve lost their faith, most simply drift away, rather than been reasoned out by an honest argument, 141.6. In a higher sense humility is involved. One must consciously try to practice C virtues. …

12, Faith, p144

This chapter may not be understandable to anyone not already a Christian. Maybe someday later you’ll realize what it means. Even author is unsure if he has it right. Faith in the higher sense. [[ There’s this endless presumption; how does he *know* that God wants this that and the other? ]] … The debate about actions vs faith. Both extremes are nonsense. You can’t separate the two. A puzzling line from the Bible. …

Book 4, Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

1, Making and Begetting, p153

Warning: theology. The science of God. [[ Science? I do not think the word means what he thinks it means. ]] Theology is like the map of the Atlantic. Mere religious experiences lead nowhere. Theology is practical. Without it your ideas about God will be out-of-date. Many plain religious ideas are obsolete, like believing the earth is flat. For example, the idea that if we did what Christ taught the world would be a better place is true enough, but beside the point. Real Christian writing talks about something quite different. Things about sons of God and being saved for our sins. Becoming sons of God. Begotten of God is not about virgin birth. Everything is like God in some way. Author distinguishes two types of greatness: Bios, from the material world; and Zoe, from the spiritual world. Christianity is about changing from having Bios to having Zoe.

2, The Three-Personal God, p160

More about the difference between making and begetting. … there are three ways to move in space. You build figures in higher dimensions from shapes in lower ones. This is like the Christian account of God. Theology started with the man who claimed to be God. And then people discovered God inside themselves. So a three-part god. Theology is a kind of experimental science, author says. But it’s up to God to show Himself. Horrible religions in horrible nations are like looking at God through a dirty lens, 165t. Many make up simple religions and are forgotten, because we are not making up Christianity, it is fact. [[ What can one say here? Of course he’s making it all up. What facts? ]]

3, Time and Beyond Time, p166

It’s fine to skip chapters that are of no use to you. This chapter may be an unnecessary complication. About prayer. How can God pay attention to so many people at the same moment? Like when we are busy and have too many things to do. But God is not in Time. He has all eternity. It is like being a writer, knowing what a character is doing. God does not live on a timeline, but on an entire page. Author figured this out to remove a common objection to C. Further, God knows what we will do tomorrow, he sees what you do in your entire life. [[ So much for free will ]] But if this is bothersome, author says, don’t think about it. [[ There are in fact psychological studies that indicate that people who believe such things – that they’re being watch over constantly – behave better, more ‘morally.’ So there’s a utility here to an idea that isn’t necessarily so. ]]

[[ It’s as if he’s started out with some premises (e.g., the Jesus really was God), and discovered they’re inconsistent with each other unless he invents an increasingly elaborate fantasy framework to rationalize the premises. This is a long way from deducing that God exists because innate morality. ]] [[ At the same time he’s hedging. “What I believe to be the truth” 168.3 “Almost certainly” God is not in time, 167m. Perhaps this is crucial. He is admitting that this is how he’s rationalized the evident incoherence of religious claims… ]]

4, Good Infection, p172

Consider two books, one on top of the other. They’ve always been there. The Father and Son always exist. Etc. It’s not that God is love; it’s that love is God. Unlike in all the other religions, the Christian God is dynamic. The union of Father and Son is itself a person. A spirit. The Holy Ghost. This matters more than anything else in the world. Once a man unites with God, he will live forever. How does this happen? By being ‘infected’ by the idea of God, via Jesus Christ. [[ Again, endless fantastic rationales. ]]

5, The Obstinate Toy Soldiers, p178

The present state is that we live natural lives that are self-centered, and we want to take advantage of others the exploit the world. We would resent being raised into a spiritual life that would kill our fun. [[ Again, the familiar conservative assumption that people are by nature bad. ]] Like a child making his toy soldiers come to life. the tin soldier would resent it. Jesus lived a whole human life… … What he did can be expressed in different ways: Christ died for our sins; Father has forgiven us; washed in the blood of the Lamb; Christ as defeated death. All are true. Don’t quarrel with people who use a different formula than yours.

6, Two Notes, p183

About the previous chapter. Why not beget many sons, instead of making toy soldiers who had to struggle to come to life? [[ Why the whole roundabout process? ]] Partly because the human race had already turned away from God. [[ Why? ]] Partly because it’s nonsensical to ask how something could have been different. And the author finds this difficult to think about. Second question, How things that are parts of a single organism can be different from one another. A Christian is neither a totalitarian nor an individualist. It’s the devil trying to trick us about one idea in order to draw us toward its opposite.

7, Let’s Pretend, p187

What difference does all this theology make? Consider prayer. How it’s a kind of pretending. Some kinds of pretense lead up to the real thing. …  You begin to notice your sinful acts. In reality God does everything; we allow it to be done to us. …

8, Is Christianity Hard or Easy?, p195

So that is what Christianity is all about. First it’s about the natural self learning about morality and avoiding ‘wrong’ things and doing ‘right’ things despite his propensity to do otherwise. And still has a chance to do what he wants. This may lead to unhappiness. Christ says: give me all. Get over your natural self. You’ll get a new self. This is both hard and easy. Just as the State exists to promote ordinary human happiness, the Church exists to draw men to Christ. The Bible says the whole universe was made for Christ. We don’t know if the plan applies to other creatures anywhere. Perhaps intelligent creatures on other worlds would do the same.

9, Counting the Cost, p201

Be ye perfect, said the Lord. Author recalls toothaches and going to the dentist. The Lord will give you the full treatment. He won’t be satisfied until you’re perfect. It isn’t right to be humble and prefer to be ordinary. God has a plan. He meant what he said.

