In praise of excellence
August 27, 2006 by Bill
On this Labor Day weekend I am thinking about all of the hogwash we have been subjected to about “serving mankind”. I am asking: “Who is it that really serves mankind.?” My answer is this: Every person who daily labors to the best of his/her ability, with honesty, integrity, skill, competency and excellence is serving mankind as a living example.
Federal Judge Learned Hand, one of my heroes, had no superior in the jurisprudence of the English speaking world. In a commencement address at Bryn Mawr College he said this to the young graduates:
“Observe, I suggest no sense of service. More hypocrisy is poured out to youthful ears in the name of serving mankind than would fill a library of books. I can remember the droning on that score that I had to listen to, that I should become a drudge in some distasteful pursuit to assist a mankind not visibly affected by similar endeavors. If it be selfishness to work on a job one likes, and live as one wants, because one likes it and for no other end, let us accept the odium. I had rather live forever in a company of Don Quixotes, than among a set of the walking dead professing to be solely moved to the betterment of one another. Let us then do our jobs for ourselves and we are in no danger of disserving society.
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Respect for ignorance…a disease
August 20, 2006 by Bill
H.L. Mencken was one of the most respected scholars, writers and nationally syndicated columnists in American journalism. He wrote for the Baltimore Sun. His observations on “religious opinions” should be on everyone’s fridge door.
“The most unbelievable social convention of the age in which we live is the one to the effect that all religious opinions should be respected, no matter how ignorant.”
The insidious and seductive cliche that seems to saturate our society is…”you should not be critical of another person’s religious belief…they all deserve “respect”. No matter how ignorant…how bigoted…how ugly…how destructive…how false…how cruel…how superstitious…they all deserve “respect”.
It reaches the absurd point where a person cannot even write a scholarly critique on a religious belief without being labeled and attacked. Distinguished scholars such as Joseph Campbell, or Dr. James Bennett Pritchard who was the biblical advisor to National Geographic magazine and Time-Life books, write about the myth of the Hebrew patriarchs and the monumental exaggeration of Old Testament events and they are immediately attacked as being anti-semitic.
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Functional illiterates
August 13, 2006 by Bill
“Functional illiterates” is a phrase coined by the late Robert Hutchins, who was dean of the Yale University Law School at age 28. He was appointed chancellor of the University of Chicago at age 32. He was obviously brilliant.
One of the most important events of his life took place when he was a teenager. He never forgot it. His father was a professor of philosophy at Oberlin College in Ohio. Hutchins went to his father one day and started to give him his “opinion” on a particular subject. His father stopped him with these words: “Son…let me remind you, before you proceed, that you do not know enough about the subject to even have an opinion.”
Would to God that every Tom, Jane, Dick and Harry going around giving their “opinions” about religion and the bible would take that to heart. As Dr. Fred Denbeaux put it in the Layman’s Theological Library series “the person who is unwilling to study linguistics and literary distinctions and to differentiate between prose and poetry, history and mythology, legend and folklore, will not ever understand the bible.”
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