I'm Eric Farkas, currently a mechanical draftsman, as well as a web developer, doing mainly Ruby on Rails. I am also the CTO of TalentSoup, as well as one of the founding members of Sensus Divinitatis Publishing. I have a number of side projects, including SD News, Perplexed Labs, Inc. and GenXCommune. In a past life I was a founding member of HoverSpot.
I worship at the OPC of Franklin Square with my family, where I serve as a deacon.
You can check me out on various social sites:
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I like to read books. I keep an Amazon Wishlist and a Reading List.
I also keep a Training Log of workouts.
This blog is my attempt to catalog what I read and see, as well as offer my thoughts on theology, philosophy, technology, and culture.
I hate coffee.
Email me: speric at gmail dot com
I named this site ‘Fallible Ideas’ to emphasize that we all make mistakes. It's important to always be learning, challenging ourselves, and trying to improve. By an effort, we can make fewer mistakes. Perhaps you can learn something if you read on.
I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in this country. I was minutes away from beginning my lecture, and my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts.
He said, “This is America’s first postmodern building.”
I was startled for a moment and I said, “What is a postmodern building?”
He said, “Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.”
I said, “So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?”
He said, “That is correct.”
I said, “Did he do the same with the foundation?”
All of a sudden there was silence.
You see, you and I can fool with the infrastructure as much as we would like, but we dare not fool with the foundation because it will call our bluff in a hurry.
Ravi strikes again.
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I think one of the things that is killing Evangelical witness to the world is that we don’t know how to properly navigate the differences between Premodernism, Modernism, and Postmodernism.
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“The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”
Jean Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” 1946
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“My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to the stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus “truth,” at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call “imaginings.” Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity.”
The Portable Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” p. 501ff (via Cloud of Witnesses)Comments [0]
"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life." - Albert Camus
The Christian's hope for "another life" is not foolish. Indeed, "another life" which will be inaugurated at Christ's second coming, and which we already have a foretaste of in the new birth and through the means of grace, is an "anchor for the soul". But though, as pilgrims and sojourners, we look forward to eternity with eager expectation, let us not "elude the implacable grandeur of this life". It's in the little things: your child running to hug you when you walk though the door, a glass of wine shared with your spouse, an afternoon spent in the country, soaking up the sun.Comments [0]
“To be ignorant and simple now–not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground–would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”
- C.S. Lewis, quoted from “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory
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