The Mascara Gene

Headline in last week’s Observer: ‘We are one gene away from defeating religion.’   Imagine different groups engineering children according to a religion gene … or not: some will want them to have it, some wont. So suppose: a whole group of the non-religious gene children grow up religious: in spite of their parents … A rejoinder: it is like someone being on the verge of discovering a mascara gene: since they now have this proof of vanity, would they then be right to think: “I am just one gene away from closing the entire cosmetics department of the John Lewis pantechnicon.” Is vanity just genetic – and just vanity – ?

The difficulty of imagining a humanity with religion engineered out of it is comparable to the difficulty of imagining a humanity with the impulse to wear cosmetics engineered out of it. (Not that the two are necessarily comparable otherwise.)

Wood is split by metaphysics

[That we are metaphysical slaves.] The most indicative sign of how we have entered the realm of the metaphysical with any argument is shown by the pattern of the argument itself: it works regardless of fact in spite of the ‘reliance’ on fact – in spite of the vehement statements of ‘fact’ for one finds little point to the careful articulation of other further pieces of information or bodies of material for reflection that would go to modify these statements of ‘fact’.  Certainty presides.  There lies at the root of the so-called facts no facts at all only an endless runs on rails metaphysics without hope of modification …