Vendredi Appartient à Voltaire

We’ve got Meslier on Monday and Voltaire on Friday. Our cups runneth over! Faire rire et danser!Voltaire by Houdon

I’m not going to post a Meslier every monday or a Voltaire every Friday. I’m just going to do that if I feel like it. But it’s nice to know that I can blog for 100 years here without my well running dry, if I am afraid of that happening. That doesn’t strike me as a likely outcome but having lifelines like these is particularly good.

In which I mention Milo Yiannopolous in the same breath as Voltaire (So that Milo loses horribly by comparison)

Nobody should accept mediocrities-by-committee like Milo Yiannopolous in a world that once held Voltaire.

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The Dining Philosophers, rebooted

Epicurus muttered, “None of this affects me at all,” excused himself, and slipped out the back door practically unnoticed. That left the table unbalanced. On one side were the ancient worlders: Plato and Aristotle, heads together in deep discussion, and Socrates, who appeared to be gently questioning Miletus while Sextus Empiricus studiously withheld judgement on the proceedings.

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Warning: Jesus Appearances

According to New Testament scholar Jeremiah Johnston, who allegedly spent 6 years working on a book entitled “Unanswered (Lasting Truth for Trending Questions)” interviewed in Christian Post:

“Jesus is appearing to Muslims all over the Middle Eastern world,” he told The Christian Post. The Bible scholar, who wrote a forthcoming book on the Islamic State terror group, admitted “that makes some believers uncomfortable — you know, Jesus appearing to someone. I remind them, ‘have you read Acts Chapter 9 recently? Who did Jesus appear to while he was on the road to Damascus? Saul of Tarsus.’ We don’t need to put God in a box. Believe you me, God can work apart from us.”

I didn’t realize that toast, waffles, and moldy carpet were so popular in the middle east. Or perhaps Jesus is appearing in mud puddles or other unusual places.

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The Monday Meslier

What is the Monday Meslier?

Every so often, on mondays, I’m going to select and examine a chunk of the 1729 Testament of Jean Meslier (wikipedia).

I first stumbled on Meslier when I was looking on Project Gutenberg for any works by Voltaire, and the search engine returned a pointer to Meslier’s Testament because it had been published with a forward by Voltaire. I still get

Jean Meslier Portrait

goose-bumps at the idea of being an author, and having a forward for one’s book written by Voltaire. That, as they say, is “big time.” It’s also a bit dangerous – Voltaire had his own ideas and his own agenda and, while he was a rationalist par excellence and one of the sparks of the enlightenment, he was not an atheist. Meslier was.

Meslier’s historical significance is interesting. His Testament was one of the first explicitly atheistic tracts of its sort, and he resorted to the clever dodge of posting it posthumously. “HAHA! You can’t kill me because I’m already dead!”

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