Heroes, Saints, Cowboys, and Crazies

The authors of philosophy and scripture both come across as mounting a case to prove their own sanity.  (Most all of it sounds at least a tiny bit bonkers.) Nowadays, the power of philosophy or scripture is also measured in the same way– by how successful these authors are in making this case.

Religion and politics are rooted in the belief that we should walk toward what the authors of scripture and philosophy were pointing at.   Heroes and saints are those who walk in those directions with a vigor that most everybody would find a bit nuts. (Sort of like sports champions.)

Those who claim to believe in science alone are simply those who make the odd claim that the authors of science are the only sane people, that the only saints and heroes were scientists.  This view will always appear crazy to the sane person whose heroes have always been cowboys.  (The fact that such people even exist proves that this sort of scientific nihilism is flatly incorrect.)

Moby Dick is scripture

Chapter 49: The Hyena

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

Brilliant.