Oct. 22nd, 2018

seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
Permission to Believe by Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen

Reread, haven't read since I was a teenager. Amazing little book, which had a lot of impact on me as a teen and which I still find impactful and meaningful today. Its brilliant insight is that since God's existence is unfalsifiable, it's okay to offer imperfect and incomplete arguments for God's existence. As long as you are intellectually honest about what you are representing, that you are not offering 'proofs' of God's existence, you can start the conversation. Kelemen calls his four arguments 'permission to believe', as one has to take the evidence in front of them and make the choice on their own, given the permission. But they are equally permission to doubt. Permission to Believe is permission within normative Orthodoxy to discuss God without certainty.

The four permissions Kelemen offers are:

1. The moral argument. Murder is wrong, but absent any external, omnibenevolent source of moral authority, there is no source for that sentiment. God provides a moral backbone for human interaction in a way no moral philosopher ever has. The least compelling of the quartet for me, it almost feels backward. Once you accept the existence of God, then you try to figure out how universal morality makes sense.

2. The cosmological argument. The creation of the universe as science currently describes it is consistent with the existence of a creator.

3. The anthropic argument (Kelemen calls it the teleological argument)- Our present understanding of evolution says that it is dependent on many steps we believe to be wildly improbable. Divine guidance would provide an explanation for these steps somehow resulting in the development of humans.

4. The argument from Jewish history. It is wildly improbable that there would still be Jews after so many centuries of persecution. Their existence testifies to the viability of God's promises.

All of these are flawed arguments, but they are flawed arguments worth thinking about and struggling with as a Jew. Kelemen's book provides a concise jumping off point for that struggle.



The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty

A tremendous amount of fun- the parody guidebook quotes are spot-on and also just really insidery and fun as an NYC geek. I liked that Lafferty's monsters are dangerous and scary but the book manages to still be funny.

But the more I think about that, the more uncertain I am about that balance. It's very important to Lafferty's storytelling that we grasp that the coterie is full of legitimately monstrous beings. Zombies eat brains, vampires drink blood, incubuses drain life energy. And the bureaucratic monster hunters have enacted this uneasy ambiguous truce where as long as the monsters aren't too open about it, as long as they don't throw the city out of balance, they will be tolerated. And Lafferty crafts a book in which the ultimate conclusion is seemingly that when you get down to it, people are people.

There's a scene where Zoe, the human protagonist, is nearly raped by her incubus co-worker, and then all of her other monster co-workers treat it like it's a party foul like double dipping in the hummus, and certainly not like a thing that should get the incubus fired. He's a monster, after all, that's what they do. And there's a scene where Zoe's zombie co-worker kills a morgue worker and eats his brains and the "good guys'" major concern is finding him and protecting him before the monster hunters can catch him. There's a breezy sort of urban fantasy that The Shambling Guide superficially resembles, like Seanan McGuire's Incryptids, but Lafferty is not interested in making her werewolves anywhere near as warm and cuddly.

So I think when you get down to it, in the book's terms, people aren't people. There are fundamental moral differences between coterie and non-coterie that Lafferty develops but her characters are mostly in denial that this is something that needs to be reconciled, or they're aware that it's a thing that needs to be reconciled, but they reconcile in terms of allowing rape and murder to continue.

I see there was a sequel, I'm curious if the sequel does anything to deepen these questions.

Profile

seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
seekingferret

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
67 89101112
1314 1516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags