The Appropriation of Nonsense, Part 2

Read the first part here.

If you’re on Facebook, chances are you’ve listed quotes that reflect your philosophy or outlook on life. They are quotes with which we agree from people we admire, but there’s never a real opportunity to showcase the ones we don’t like — unless you have your own blog and can write whatever you’d like on there, like I’m going to do, right now…

“Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot,
who calls you back when you hang up on him,” etc. – unknown

Read the whole awful thing here, and then the responses below the post. There’s not a whole lot of middle ground.

A woman’s unrealistic expectations for sought-after men is distilled in this one gag-worthy manifesto. Of course, there’s no reason for men to be overbearingly macho towards women (unless some women like that), but it’s also true of his polar opposite: the woman-worshipping, overly-romantic, castrato with truncated animus-sense are really suspicious to me. Do women really want a lapdog for a companion, or someone who is complimentary, not opposing, to their own characteristics? I don’t know, but the former is categorically unseemly.

“Insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – a bunch of people

A quote of mysterious origins, sometimes attributed to Einstein or Benjamin Franklin. In the grand history of popular figures making ridiculous propositions outside their field of expertise, this offense is mild and probably meant find value in its brevity rather than accuracy. But that doesn’t matter, because the results of an entire field of research and medicine have now been condensed into one simple sentence. Now everyone can be a psychologist!

But apparently “insanity” is purely a legal term now, not a psychological one. I defer to this post to really explain the insanity (hyuk-hyuk) behind this quote.

“God is dead.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

No, not a Trent Reznor original, and he appropriated it into a different context. This line appears twice in Nietzsche’s writings, first in The Gay Science and again in Thus Spake Zarathustra. It’s in the latter writing that it is Nietzsche himself actually saying the phrase.

This statement is meant more as a philosophical statement than a religious one, and it’s actually quite accurate even from a Christian worldview. The Christian God as a concept, having been killed by man’s disbelief, took the Christian sense of morality with it, and it is left to man himself to rebuild a proper absolute morality. Remove God as being the creator of any kind of philosophical framework and morality has to be originate from somewhere else. It makes decent sense at first blush, but that doesn’t stop dunderheaded Christians or angsty teenage poets from misapplying Nietzsche’s words.

“All thinking men are atheists.” – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was an atheist but he didn’t say this, Henry’s Major from his A Farewell to Arms did, and it’s been used by atheists to encapsulate their intellectual dominance over religious belief. I might actually agree with this quote if it’s meant that men who think only are atheists, if you understand a belief in God to come to people axiomatically — as in, not on the basis of other beliefs but as a premise in itself. The only problem with this is that the atheist would be something more like a solipsist or nihilist from not arriving at any belief at all, if “thinking” is the only legitimate means of acquiring knowledge.

However, the Major’s intended meaning is just as unacceptable. No one would consider the ancient Greeks, Aquinas, Galileo, or any intellectual giant as unthinking because they held a religious belief, but if one categorically claims that no thinking person would believe in the supernatural is guilty of the No True Scotsman fallacy, which is very unthinking indeed.