@spendius,
There are less poetic versions of the Sterne quote I gave earlier. The most extreme, I suppose, is the Pavlovian one.
This one is from John Morley who I have quoted before--
Quote:With most men and women the master element in their opinion is obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination, independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by fortuitious sensations, and modified in the better cases by the influence of a favourite teacher; while, in the worse, the teacher is the favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions, or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that are proper to it. It is a question of temperment how violently either of them straitens and distorts the normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head, which would usually be better described as a thin head, may and constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine name of reason. Excess, on the other side, leads people into emotional transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the difficulty of discovering truth, the narrowness of the way that leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness, and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over intelligence.
Which is to say that militant atheists, taking the names of reason and science in vain, are as conditioned by "fortuitous sensations" (usually sexual) as comprehensively as any well trained dog is by chunks of Pedigree Chum and that they are no better and no worse, only differing in sentiment, than the most rabid religious fundamentalist with whom they fall naturally into a symbiotic relationship with in order to better facilitate each other's need to empty their lungs in the faces of their unfortunate companions, for want of anything else to say, and, with some effort, to extract money from their pockets with which to fill their own.
One might say that this distinction between excess of both the poetic and the scientific temper, exercised separately but together, is equally stupid and boring as it takes place outside of any known reality. It is essentially parasitical taking its necessary energy inputs from outside the ridiculous circles in which its practioner's egos wank themselves off.
The consequences of the rest of us taking either side seriously are dire in the extreme although it is worth saying that the imaginative side have the best tunes and provide some useful inspirations from which to derive that circumstance which we are, or most of us are, devoutly hoping to consummate at reasonably regular intervals, when other exterior threats are extinguished, and I sincerely hope that such is not the case with scientific methodology which is easily shown to actually inhibit the procedure. Or it is in those whose natural reflexes have begun to fade to make make way for the applications of taste and decorum.
The paucity of imagination seen on this thread from militant atheists, which is pitiful to see in view of the length of a modern education, is matched by the paucity of reason of their counterparts, equally pitiful, and travelling companions. Both sides turned up at Dover, took a pile of $$$$s off the less influential locals and got nowhere of any significance.
