This morning's Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:

… Hmm: Is Atheism Irrational? - NYTimes.com.



Maybe it's too rational. Here's another piece I came upon with the same title. This one ends peculiarly:

Is atheism’s connection with autism the silver bullet that proves once and for all that atheists are irrational? Given the complexities of both the human mind and human culture, it is impossible to tell.

So when a (philosophically reflective) atheist claims herself to be rational because she believes that the arguments for theism are bad and the arguments against theism are good, I suggest we take her at her word.

Of course, you'd have to do the same with a theist, right? 

… Beware the sparrow cull: Farmageddon.

The authors tell the tale of the maddest and most wicked farm thinker of them all, Mao Tse-tung. He got it into his head that sparrows were eating too much grain so he organised a mass cull. Inevitably, this led to the uncontrollable rise of other grain-eaters such as locusts. 

I avoid grain-fed beef simply because it doesn't taste as good. We get enough grains as it is. Bryan's review displays his usual common sense.



… Skipping the vanishing point: Hockney’s LA Story.

 The moment an artist chooses a vanishing point for his picture, time freezes. “Perspective,” says Hockney, “stops time.” Pointedly, he tells me that the ­Chinese and Japanese are keen to see his videos. In their cultures, nobody ever bothered to stop time with a vanishing point.

… Think of this the next time you call somebody a bird brain:  Watch A Crow Solve A Complex Puzzle | Popular Science*.

… In case you wondered: What’s Wrong with Poetry Today?

Rather than looking carefully at the reality in front of her, [King] uses predetermined neo-Marxist paradigms (“poetry’s obituaries are aligning themselves with a capitalism that is patriarchal by default”), showy but meaningless metaphors (what does it mean exactly that poetry is “untamed in its potential” and “mercuriallyignores…authoritarian muscle”), and thunderous self-assured pronouncements that, once the reader has taken the time to wade through them all, add up to nothing more than poetry is process and personality, fixity and flux, form and feeling—something all poets and critics know already and have for a long time.

… Objection: Jacobs on Lewis.

… nobody is a natural storyteller, except in the sense that all human beings are, and while it is certainly true that Lewis struggled with the kind of storytelling he liked best, this is true of any competent storyteller. In reality the only test of competence in storytelling is whether fair-minded people with a taste for story like the stories. That's the whole point of storytelling, and it can be judged by no other standard. It certainly can't be determined on the basis of things that Alan Jacobs vaguely suspects and can't coherently defend.

If Lewis is to be judged as a storyteller, the focus should be on his best novel, Till We Have Faces. I think he acquits himself quite well.