10, Nice People or New Men, p207

If this is true why aren’t Christians obviously nicer than non-Christians? First, if he doesn’t seem nice, then his ‘conversion’ wasn’t honest. And brings dishonor on C. But it’s not to be expected anyway. The world is more complicated. Some people in other religions sense the ideas of C and so are C’ns without knowing it. Ancient pagans, perhaps. But supposes we compare two real people, one C and the other not. [[ And of course this part isn’t true at all, in the current world ]] But we can’t know what either person would be like in different circumstances. Further, every person needs saving as much as any other; niceness is beside the point. And so on. Anyway some Christians are still nasty. Perhaps Jesus attracted ‘awful people.’ Thinking your life is good may make you less interested in seeking Jesus; perhaps this is what the line about the rich entering the Kingdom was about. Similarly the nasty people might think their only chance in life is Christ. Being nice doesn’t mean your soul has been saved. What God is doing is like turning horses into winged creatures. It’s easy to find stupid arguments against C. But you know in your heart this is an evasion…

11, The New Men, p218

So the making of New Men is like turning a horse into a winged creature. It’s a transformation. Like insects transformed by rays from outer space. [[ What?? ]] Perhaps the Christian idea is like evolution [[ which he seems to acknowledge ]]. What is the next step for humans? A superman? The heavily armored creatures of thousands of centuries ago gave way to little animals with better brains. Evolution isn’t about getting bigger or brainier. A common mistake. The next step will go off in some other direction. Perhaps by something other than evolution. And perhaps very few people will notice. The Christian view is that the Next Step has already appeared. To being sons of God. This Next Step will come from outside nature. 1, Not by sexual reproduction. 2, It will be voluntary. 3, Christ was the first instance of the new man. 4, This step occurs in a flash of lightning compared to the development of man on this planet, despite the many times outsiders have thought C was dying. 5, The stakes are higher.

This new step is being taken. Certain individuals. Like a secret holy society. They are not all the same. Imagine describing light to people living in the dark. The light would show they are not all the same. Or someone who’s never tasted salt, thinking it must make everything taste the same way. The more we let Christ take us over, the move truly ourselves we become. The only real personalities are in God. You must give up your self. You can’t think about yourself.

Text ends 227

Final comment:

So let me see if I have this right. An eternal omniscient God created humanity only 6000 years ago, or so, but created them with free will and therefore flawed, to the point he had to destroy the first batch, except for Noah et al, and then “redeem” humanity from their sins by instantiating himself as a son and having that son gruesomely crucified in order to “forgive” and redeem humanity. While according to Lewis, this redemption is still underway, as people find God and ascend to some kind of unification with God. And when this finishes, what then?

Perhaps the eternal God will try again? If He’s omniscient, why didn’t he get it right the first time? What was He actually trying to accomplish??

All of this has a much, much simpler explanation. Which has happened over and over against through human evolution and history.

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Wonder is Appreciating the World as it Is

Posted on Friday 4 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Wonder is freely available, in reality, for people who bother to look up from their holy books and political screeds and capitalist efficiency mandates.

The Atlantic, Ian Bogost, today: The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life, subtitled “Why we need wonder”

The writer discusses the current idea of “maxxing” and the culture of optimization ever since industrialism emphasized efficiency and productivity, summarizing:

Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. When goals overtake experience, you lose the freedom to encounter your life as it happens. And when you lose that ability, you are no longer living in full. We used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job. Too many of us seem to be maxxing our way out of the experiences and perspectives that give us maximum meaning.

Here we are with meaning, again. Then:

I’ve come to believe that wonder, the most immense of our sensations, is the antidote. Wonder can rise up anywhere. It might arrive after you hike to Hopi Point, nearly a mile above the Grand Canyon’s river floor. Or as you take in the northern lights from Tromsø, Norway. Or, on a different scale, wonder might be expected while you hold your newborn child for the first time, recognizing human life in its primal form and knowing that your own has now changed entirely. For children themselves, wonder remains abundant—in the bigness of a Tyrannosaurus rex in a museum, or the flicker of fireflies in the summer dusk. But for many adults, wonder is too often compartmentalized: a feeling we associate with extraordinary and rare experiences, banished to a realm outside the mundanities of daily life.

Then more about the problem. And then recognizing that wonder can be found even in the little things in modern life, like the “a bit more” button on a toaster. More generally: appreciating reality. The writer asks people, and concludes:

Many people did describe the familiar icons of awe—the moment when an airplane breaks through the clouds, and all you can see is the great expanse of sky ahead; the experience of strangers gathering silently along a shoreline to watch the sun vanish below the horizon. But just as many have told me that they’ve found wonder in the mundane—watching a procession of ants carrying things they value, for instance. I’ve corresponded with people who described their affection for an old refrigerator; a sewing machine whose hums and clicks became a friend’s familiar voice; pots and pans that carried decades of family meals; and even a toilet whose owner began to admire it after a repair revealed its elegant method of operation.

Whenever you cease treating the world as scenery or equipment, you’ll find that you encounter the world as something inexhaustibly, constantly present. Oceans and ants, sewing machines and sunsets, strangers and screen doors, microwaves and mountains, rocks and racquets, lamps and laughter all prove equally worthy. Our expectations for wonder sometimes wane, but it is with us all along, waiting to be rediscovered.

I’m thinking about scale-blindness and realm-blindness and how awe and wonder come from the abrupt realizations of things that exist outside our ordinary intuitive experience, which occurs at relatively restricted scales and realms. This is the source of science fiction’s “sense of wonder” and “conceptual breakthrough,” too.

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This is significant, in more ways than one.

CNN, today: UN votes to adopt new map that makes our world look very different

First, it’s long been known that the Mercator Map — still seen in the background of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, for example — grossly distorts the world. It makes Greenland look as big as Africa — which may in fact have caused Trump to overvalue it.

But the second way is that, in the UN vote, the United States was the only country to vote *against* adopting this map. Why? You can guess.

Personally, I like the Goode homolosine projection, the so-called orange peel map, which leaves relative sizes intact and doesn’t pretend the globe can be flattened onto 2D map. Though, as it happens, it splits Greenland in half.

No projection is perfect. Use a globe.

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I have items today about how conservatives are against education, how Texas is eliminating gender and climate change courses, and how conservatives are obsessed with contamination and degradation (concerning the blood supply). Same ol, same ol. Let’s skip them for now.

Also, items about Wendell Berry and an evangelical defending herself. I’ll check these out later. I’m curious how the evangelical defends her faith while evangelicals demonize Muslims. Meanwhile, I’m finishing up a post about MERE CHRISTIANITY.

Posted in Human Nature, reality | Leave a comment

Is America Literally Being Sabotaged? From Within?

Posted on Thursday 3 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Is America being sabotaged from within?
  • Robert Reich asks his readers what gives them hope, with four options;
  • Headlines about Haitians, Satan, a terror attack, the end of free meals for children, hiding statistics, how conservatives are realizing Dolly Parton wasn’t on their side, erasing history, and shutting down forest research;
  • And some inchoate thoughts, after the floods in Nepal, about the meaning of life.
– – –

It’s not getting any better.

