Le Guin on Rushdie and religion 1 Apr 2008 David Williams sent me this snippet of Ursula Le Guins’ review of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel: Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for “re-enchantment”. But it’s clear that Charles Darwin lived in as wondrous a world, as full of discoveries, amazements and profound mysteries, as that of any fantasist. The people who disenchant the world are not the scientists, but those who see it as meaningless in itself, a machine operated by a deity. Science and literary fantasy would seem to be intellectually incompatible, yet both describe the world; the imagination functions actively in both modes, seeking meaning, and wins intellectual consent through strict attention to detail and coherence of thought, whether one is describing a beetle or an enchantress. Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination. So the true believer must condemn both Darwin and Rushdie as “disobedient, irreverent, iconoclastic” dissidents from revealed truth. Evolution Sermon
Politics The stupidity of ISP filtering no barrier to its implementation 29 Jul 2008 The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I’ve been using a filtered ISP at my university (they’re running a trial) and what I can do online at home in one minutes takes the better part… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity The origins of “speciation” 29 Mar 20145 Apr 2014 As I do some research on the history of speciation theories, I came across this, which is perhaps the original coining of the term: Evolution is a process of organic change and development, universal and continuous, and due to causes resident in species. Speciation, to give the other process a… Read More
Politics 9/11 12 Sep 2010 They hated our freedoms, so we instituted warrantless wiretapping, electronic surveillance and denied habeus corpus. They hated our lack of religious control, so we redoubled our efforts to make discussing religion a crime, and to impose particular religious values on all, irrespective of their beliefs or commitments. They hated our… Read More
It takes a writer…. How wonderful to recognize the common ground of curiosity and imagination between science and fantasy, and to recognize also how invidious a doctrinaire religion (or to be fair, any dogmatic belief that excludes the quest for further knowledge) is to these.
Small wonder that many of us geeks are both scientists and fans of fantasy and science fiction. That also explains the hatred of fundamentalists towards science and Harry Potter (they aren’t likely to be exposed to a better quality of fantasy, or SF).
Small wonder that many of us geeks are both scientists and fans of fantasy and science fiction. That also explains the hatred of fundamentalists towards science and Harry Potter (they aren’t likely to be exposed to a better quality of fantasy, or SF).
Ursula Le Guins deserves to be in the same class as Zelazny(? spelling) Clark, Bradbury, and Asimov. I love her sense of fantasy and her intelligence, but most of all, her understanding of human beings and her talent for story telling.
Ursula Le Guins deserves to be in the same class as Zelazny(? spelling) Clark, Bradbury, and Asimov. I love her sense of fantasy and her intelligence, but most of all, her understanding of human beings and her talent for story telling.
Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination. This is false, at least in the sense that religion eschews imagination. Faith requires an element of human fantasy. What religion tends to proscribe is the use of imagination along independent lines.
Religion, which prescribes and proscribes, is irreconcilable with both of them, and since it demands belief, must shun their common ground, imagination. This is false, at least in the sense that religion eschews imagination. Faith requires an element of human fantasy. What religion tends to proscribe is the use of imagination along independent lines.
Yeah, Ursula K. Le Guin demonstrates degrees of insight that I admire. To me she seems not just smart, but wise. Tim, have you read Le Guin’s relatively recent book, Changing Planes? Her talent for telling stories that demonstrate a deep understanding of human beings really shines in that one, I thought. Cheers