Yes, We're Created In The Image of God. Now What?

My response to activist Bible commentators who think "image of God" is license to say the Bible supports my politics and hates yours.

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/yes-were-cre…
1) The principle of the infinite value of human life may or may not be what Genesis is teaching.
2) The principle is vague and mostly non-instructive.
3) There are no objective criteria by which one can measure whether one is honoring the principle.
4) Ethical and political life are messy, conflictual, and rooted in prioritization, all of which make it impossible to enact the infinite value of human life.
5) At most, the principle is negative—it forbids wanton destruction and excess cruelty. But barring the sadist and the sociopath, can’t reasonable people disagree and disagree vastly about what constitutes wanton destruction and excess cruelty?
6) It seems implausible that the Bible’s message is basically the same as whatever ideology happens to be in vogue at the time of the interpreter. And if there is no point of disagreement between the Bible and contemporary culture, then one of them is redundant.

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More from @ZoharAtkins

16 May
I’m going to swerve out of my lane and make an observation about crypto culture:

It’s founded on a paradox:
On one hand, the belief in the idea that truth is best discovered through a process that is anonymous, rule-based, unbiased.

On the other hand, a desire for recognition—to status signal oneself as a HODler, a believer, a person with laser eyes.
In the elevation of anonymity and depersonalization we see the ideal of instrumental rationality.

In the swag and identity politics of crypto pride we see the Hegelian return of the agonistic model of politics (a struggle for recognition)
Read 11 tweets
16 May
"Plato didn’t have a typewriter. Aristotle didn’t have an iPad. Plotinus didn’t have a smartphone. Descartes didn’t use a note taking app. Heidegger wasn’t on academia.edu Hannah Arendt wasn’t on Twitter."

whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/why-has-tech…
I wonder if a culture that treats thinkers as “knowledge workers” and optimizes for “productivity tools” rather than “discernment tools” ends up leading to an intellectual culture that is superficial and fleeting.
I don’t blame the abysmal academic job market even though Hegel, Schelling, Strauss, and Arendt were professors. Marx managed to write Das Kapital without tenure. Kant made a living as a tutor. Thales traded options.
Read 9 tweets
14 May
New essay just dropped!

Unfamiliar Territory etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/unfamiliar-t…

"Revelation is an other-worldly event that should motivate our love for the world. Torah teaches us that our love should both include and transcend our need for the familiar."
“The essence of home only reaches its luminosity abroad.”

(Martin Heidegger, “The Language of Johann Peter Hebel”)
“People are social and political creatures who belong to groups, but they cannot be reduced to them. Read charitably, the Torah’s foregrounding of 12 tribes suggests that Israel must contain multitudes if it is to avoid the pitfalls of Babel”
Read 9 tweets
12 May
In Defense of Silence, by @ZoharAtkins whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/in-defense-o…

Every time there’s a crisis in the news, a great number of clergy, professors, and other “thought leaders” feel “called” to speak up.

This essay argues fewer should.
1. Unless you have been speaking out about an issue regularly, why does it take a crisis to activate your concern? Why now?
2. Unless you are wading into a debate about policy, what does it add to the conversation for you to use (an unearned or dubious authority) to simply say something generic that people can read in the newspaper or watch on the news for themselves?
Read 11 tweets
3 May
Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) is one of the most underrated thinkers of the 20th century. This @threadapalooza is my tribute. Levinas was imprisoned as a POW on the Western front during WWII. A Jewish student of Heidegger's, he criticized Western thought to save it from itself.
Levinas is chiefly and rightly remembered as the thinker who understood our encounter with the human face to be the basis for our (experience of) responsibility. In the age of Big Tech and Big Data, this insight will only grow in importance and controversy. 2
Despite the elegance and simplicity of Levinas's core thesis, his work is far from simple. Levinas is great because he contains irresolvable contradictions. 3
Read 102 tweets
20 Apr
Let’s do a @threadapalooza on Nietzsche, an unavoidable force in our thought and culture, a brilliant polemicist whose work is both over-exposed and undervalued; he would have been off Twitter but would have written a Substack railing against everyone—including his fans.
“The only one who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man.” Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran minister. Although often seen as an enfant terrible by religious folk, Nietzsche was a soulful and sincere seeker who was equally critical of atheists as he was of believers
His much remarked upon phrase “God is dead” is spoken by his invented literary prophet Zarathustra to atheists! 3
Read 102 tweets

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