LA Times, Jon Duffy, 31 Aug 2026: Trump is spending billions to reverse American progress

Key points handily summarized at the top:

• President Trump has ordered the Navy to strip advanced electromagnetic launch systems from future Ford-class carriers and revert to steam catapults, discarding decades of investment and adding new costs and delays.
• The administration is also paying energy companies nearly $4 billion to surrender offshore wind leases, using taxpayer dollars to erase future clean power instead of expanding proven renewable projects.
• Paying to dismantle successful technologies, including carrier launch systems to offshore wind, risks squandering hard-won progress and weakening America’s energy security, military readiness and long-term technological edge.

Concluding,

The United States needs more energy, a more capable military, modern infrastructure and the ability to compete technologically for decades to come. We have already paid billions to move forward. We should be investing in that progress, not buying our way back to where we started.

How can this not be seen as sabotage? If not by a foreign power, then by…?

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Robert Reich, yesterday: Office Hours: What gives you hope?, subtitled “If anything”

He asks the question of his readers, with four options. I’ll expand his definitions of two of them.

  1. Frankly, I’ve lost hope.

    I wish I didn’t have to admit this, but I’ve come to the conclusion that our democracy is doomed. A majority of the American public is too stupid to hold on to it. Trump has done so much damage that we can’t recover from this. We no longer understand our nation’s ideals. We’ve lost our moral compass.

  2. Democrats will take over the House and possibly the Senate in January.
  3. Trump won’t make it through the rest of his term.
  4. America is turning to progressivism.

    Call me a cockeyed optimist if you wish, but I see a huge progressive wave coming soon — not just politically but also socially and economically. Americans are waking up to the predations of the billionaires and tech bros. Just as we had a progressive era after the first Gilded Age, another progressive era is on its way.

I have sympathy for the first option, since it really does seem that a large portion of the population is too stupid to understand democracy or why it should prevail over their personal religious priorities. But in reading beyond current events, and having some historical perspective, I see both the swing back and forth between progress and regress, and how our current state of politics, no matter how bad it might seem, is still better than the social assumptions of a century ago (never mind a millennium ago!); that is, we’ve progressed, and will continue to. I voted for option 4, which it turned out has 31% of the vote, while option 2 currently has 46% of the vote.

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Headlines.

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Latest inchoate thought about the meaning of life. In reflection of those who died, abruptly, in the floods in Nepal.

The creepy thing is that so many people, especially those who die in floods like this, but also in auto accidents and plane crashes, have no opportunity to ‘finish’ their lives, to draw their lives to some kind of conclusion. People with illnesses who die in a hospital bed do have that opportunity, perhaps. But either way, does it matter? How many people matter to very many other people? Here is the idea of the meaning of life, or ‘mattering.’ My take is that there is no greater existence in which each of us matters is some cosmic sense. (Unless you take a cosmic, species-wide perspective, about the fight against entropy, as some writers have suggested.) We only matter to the people who matter to us.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Human Nature, Meaning, Politics | Leave a comment

Todd May: A SIGNIFICANT LIFE

Posted on Thursday 3 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “Human Meaning in a Silent Universe”
(University of Chicago Press, 2015, xi + 197pp, including 13pp of acknowledgments, notes, suggestions for further reading, and index)


This is the first of three slender books I’ve collected over the years by Todd May, who’s just a bit older than I am and who gained some prominence by being a philosophical advisor to the TV show The Good Place. Is that where I first heard of him? Probably, though I’m not sure after ten years. (The two later books are A FRAGILE LIFE and A DECENT LIFE, and I also have his latest book, SHOULD WE GO EXTINCT?)

First, it’s peculiar that he doesn’t use the word “significant” in the book much if at all; he speaks of “meaning,” as in the subtitle. Second, the author explores mostly familiar ideas about what people have meant by “meaning,” and how looking up at the sky, at the universe, provides no answer to the “meaning” of human life. Ultimately, it boils down to deciding what we mean by meaning.

It was while reading this book that some of my thoughts about writers, physicists mostly, who discussed how it is better to think about different “levels” or “realms” of reality, with different “stories” appropriate to each. I’ve been  mentioning some of these as I’ve been posting, but soon I’ll be consolidating such thoughts on a series of theme pages…

*

Key Points

  • Like Camus, we search for meaning in the universe around us and find only absurdity.
  • There are three problems with relying on God for meaning: One, we understand how we got here, without God. Second, even allowing for God or gods doesn’t solve anything, because different religions have different answers. Science provides methods for determining correct answers, but not religion. Third, does God dictate what’s good and what’s bad based on some external criteria, or just because he says so? Either way doesn’t solve anything.
  • Some think merely being happy is enough; it’s what parents want for their children. Is happiness mere pleasure? More substantially, higher pleasures, like projects that engage with the world, could provide “meaning” in the world, a psychic affirmation. More precisely: when a subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. Your project has to matter. But what is mattering?
  • We can adopt a narrative approach to life. But not all narratives are meaningful. Better to consider narrative values. Where do they come from? Something unique to oneself?
  • Other ideas: Intensity. Steadfastness. (Many examples of real people throughout these chapters.) Meaningfulness doesn’t necessarily align with morality.
  • How do we ground narrative values? How can they be objective? Based on values? Where do they come from? Values can change, and we can debate rationales for doing so.
  • Values can be culture-specific. Meaningfulness too? There seems to be nothing that justifies any particular web of beliefs. Our scientific theories occur within the same web. That’s all we have.
  • Ultimately, meaning is what we create, with how we engage with the world. It’s more than happiness. It’s not about success. We are not required or obligated to live meaningfully. There are no underlying standards for meaning. But realizing this is, at least, something.

*

Detailed Notes

Introduction.

Author grew up near the Museum of Natural History in NY. “One is born, one dies, the land increases.” Is that all there is? We often wonder, what have we made of ourselves? Will we lie on our deathbed and think we should have done it differently? If there is a meaning to life, we shouldn’t have to wait until the end to find it. Camus wrote about the feeling of the ‘absurd’ – weariness and amazement. What does anything matter? The absurd is something precise, p ix: “It is the confrontation of our need for meaning with the unwillingness of the universe to yield it to us.” Perhaps there is a meaning, and it is just inaccessible to us. Where do we look? Camus thought the only escape was physical suicide. The human condition demands meaning. Or we commit philosophical suicide—accept that the universe will give us no reason to go on. We pretend that there is meaning to be found: in belief in God, in self-help books. Author decided to think more deeply. This book will offer a way of thinking about meaning. Maybe nothing grand, but something.

