by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | Dec 28, 2014

I apologize for not giving specific evidence here. My only excuse is that there were so many examples and that they happened so long ago, that I have forgotten the specifics. I should have written them down, but what remains is my impression and I’d like to take this opportunity to make a note of my observations as they are; so that others with the time and interest might observe some of the same biases and cover-ups that I observed in my early years as a math/philosophy major.

Now, I had been a student of philosophy from about age twelve onward.  I lived in a dusty, dry West Texas desert with very little parental supervision. I went to school when I wanted and did what homework I wanted when I wanted. I had horses and rode almost every day from sun up to sun down and played, built forts & weapons, ate mesquite beans, cactus, rattle snakes and would drink a beer now and then. I broke horses and rode bulls for fun. I painted, composed and played music and wrote poetry and I wrote about philosophy and religion.

West Texas …

At age twelve, I was reading Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and others whom I viewed as warriors for truth. I had never heard anyone speak with such fearlessness about life and reality like these existentialists and I found comfort with these fellows as they thought like me.  I do not now pretend that I understood everything they had to say, yet they spoke a truth that I knew instinctively and I read as much as I could get my hands on and wrote my observations. This filtered into my poetry, my art and my music and into my adventures in the desert with my horse.

Despite reading existentialism and despite the fact that most were atheists, I never gave up my belief in God since my heart was touched by His magical fingers years earlier and left an indelible mark on my heart. It’s a feeling that I cannot describe.

But despite being raised a Christian and my personal experiences just mentioned, I toyed and played with being an agnostic or an atheist –in as much as I could– to sample the full spectrum of logic and of emotion as described by my many atheistic philosophy heroes.   I pondered who am I, what am I, what is this thing I call self?   I destroyed my religion and I built it back up. I pulled and twisted it and folded it, bent, spindled and mutilated it; and still it came back to an even more beautiful form than before, for it had been tested by fire and by doubt and was now stronger than before… because after all, I like the men above was a warrior for truth, willing to gore my own sacred ox for the pursuit thereof.   I looked out into the vast existential abyss of meaninglessness and felt Satan’s hot breath on the nape of my neck as I peered into his dominion of fear. I gave up on fear that day for I had seen what I had come to see fearlessly and I looked back on Satan and shewed him away; and he left.   I was as a giant held down by lint. I realized that I was held down by fear and that I had confronted fear and caused fear to flee.

So despite Nietzsche’s warning:

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

I did not become a monster nor did my new found wisdom require that I look long into the abyss.

So after this diversion into my childhood, I return now to my original point; that being of my observations of bias and cover-ups in philosophy at the University. What I observed are two things mainly: 1) that there was an inordinate volume of visceral critique aimed at Christendom.   Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism were okay but that pesky old Christianity was a real bother to many philosophers and they spent extra time and care to discredit this foolishness called Christianity. Now, using the same criteria all other religions should likewise receive the same amount of attention, yet they didn’t. Why? Was this seen as a greater threat? And 2) as our great thinkers would approach a particularly difficult problem, they would suddenly develop a special language of words with special precise meanings in order to traverse this heretofore impenetrable brick wall and after some unnatural gymnastics, they would magically appear on the other side of the brick wall. Problem solved, or so they would have you believe. From this, I learned that man is mostly made up of ego and that it is very difficult to bring ego under the subjugation of hard, cold logic especially if you were a famous philosopher who has spent the better part of your life working out the details of your philosophy only to find that an unknown many of your assumptions were wrong, thus your entire philosophy was suspect.   From this, I learned that many of my heroes were yes warriors for the truth, but they had failed an important test. They could not face the fact that their entire body of knowledge was based on unprovable assumptions and therefore they had accomplished nothing.   Well, almost nothing… philosophy will bake no bread, but no bread will be baked without one. But the truth had evaded them. They did learn how to think and many earned a reputation, and a living at this exercise but they proved that they did not have a pure heart and were therefore sent a strong delusion which fed their ego, not their search for the truth. And then I recalled that Jesus said “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” I also recalled that God is love; God is truth and God is light. So I concluded that indeed they could have been blessed if they had a pure heart or a pure intent, for they would have indeed found the truth or found God.

Now, despite the thrashing above, I still love philosophy since philosophy after all is the art of wondering and life is art.

Another one of my heroes said it best …

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

~Sir Isaac Newton

Additional reading on this topic:

On Religion
The Three Religions of science…
The religion of science…
Religion is the root cause of all Wars. Not…
Misc Musings on the surety of science or why I am skeptical of ‘Well-Established’ facts.
Do you see a pattern here?
Opus 014: The Hoax of materialism…