Last night, I finished reading Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger * ... again. It cannot be overstated, in my humble opinion: what a gem.
This book was originally published in 1977;
here's an excerpt from the preface of the 1986 edition:
"It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word 'agnostic' appears explicitly in the prologue and the agnostic attitude is revealed again and again in the text, but many people still think I 'believe' some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that
I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must 'believe' something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended."
Highly recommended, recommended rather highly, in this materialistic day and mechanistic age, when and where science and atheism seem like dogmatic expressions of a new, true faith; when and where the words "cogito ergo sum" seem to mean "iThink therefore iAm".
( - _ ^ )
A thousand thanks, dear Bob - five tons of flax!
* finished part 1, that is - diving into 2 & 3 asap.
pic & txt sampled from "Cosmic Trigger - Part 1"
(by Robert Anton Wilson © New Falcon Press, 1986)
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in chaos to create order,
click there to visit rawilson.com.
Bob's Our Uncle - node 23.001, click here
Bob's Our Uncle - node 23.002, click here
Bob's Our Uncle - node 23.003, click here
Bob's Our Uncle - node 23.004, click here
Bob's Our Uncle - node 23.005, click here
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.: words create the world :.