[[ My thoughts so far. Is meaning is relative? Things mean to you just what you mean to them? Or, meaning is a kind of metaphor or analogy, that just as things serve some function in a larger whole, so perhaps does our life. Purpose is something different: one’s purpose is to achieve what you and no one else can do. Or, the purpose of humanity is to make progress, to fight entropy, because as intelligent life forms, these are what we can do that no other creatures can do. To not to this – to merely perpetuate a self-congratulatory fable about worshiping your creator, say, accomplishes nothing and is a waste of potential. Your personal purpose is to identify what you can do that no one else can, and do that. That’s my current provisional conclusion.

Further: we understand the need for ‘meaning’ in the way humans evolved to perceive causes and effects, for improved survival. We perceive lots of false causes and effects too, and while some may be harmless, we’ve devised this self-correcting process called ‘science’ to filter out the false-positive cases. But eventually we search for ‘meaning’ at scales that don’t matter for our perpetual existence – except in some of the existential threats. Everything fits together.

The universe is *not* silent. It is showing us exactly what kind of meaning exists. That we’re uncomfortable with that is a problem of scaling. We seek causes and effects where none exist. It’s like infants and children who believe that everything must be about them. It’s immaturity.

There are two core issues. One might be called ‘scale-blindness’. The other might be the same thing: asking the wrong questions. 

(later)

So: meaning makes sense only in human realms. And it is built. You get to choose what is meaningful and what is not. That’s my current take.

Also: consider ‘meaning’ in the dictionary sense. There, it’s the equivalence of one word with a set of other words that describe the same thing. A word doesn’t mean in the context of a sentence or a book…

Perhaps you could say your purpose – the one things you can do better than anyone else – is what gives your life meaning. ]]

Ch1, A Meaningful Life?, p1

The question seems to ask for something that is the point of our being alive. How do we discover this? And it is not up to us what it is, 1.8 [contra my thought; this is why my notes conclude there is no meaning in that sense.] It exists independent of us. Camus. Perhaps the universe contains a meaning that is independent of us. Aristotle, whom author detested. Then he read the Nicomachean Ethics. Then he taught Aristotle. Aristotle talks in terms of the good. What is the human telos? Eudaemonia, or happiness, or flourishing. And this is rare. It’s about expressing virtue. It’s not an end state. It takes work. There are two types of virtue, and three parts to the human soul. Vegetative or nutritive; then desire; then reason. The first is immune to reason. But desire can be controlled or channeled. We can apply reason to desire. It’s about finding the mean between extremes. There are virtues of character, and virtues of thought. …  A good life is a life in which our mental capacities are exercised as an end in itself. What would this life look like? It is one dedicated to self-cultivation. (Not a life dedicated to others.) It might be found among some of one’s peers. A reflective discipline to understand the world and act well and thereby be wise. It includes cultivation of physical health. Eventually these traits become automatic, and won’t require constant struggle not to do bad. True friendship is possible only among the virtuous. This is an attractive vision.

But is it a meaningful life? We must know what makes life meaningful. For Aristotle the universe is not silent. It allows us to find it for ourselves. That what his ethics does. Camus wasn’t satisfied. Nor are most of us; we don’t see the cosmos as a rational place. Some of us need a God. A deity that grants meaning from the outside. A popular option, if perhaps unconscious. We could forget Aristotle and rely on God to provide meaning. But there are three challenges to this way of thinking.

First, the arguments of the ‘four horsemen.’ We understand how we got here, without God. This returns us to Camus’s silence of the universe. Does this deny a meaning of life? Let’s set that aside. Second, granting the existence of God or gods doesn’t provide a roadmap toward meaning. Different religions offer different answers. [[ Prothero ]] Even within the monotheistic religions. Science could offer us a method of determining the answer, but religion does not. E.g. Catholic vs Protestant debate over faith versus work. Philosophy has a similar problem. But religion begins with an individual choice of which religion to follow. Third, what if we did allow a single God and knew which religion was right. Even this doesn’t help. Because it is we who decide what’s good and what’s bad. What God decides? Why isn’t God dictating what’s meaningful then? Example from Douglas Adams, 20m; would that make our lives meaningful? [[ this is like my thought of the carbon atom as part of a table leg. ]] Or, does God answer to some external good? The same argument applies to meaningfulness. How and who decides? But we’ve already considered this, and found an empty universe.

So, we can’t count on the universe being rational, as Aristotle did, nor can we count on God. Recall Dostoevsky: if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. It seems the same is true even if God existed. But: must meaning be written into the nature of things? Maybe we can make choices that are more meaningful than others. Human flourishing, perhaps. [[ Recalling Sam Harris and others. ]] This casts the idea of meaning as something different than the traditional one. It can be a someway: a way of living in certain ways rather than others. Two tasks: what might this meaningfulness be. And how would this apply to us? It’s not about external meaning or the meaning of humanity. Think of a perspective that between our living and dying and increase of the land, “something worthwhile will have a chance of taking place.” 24b

Ch2, Is Happiness Enough?, p25

Everyone is talking about it. There’s a world database of happiness, etc. Note books in footnote 7. Parents just want their kids to be happy. But it was a side effect, not the point, for Aristotle. [[ this discussion echoes Bregman — The monk who lives eternal peace, but doesn’t accomplish anything ]] Why is this? Because these are difficult times? The concern goes back a couple decades. Or is happiness easier to think about than meaning? Also, it’s quite American, as in ‘pursuit of happiness.’ And, happiness is entirely subjective, whereas meaning might be measured by some external standard. So happiness is more democratic. And happiness goes with tolerance, the acceptance that there is not any singular religious conception of a good life. So maybe the search for meaning is obsolete.

But what is happiness? Not just what makes people happy. Simple answer: Jeremy Bentham. Pleasure. We seek pleasure and avoid pain. These are obvious experiences. Yet pleasure can become pain, as in strenuous running. Sometimes pain necessarily precedes the pleasure of an accomplishment. But, is it enough? The brains of rats. Would this work for humans? Would anyone want to sign up for continual pleasure without being able to do anything? Almost no one does. Because such a life isn’t really living. No life projects. It is the projects that call to us. So let’s think of happiness differently, as did John Stuart Mill. Who thinks there are different kinds of pleasure, higher and lower. Higher pleasures are those preferred by those who have experienced both. We fritter away time with lower pleasures, but it’s the projects that are most worth doing, higher pleasures. And Mill chose philosophy as the highest pleasure. Not everyone would agree. How about an experience machine? (Nozick) Virtual reality of a sort. But most people wouldn’t take this either. What’s missing is engagement with the world. Book by Daniel Haybron. Happiness is an emotional relation to how one’s life is going. A psychic affirmation. Attunement, engagement, endorsement. Flow. Unconscious.

