Monday, December 27, 2004
Cure for "impudent anus"
By The Erudite Redneck
Keep the following in mind when some self-righteous lawmaker, or scientist, bellows about the need to root legislation in "sound science."
Yes, of course. But in a generation, if not before, today's science, and today's doctrine, will be history.
"It didn't take long to see, he wrote in later years, that learning at the university was more about fancy robes and winning arguments and citing the proper authorities than it was about the pursuit of truth: he had bitten into the apple of knowledge and came away 'naked as Adam and Eve.' He felt like a fool, because he knew nothing except how to argue, and merely to support a predetermined position rather than to find truth." -- Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 182.
The author was writing about the young doctor Jan Baptista van Helmont, Natural Philospher, who later cited the following in a tract that explicated the interplay of science, natural philosophy and the Christian faith as he saw it in the 17th century:
"To avenge yourself memorably on those who might excrete on the threshold of your door, place a red-hot iron on the excrement itself, and in very short order the offendor would develop sores and scabs on his buttocks, for 'dorsal magnetism' was driving "the acrimony of the burning into his impudent anus." -- Harline, 201.
"Impudent anus" sounds like what the extended ER family (on the Dr. ER side) calls havin' "a case of the ass."
:-)
END
Keep the following in mind when some self-righteous lawmaker, or scientist, bellows about the need to root legislation in "sound science."
Yes, of course. But in a generation, if not before, today's science, and today's doctrine, will be history.
"It didn't take long to see, he wrote in later years, that learning at the university was more about fancy robes and winning arguments and citing the proper authorities than it was about the pursuit of truth: he had bitten into the apple of knowledge and came away 'naked as Adam and Eve.' He felt like a fool, because he knew nothing except how to argue, and merely to support a predetermined position rather than to find truth." -- Craig Harline, Miracles at the Jesus Oak: Histories of the Supernatural in Reformation Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 182.
The author was writing about the young doctor Jan Baptista van Helmont, Natural Philospher, who later cited the following in a tract that explicated the interplay of science, natural philosophy and the Christian faith as he saw it in the 17th century:
"To avenge yourself memorably on those who might excrete on the threshold of your door, place a red-hot iron on the excrement itself, and in very short order the offendor would develop sores and scabs on his buttocks, for 'dorsal magnetism' was driving "the acrimony of the burning into his impudent anus." -- Harline, 201.
"Impudent anus" sounds like what the extended ER family (on the Dr. ER side) calls havin' "a case of the ass."
:-)
END
