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Originally Posted by traumaturgist
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Originally Posted by Dennis Campbell
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Originally Posted by traumaturgist
Apologies for what may very well be a duplicate posting, but I chanced an amazon.com search on Seymour Lessans' work, and there is a review of Decline and Fall of all Evil:
Decline and Fall of All Evil: Seymour Lessans: 9781553953302: Amazon.com: Books
Guess he just didn't understand...
And for what it's worth at this stage, and for the record, and without namecalling or vulgar insults: Peacegirl, I would really honestly love to be able to believe what you seem to believe in. I mean, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't love to have as consolation the idea that the end of all war and crime is inevitable and will come someday, and to have that belief shine on and edify one's life? But that just isn't the way the world is. I'm not telling you what to believe, and I would never presume to tell anybody that...but overstating humanity's conscious control of both itself and the Nature within which it moves, live and dies has never made a difference to a Being that just goes on its merry way without caring a damn for our hopes, dreams and desires. While it is these hopes, dreams and desires that move us "forward" (in a non-teleological, non-valued sense), we could just as easily be moving "forward" off a proverbial cliff. And that, too, has its lessons and potentially edifying experience(s).
We need war and crime (as if we have a choice!); we need "evil" to show us what to struggle against (and all life is conflict, struggle and angst). To believe that they can be ended is just that - a belief. And no system of knowledge or beliefs is completely commensurate with the world in which we live. To attain that would be to attain to absolute knowledge, and humans will never be "absolute" in that sense. So believe what you want - nothing that has been said here is going to change your mind, as we all know; but I won't buy what you're selling. |
Read the one review posted below that on Amazon.com |
The link to the specific discussion is down, but you can eventually make your way to Talk Atheism and The Secular Web...neither of which return search results for "Janis Rafael."  |
The book is presented in an awkward style where the author presents imaginary conversations he's having with people that he readily gets the best of. The other person then gushes enthusiastically about the authors reasoning. The prose and self glorification aren't the only problems with the text though.
Lessan likes to present even his philosophical ideas as scientific validated theories.
However not all of them are even testable hypothesis, and the ones that are testable he never bothered to try testing, or apparently reading any research in the field that was available even at the time the book was written.
His first discovery regarding free will he claims will lead to a world in which no one can hurt another person. The caveat is that these ideas can only been tested when he first has complete compliance from the entire worlds population. This last part even requires a period of military action first where dissenters are taken care of.
His second discovery, being the most testable, proves to be the weakest. Here the author claims that he can perceive an event, in real time, over great distances, without the light from the object having to have first had time to reach our eye. That perception was a process occurring without light reaching the eye and at greater than light speeds.
The most famous of his examples is seeing our newly ignited instantly sun eight minutes before the first rays of its' light can touch the earth.
The claims he lays out here are easily testable, don't match any observation ever made, and defy everything known about light, optics, and physics.
This would be Lessans worst mistake if we didn't get to his third discovery.
The third claim involves proving we are born again through an argument involving pronoun usage. The difference between people saying I or You and a person's inability to say I any more after their death convinced him that one of those other You out there must now be I.
These are without a doubt one of the most poorly reasoned proofs I've ever seen collected in one book. Save your money.
Above was the single published review on Amazon