Is happiness enough? Imagine your last days. You wonder if your life was worth living. Is saying, you were happy, enough? Isn’t that a bit too self-absorbed? Doesn’t that miss something more? Something… meaningful? Some kind of significance? Something we have not found? That’s the existentialist view. Then author read bk by Susan Wolf. It approached the question of meaning from a different angle. An idea so obvious… Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness. To find something important and engage with it. It’s about not being a spectator, but a participant with something that matters. Projects. One can live a good life without this kind of meaning. Meaningful involves that sense of engagement. And what is engaged is a valuable object. Example of an obsession with goldfish. Maybe Mary is happy. We might consider her pathetic. But her life isn’t very meaningful. That doesn’t mean she’s worthless. And who are we to judge about her meaningfulness? But it misses the need for meaning in the previous chapter. To seek meaningfulness entails some kind of standard for what is meaningful. Standards give us goals. Which we may not meet. We need that standard. It’s not in the universe or in God or inside us where then? Susan Wolf had no answer. There must be some kind of answer. We can’t leave it there. we must confront the question of criteria for meaningfulness. We at least a conception. (There might be others.) Where can we look?

[[ how about: your life is meaningful if you’re making some kind of progress in the world. then define progress ]]

Ch3, Narrative Values, p61

We live in an arc from past to future; only humans do that. The past is who we are (Faulkner). Yet we can change. It is the trajectory that amounts to being meaningful. What makes a life trajectory meaningful? We can adopt a narrative approach. We conceive of lives like stories. What’s a person’s story? Example of a colleague at work. Author gradually got to know his story. There’s a recent movement in psychotherapy called narrative therapy. Our stories inform who we are. Sometimes we need to escape them. (Fn 23 for books about use of narrative.) Perhaps we can detect meaning in these narratives – not *the* meaning of life. Some people claim not to live narratively. Like Buddhists who advise living in the moment. To eliminate desire, and thus suffering. An episodic life. But not all narratives are meaningful. People who are depressed. Such narratives seem to lack meaning.

Smry 70. Consider Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. The family endures. Steadfast. Like teachers, parents, athletes, craftsmen. Author sees this steadfastness as example of narrative value. And this can be the basis for meaning in lives. Smry74. Steadfastness is not a what, but a how. How she navigates the world. Perhaps a human life can be meaningful without attaining some sort of meaning. Consider Jimi Hendrix… the narrative value of intensity. Other such values, 76m. Even spirituality. Courage. Some if not all of Aristotle’s 12 virtues. Even a religious life can be meaningful in these ways. We need not be aware of the narrative value that we express. Example of author’s uncle. Narrative values are not binary, either there or not. They are levels of degree. Nor need a life express only one narrative value. Example of Coltrane. Author’s life is more of a serial intensity. Many people balance different interests, or narrative values. So assessment of narrative values in a person is not simple. Smry: we are concerned not with narratives, but narrative values. Even that episodic guy can be seen as expressing narrative values. But not story or plot. Narrative values would be a subset of aesthetic values, which Foucault argued should apply both to objects and to individuals. We’re drawn to people who live such values. But are such values merely subjective? This is a deep question that will be in ch5. But briefly: we can be mistaken, e.g. about intensity. An intense meaningful life watching sports? Mary and her goldfish? That would be a problem. We need both subjective attraction and objective attractiveness. Compare Hendrix with a fan. Hendrix is creating the music, not just experiencing it. Narrative values are about activity rather than passivity. … recall Invisible Cities. Moby Dick. Not a shopping mall. And what about love? Author is not in a position to explore this. But has a couple ideas. Subjectively, it does seem to be a source of happiness. Objectively, we can associate love with steadfastness and intensity and so on. Back to narrative values: we like to think ourselves unique. Doesn’t assigning narrative values make us less so? But this is true about any kind of category. What’s meaningful should be something personal to oneself. But then there are no standards for objectivity. Examples. Unique aspects of a person doesn’t provide meaning. So, we need categories of some sort. We’re usually concerned with our own lives. We need to find some kind of value, to keep going on. But that’s not the only important question about life. Recall Aristotle. A life can also be good. It can be happy. What is the relationship between these? And morality?

Ch4, Meaningful Lives, Good Lives, Beautiful Lives, p105

About Portrait of a Lady. Ralph is steadfast but not happy. Contrast him with Lance Armstrong. In 2013 he was just confessing his use of banned drugs. He had sued people for accusing him of doping. His struggles against cancer were admirable. He too was steadfast. But we approve of Ralph, and not of Armstrong. Ralph was not happy. Armstrong might have been happy with what he was getting away with. Consider the terms of “subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” Author mentions he’s assumed that readers understand in general what living a moral life is about. …then author goes on about Ralph Torchett. Something is missing in his life. Also recall Claus von Stauffenberg, who unsuccessfully sought to murder Hitler. … A moral life is not necessarily a meaningful one. Can it be meaningful without being moral, as in Armstrong’s case? What about rock stars who treat everyone badly? We can think of other examples. But their moral flaws should not make us disregard them entirely. There is another scale, of meaningfulness. We admire those people, but only in a certain way. (We tend to allow ‘meaningful’ people more latitude in their morality.) The human life is complex; it cannot be neatly wrapped up as some would prefer. Morality and meaningfulness are not necessarily aligned. Examples of individual engaged in massacres. Whereas one who participated but had doubts might live a life less meaningful but more moral. How to account for this? Perhaps severe immorality, evil, subtracts from meaningfulness. Suicide bombers.

A meaningful life has to be a life that is in some way worth living. How about another question. How can a life be beautiful? Contrast van Vogh and Rothko. Do their styles align with different narrative values? This should be resisted; a painting does not unfold over time. How about music? But many musical values seem to have no correlation to narrative values. Then how about literature? But values of literary characters are not values of literature itself. There’s a debate here that is as old as the philosophy of art itself. But author resists the idea. Narrative values are more like moral values than aesthetic values. Yet beauty in art isn’t necessary in the way narrative values aren’t necessary for a moral life. Finally, a question remains: what is it for a narrative value to be objective? Smry of earlier arguments.

