When I was in HS, I took a few concurrent courses at Oral Roberts University. The last of these was American Government. One of the assignments in that class was to read, and then paraphrase in our own words, a couple of The Federalist Papers. I found the exercise to be so informative that I vowed to myself that I would someday finish all of the papers, and didn't sell back that book. Well, that was about a decade ago. Since then, I've had several false starts in trying to complete that commitment. But, last Friday, I finally did finish them all. As soon as I finish the appendices (The US Constitution and a few State Constitutions), I will write up some of my thoughts.
Obviously, I didn't find the rest of the papers to be as invigorating as the two that were assigned in class. Still, I'm proud to say that I read them. Understanding them is something else altogether different - but I'm closer than I was before :-D Mostly, however, I'm just glad to have time and effort to devote to other books.
A friend of mine very obligingly agreed to read my copy of The Underground History of American Education. So, when she gave me her copy of The Divine Conspiracy, I felt compelled to make it next on my to-read list. It looks like it may be more uplifting than my normal intellectual fare, anyway. I really liked a CS Lewis quote in the forward (from The Screwtape Letters, which I started but never finished):
"the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo . . . the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve."
It reminds me of things I read near the end of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek. That was the result of another quid pro quo type arrangement. Basically, I was playing devil's advocate (not altogether insincerely) against one of HSA's more-well-known members. After debating several of my emails, he suggested several books for me to read, and I settled on that one. Anyway, although I was originally drawn to factual arguments in apologetics because of their seemingly irrefutable logic, I have since found them tiresome. Often, the collections of individual facts are so situational that they don't prove much anyway (on either side). I have become much more interested in a priori type arguments since then. They are so much more elegant. That book trotted out all the "facts" of modern apologetics, one by one, and yet in my opinion, all of that was dwarfed by a paragrapgh or so in the conclusion. Hooray for the power of conciseness ;-)
Yet, both Adrian and I have come to the conclusion that people just believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of facts or arguments. This is both dangerous and empowering. Still, I find it rather intoxicating to think that, for my life at least, my own will is more powerful than all the "facts" in the universe.
Anyway, enough with the rabbit trail. It's probably better to write a review of The Divine Conspiracy *after* I finish it. For the mean time, I'm simply glad to be moving on to new works, and am again excited about reading, libraries and books in general :-D Which is why, as my Facebook friends have surely noticed, I've gone and looked up all my old favorite quotes regarding these things:
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." - Jorge Luis Borges
"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero
"When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food." -- Deciderius Erasmus
Kenneth Tynan asked Richard Burton, "If you had your life to live, over again, would you change anything?" - a question that is as worn out as vaudeville. But Burton's reply was fresh and revealing, "I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information."
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