#secular thought

[leam1983]

Lent?

We're having lunch and I'm aimlessly scrolling through the Hellsite. I spot a weirdo "Lent guidance" app narrated by Jim Caviezel. I pop by the calendar app, boot up my inner (and defunct) CATECHISM.EXE binary and nod with a pout. Yarp, it's definitely Lent Season for those who care.

I ask Walt if he's ever tried fasting for Lent. He doesn't verbally reply, instead widening his grey eyes and bobbing his Rage Sandwich as if it were an implicit answer. I grin. "Guess not, right? You're more of the sin often and sin joyfully crowd," I joke.

Still chewing, he settles with a finger-gun. I field Sarah with the same question. She frowns.

"Once, maybe? For Catechism class? I think I cut back on something dumb like peanut butter or Nutella or - I don't know. You?"

I peel back the years in the back of my mind. "I tried going without desserts for a month, but that mostly just made me eat more fruits on Friday evenings. I grew up in the eighties and early nineties' respective recessions, so pricey meat alternatives were off the table. That's it, I think. My grandfather made a big show of cutting off booze for a month and then got absolutely plastered right after Lent..."

Privations never really were much of a House Gremlin thing. We mostly just followed supermarket sales and splurged on whatever it was that was on sale and cut back on anything expensive and nonessential. It sort of makes modern-day moral posturing feel empty.

Obviously, that Lent app has to come with some sort of Premium feature you're asked to pay for. I wonder what its dumb name is, considering the subject of the app. Grace Plus? Extra Faith? Get Touched By Jesus in All the Right Places and Cosplay as Saint Therese of Avila Who's Totally Not Having an Orgasm?

[philosophy-irresponsibly-blog]

Averroës, the founding father of secular thought, seems to argue that there are two forms of truth, a religious form and a philosophical form, and that it does not matter if they point in different directions. A common theme throughout his writings is that there is no incompatibility between religion and philosophy when both are properly understood. His contributions to philosophy took many forms, ranging from his detailed commentaries on Aristotle, his defense of philosophy ("Tahafut al-tahafut") against the attacks of those who condemned it as contrary to Islam (al-Ghazali) and his construction of a form of Aristotelianism which cleansed it, as far as was possible at the time, of, Neoplatonic influences. There is much in his work also which suggests that religion is inferior to philosophy as a means of attaining knowledge, and that the understanding of religion which ordinary believers can have is very different and impoverished when compared with that available to the philosopher.

He believed in an eternal universe, and in a soul which is divided into two parts (an individual part, and a divine part which is eternal and shared by all). His belief in the then radical idea that "existence precedes essence" was developed much later by the Transcendent Theosophy of Mulla Sadra (c. 1571 – 1640) in the 17th Century and by Existentialism in the 20th Century.