Ch5, Justifying Ourselves to Ourselves, p139

Smy. But a piece of the puzzle is missing. Why should narrative values be objective measures of meaningfulness? How do we ground them? How are they not arbitrary?

[[ idea: they have to be grounded in the priorities of long-term survival ]] [[ you just need a wider perspective than mundane living. ]]

What makes something objective? It’s rooted in the material world. Example evolution. Yet ideas like Ptolemaic theory survived despite many examples that evidence did not support it. But what about values? Author suggests values are constrained by the practices through which we make them up. So, where do values come from? Examples of suggested values that others might think silly. It helps to have ‘reasons’ why something might be a value. We have to know the context, e.g. as in soccer. Yet soccer is a game, it’s made up. And it evolves. Examples. Individual rules can be changed to support the broad point of the game. And such rules are particular, given how circumstances change. As they do in everything we do in our lives. Some changes would be pointless. Changes, one, don’t need to derive from existing ones; two, they must respond to the practice as a whole. E.g. to make things fairer, more exciting, more accurate, more democratic. Technology can have similar effects. These are all values by which we can assess a process as being better or worse. Sometimes the outcome is worse. We can suggest reasons for such judgments. … and people can disagree. We can assess new practices against other practices. Author studied Foucault. About how things have changed and aren’t inevitable and can be changed again. (Ideas of rehab, 154m, like in Equus? “The normal.”) We can debate his ideas.

Take stock. To debate practices we use values and reason, but some values have to be held constant. This is called holism. Wilfrid Sellars. Quote 156m. (sounds like science.) What would a foundation for knowledge or values be? The option here is a third option: we can question any part of the whole network of knowledge, but not the whole itself. 157t. Similar for values. Values aren’t arbitrary; they respond to reasons. We evaluate values in comparison to other values. Neither an individual nor a community can arbitrarily declare something to be a value. Some values apply across practices, like moral values. Within limits. Similarly narrative values. Both can be criticized in the context of the practice in which they are applied. Using philosophy. … a community can be wrong about the narrative value it holds. Examples. A person who is steadfast, yet driven by unknown compulsions, like OCD, which when discovered, can lead to adjustments. The community might have been wrong. Example of the value of subtlety. As democracy arises subtlety may not be as valuable. New narrative values might emerge. Or we can argue for a narrative value not already recognized. Like, intensity.

But still, are there universal moral or narrative values? Or are they culture-specific? The problem of relativism. Consider clitoridectomy. Nazis. But we are not concerned with morality here. But with meaningfulness. Those other cultures might possess that. And other cultures might well have other ideas of what meaningful is about. But we work within a web of beliefs. What justifies the web? Nothing. We’ve reached the point where justification comes to an end. We can’t steps outside our current web…  We might claim that the world provides such an anchor. But even our scientific theories occur within this web. Again: there is no God or external foundation; all we have left is the web of our current understanding… There’s no bedrock. Perhaps future posthumans will understand something we do not. We cannot rule it out. For now, our web offers all the objectivity we need.

Conclusion: Not Everything, But Something, p175

We would have preferred it otherwise. But the universe is silent, we are evolutionary contingencies. Even a God could not impose meaning upon us. But Camus despaired too quickly. 176t: But never move too quickly. There is always more than meets the eye. Meaning is what we create. We find ways of meaning to the world. It comes not from what, but of a how. It’s how we engage with the world. Meaningfulness is more than happiness. There can be meaningfulness without success. TV game shows involve pointless goals. University environments often compromise ideals with ‘success.’ Narrative values offer ideas about how we think of ourselves in ways other than success. Example of Gauguin. Suppose he had no native talent, try as he might. Or other variations…  Suppose he made great art and no one ever saw it. Meaningfulness need not be held hostage to success. Social accomplishment is not the determinant of a worthwhile life.

Further, is it necessary to live a meaningful life? We are obligated to live morally, but we are not obligated to others to live meaningfully. A bit like beauty in that way. It is not the same as worth.

So there is human meaning to be had in our silent universe. If not the one we sought. Narrative values are ways of seeing how our lives are more than Camus thought, at the risk of not living up to them. And yet without some standard we have no way of making that assessment. So… this is not nothing.

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Further thoughts:

Given that we can derive basic conservative values from the protocols of tribal survival, what values can we derive from the idea of long-term, species survival? For the escape from entropy?

The most basic level of concern is for the self—the infant who relies on his needs to be taken care of by other people.

This gradually expands as one grows older and becomes relatively self-sufficient. But immediate family is still the primary concern. At some point, the circle of concern expands (Singer). To the community, the nation, the species. Beyond that? What would a cosmic meaning of existence be?

Posted in Book Notes, Meaning, Philosophy | Leave a comment

We’re a Cooperative Species, Not an Isolationist Tribal One, Mostly

Posted on Wednesday 2 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Essay on how the future of independence is interdependence;
  • Short items about JD Vance’s sense of spiritual darkness, and his apparent welcoming of the “end times”; a new Navy Secretary who believes in witchcraft; asking why psychics don’t help in the Nancy Guthrie case; conspiracy theories about MAGA censoring and voter fraud; Vance again and “blood and soil”; and various ideas about who “elites” are.
– – –

We wouldn’t be the species we are — one with the particular spectrum of evolved human nature that we have — without having learned to overcome our primal instincts (most of us anyway) to learn to cooperate among large groups.

OnlySky, Angie Dixon, 31 Aug 2026: The future of independence is interdependence, subtitled “Every one of us depends on others; the only difference is how visible that dependence is.”

The writer is disabled in some way and depends on her family and various mobility tools for assistance.

It would be easy to look at this arrangement and see dependence. But I look at it and see a functioning life.

From this room, I write articles, attend appointments, talk to friends, manage projects, edit essays, and take classes in graduate school. The assistance and technology surrounding me do not prevent independence. They make my version of it possible.

This only sounds contradictory because our culture has adopted a bizarre definition of independence: doing everything yourself, without visible assistance.

By that standard, almost no one is independent.

She goes on about “the myth of the self-sufficient person”:

Yet the supposedly self-sufficient person wakes in a home built by other people, turns on electricity delivered through a vast public infrastructure, drinks water transported through municipal pipes, eats food grown and shipped by strangers, and drives on roads they did not construct.

They rely on mechanics, doctors, pharmacists, sanitation workers, software developers, farmers, warehouse employees, electricians, and thousands of people they will never meet.

Increasingly, they also rely on algorithms. Phones provide directions. Calendar alerts remember appointments. Search engines retrieve information. Apps deliver food, transfer money, refill prescriptions, and summon transportation.

And about “socially acceptable dependence,” “assistance versus agency,” how “The future can’t afford the fantasy” and how “technology is also interdependence.”

Her essay ends:

The independent individual has always been imaginary, and disabled people already know this. Independence does not mean needing no one. It means having enough support to direct your own life.

The future of independence is not isolation.

It is interdependence, designed deliberately, rather than denied.

So her theme here is about disabled people, and the increasing portion of the population that is getting older. But the larger idea of interdependence has driven human society for decades, centuries. It’s what Obama meant years ago when he said You didn’t build that (which conservatives, of course, took out of context to criticize him).

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Briefly.

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  • Serious question for all the believers in psychic powers.
  • CFI The Morning Heresy, today: “Put Up or Shut Up” – Conspicuous Psychic Silence, Rampant Scams, and Which Kids Count at CDC?
  • Here I’ll have to quote.

    Monday marked seven months since much-publicized disappearance of Nancy Guthrie. The Center for Inquiry Investigations Group (CFIIG) revealed it has reached out to nearly 30 noted psychics from all over the country to ask why they can’t—or won’t—use their alleged powers to solve the high-profile case.

  • Well, because they don’t actually have such powers and “are just fooling people for profit.” This is obvious.

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  • The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, today: The MAGA Right Is Only Pretending to Be Censored, subtitled “The conspiracy theory that persists even though no evidence supports it”
  • Well, but isn’t a conspiracy theory virtually by definition a fantasy that has no evidence to support it? If there were evidence, there are plenty of eager journalists (and scientists) who would be ready to jump on it.

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  • NY Times, today: Trump Administration Begins Blitz to Find Elusive Voter Fraud Ahead of Midterms
  • Subtitled: “Election fraud is exceedingly rare, but President Trump has fixated on rooting it out this year, claiming without evidence that tens of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote.”
  • Again, a conspiracy theory without evidence. But conservatives don’t do evidence; they do scare tactics, to cow voters. And Trump is doing everything he possibly can to discourage voters whom he thinks won’t vote for him.

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  • Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 30 Aug 2026: Nine years after Charlottesville, GOP pushes “blood and soil”, subtitled “The nativist doctrine lives on in JD Vance’s vision for the US”
  • This primal aspect of human nature will never go away. Smart people have tried to marshal it via ideals in documents like the Constitution. They only work for a while.

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  • Washington Post, Megan McArdle, 30 Aug 2026: Who are the elites? Everyone, depending who you ask., subtitled “Theories about who really runs America don’t seem to make sense.”
  • This is essentially the split between the common (conservative) person and the uncommon (progressive) person. All these disputes seem to align roughly along the same spectrum.
Posted in conservatives, Human Nature, Human Progress | Leave a comment

A Cosmic Perspective, and MAGA Kibble

Posted on Tuesday 1 September 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

I have a bunch of Trump/MAGA kibble today, but I’ll start with two quotes from the enlightened fringe of humanity.

Carl Sagan, from his book with Ann Druyan, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS. (Which I reviewed here.)

“We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who its antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file. Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invented reassuring fantasies about our parents—about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep.
As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for five centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.”

Also quoted recently on Facebook:

…And of course now I can’t find it. I think it was by Lawrence Krauss, a comment about how God appeared only briefly to one violent tribe on one insignificant planet in the entire vast universe, and then disappeared. The comment contained a perspective that most people don’t appreciate.

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Moving on.

In case you’re still wondering how far gone into lunacy MAGA and Trump are, consider this.

NY Times, front page today: Do D.E.I. Bike Paths Exist? The Trump Administration Says Yes., subtitled “The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of ‘that dork on a bike.'”

Apparently bicycles are woke, or frou-frou, or unmasculine.

Four years ago, after Joe Biden fell from a bike, Donald Trump made a pledge to the American people.

“I will never, ever ride a bicycle,” he declared.

The joke landed because Mr. Trump is known to be more of a limo-and-golf-cart sort of guy. But more recently, his administration has begun acting on its deep aversion to cycling, revoking federal grants for what it calls “D.E.I. bike lanes.”

In a high-profile move earlier this year, the administration even tried to remove a bike lane near the White House.

Sean Duffy, Mr. Trump’s transportation secretary, has argued that when bike lanes cut into space for cars and trucks, the result is more congestion, “longer travel times and wasted fuel.”

No. More people on bikes means fewer cars. It’s not that hard to figure out. Compare Europe. Oh, but MAGA and Trump would never do that.

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Pure motivated reasoning, by people who disdain the poor while pretending to be Christians.

JMG, today: Capitol Hill Christian Org Releases “Study” Declaring That It’s Unbiblical For Government To Help The Poor

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No, he didn’t. These people don’t just have a loose grasp upon reality, they are totally bonkers. Living in a fantasy world.

Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Christian Nationalist preacher claims his ministry has raised “over 50 people” from the dead, subtitled “Andrew Wommack has never offered evidence for his extraordinary ‘miracles’—but he expects followers to believe every word”

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No, this is what being a clueless, arrogant bully looks like.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, yesterday: ‘This Is What Authority Looks Like’: Brigitte Gabriel Gushes Over Trump Renaming Lake Ontario

(Not to mention how many centuries of history Trump thinks he can erase on a whim, and how much infrastructure costs would be to change any amount of documentation and books and atlases and signage to the new name…)

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Robert Reich, yesterday: Who’s Nuts?

Subtitled: Trump’s “artificially fabricated insanity” is worsening, but Americans are on to him.

Worth quoting.

Friends,

I still come across people who believe Trump won the 2020 election, that the attack on the U.S Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an act of patriotism, that Trump’s subsequent indictments and felonies were Biden’s work, that most immigrants are criminals, that Democrats are evil, that Jews are trying to replace white Christians born in America, that Muslims can’t be trusted, that a significant amount of voting is fraudulent, that we’re winning the war against Iran, that the economy has never been as good, that climate change is a hoax, that Canada poses a threat to the United States and it’s only fair for Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America.

To label these people “deluded” is to overlook an entire world created by Trump and his assistants, Cabinet secretaries, “spokespeople,” other political appointees, Republican enablers in Congress and state legislatures, and billionaire accomplices in the media (Musk, Murdoch, Pichai, Bezos, Zuckerberg, the Ellisons) — all of whom have reinforced Trump’s “artificially fabricated insanity,” as the philosopher Hannah Arendt once termed the technique of totalitarian tyrants.

Google, for example, just updated its Maps application to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” ** (It’s already relabeled the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”)

Totalitarian movements, Arendt wrote, succeed not by convincing people of a specific lie but by creating a consistent, logical fictional world that defies ordinary common sense and human experience.

Which raises the questions that a growing number of Americans are asking: Is Trump insane? Are those who believe Trump’s artificially fabricated world insane? Are they making the rest of us insane?

I don’t think the MAGA folks realize how flabbergasted the rest of us are that they are so deluded. Again, see The Good Liars for a steady stream of MAGA on-the-street interviews, in which they spout nonsense and ignorance. Is this another example of the cognitive limitations of the human species?

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More shutting down research. If there’s no evidence, they can pretend that problems like this don’t exist.

Politico, 30 Aug 2026: USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations, subtitled “The shuttering of three projects is expected to hinder vital research at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about the safety of the food supply.”

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As are MAGA.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 29 Aug 2026: Trump Is in Open Revolt Against the Constitution [all NYT links are now gift links]

I’ll quote some.

So far, the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This is rather technical; I’m sure Trump hasn’t figured this out for himself. He has advisors, with their own agendas, like the Project 2025 folks. Again, MAGA conservatives are tribal at base; thus they don’t care about the Constitution, or even about what Jesus said about caring for the poor.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Cosmology, Human Nature, Lunacy | Leave a comment

More About Science Fiction in Modern Society

Posted on Monday 31 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly

First, posted on Facebook about our Napa Valley Wine Train trip yesterday.

Then, more about the role of science fiction in modern society.

The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman, 31 Aug 2026: We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys, subtitled: “Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction.”

This is more about the new Jill Lepore book.

After reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.

No. This cannot be the response.

Lepore discusses Asimov, and Douglas Adams, and Star Trek. Asimov addressed ethics in his “three laws of robotics.” And then longtermism. And finally, about Heinlein.

As I was writing this, Bill Gates, who gushes all the time about his childhood love of science fiction, published a nearly 6,000-word essay worrying about AI. (He expanded on his thoughts in a Radio Atlantic interview.) He describes himself now as an “innovation lover” who “is scared and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds.” Heinlein was his favorite sci-fi writer—Gates particularly loved the 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a teenager. It is the story of a human who grows up on Mars and comes back to Earth; this traveler’s perspective reveals how contingent our established norms are, how changeable. Gates loved the “cool technology” in it, and the idea of “grokking,” a Martian term for connecting with a person or concept so deeply that you feel a part of it (Musk of course borrowed the name for his AI chatbot). But the Microsoft co-founder now points out that Heinlein was also illustrating the perils of believing that anything is inevitable—even our technology. This, he says, is the “grown-up” lesson.

Beware teenage obsessions. Many people see science fiction as some kind of adolescent fantasy of power — though I would say that this is more typical of fantasy, in which a single hero saves the world. Yet science fiction can be interpreted naively.

I would tentatively place this into the bucket about complex ideas reduced to simplex thinking.

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The essence of the conservative mindset. Resistance to change.

JMG, today: Duffy Celebrates End To Stop/Start Buttons On Cars

He resists anything that is different from the way things were when he grew up. Does he miss clutches too?

Posted in science fiction | Leave a comment

Christian Nationalism, and the Dissipation of Science Fiction Into Popular Culture

Posted on Saturday 29 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The arrogance of Christian Nationalism;
  • How some of science fiction has become absorbed into even literary culture.
– – –

From a few days ago.

NY Times, David French, 20 Aug 2026: JD Vance Has a Mind-Bending Vision for America

JD Vance doesn’t think our nation is Christian enough to be truly free. Your faithlessness has broken the social compact, and now it is time for the government to seize greater control.

Continue reading →

Posted in Religion, science fiction | Leave a comment

Truth, Myths, and Levels of Reality

Posted on Friday 28 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Given inevitable pandemics and inevitable conspiracy mongering, could AI be the answer?;
  • A new Sean Tan book, and how perhaps some truths can only be told through myth;
  • Bruce Ledewitz at OnlySky recalls a time when the US government was lawful;
  • Mahler 7, Claudio Abbado.
– – –

How to deal with the next pandemic given the inevitable conspiracy theories that undermine constructive responses?

Slate, Molly Oldmstead, 26 Aug 26: Public Health Advocates Are So Desperate for Help Against Conspiracies They’ve Turned to the Place You’d Least Expect

How about… A.I.?

Continue reading →

Posted in Human Nature, Music, Personal history, Technology | Leave a comment

Is Science Fiction Becoming Obsolete?

Posted on Thursday 27 August 2026 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Jill Lepore on how Silicon Valley misreads classic science fiction;
  • Kibble: Trumps wants to rename everything; Reich calls Trump petty and incompetent; how the Supreme Court is less and less interested in facts; and about ICE’s new electronic glove torture devices that leave no mark;
  • Mahler 6, Michael Tilson Thomas.
– – –

I have a nascent theme about why science fiction may be obsolete, and/or why it’s increasingly less popular than fantasy. Maybe all the good ideas are used up; maybe all the good ideas are turning out to be increasingly less plausible; or perhaps it’s that fantasy appeals to basic human nature and its indefatigable beliefs in ghosts and demons and magic and gods. On the second point is what I called five months ago The Most Dangerous Vision, the idea that perhaps all of science fiction’s best ideas are turning out to be obsolete or implausible. Time travel, faster-than-light travel. And now I would say this would be because our speculations about the future and about the universe have been hemmed in by our intuitive thinking that is scale-blind and realm-blind. Without realizing it we ‘flatten’ the universe by thinking everything new and strange must conform to the protocols of human existence. If a person has a father, so must the universe, and so on.

Let’s look at this. (In addition, Lepore was also on KQED’s Forum two days ago, audio and transcript here, concerning her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.)

Scientific American, Brianne Kane, yesterday: Silicon Valley reads a lot of science fiction. It often gets it wrong, subtitled “Historian Jill Lepore explains what tech leaders miss in their favorite stories—and why the fight over AI data centers may be where the machine stops” Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Music, science fiction | Comments Off on Is Science Fiction Becoming Obsolete?