Randal Rauser's Blog, page 94

The Ultimate Elevator Pitch: Can you sell your worldview in thirty seconds or less?

If you want to start up a new business, you need an elevator pitch, a pithy and persuasive statement of your idea to attract investors that can be delivered in less than thirty seconds (or about fifty words).

That can be a real challenge. It can be very hard to explain an idea and the motivation for it in such a succinct compass. But the dividends are formidable: a successful elevator pitch can launch a new idea into the stratosphere.

Is it possible to describe and defend a worldview in an elevator pitch? If so, what would that look like? I’d like to hear what you have to say about Christianity and naturalism in particular. If you’re interested, please try your hand at writing an elevator pitch for one of these worldviews — succinctly describing the essence of the view and the appeal you believe it has in a way that would leave the listener wanting more. Email your ideas to me at the contact section of my website. And I’ll post them in a subsequent article.

Are you up for it? What do you believe and why?

In thirty seconds or less.

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Catholics are now trying to link the problem of child-molesting priests to same-sex attraction. Don’t let them.

The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report is an 800-page study of the systemic rape and molestation of children on an industrial scale by hundreds of Catholic priests over decades in the state of Pennsylvania. The horrors include beating and raping children, making child pornography, hitting children with whips, forcing children to commit sexual acts on priests, and so on. Many families were victimized multiple times: in one family alone, a priest raped five girls. (To read the report, click here.)

This report is but the tip of the iceberg chronicling the abuse in one single state. Similar horrific levels of abuse have been identified with the church in other places around the world (e.g. Boston; Ireland). If past is prologue, one shudders to imagine what horrors of abuse remain to be discovered in the months and years to come.

So how is the Catholic Church responding to this revelation?

In the days since the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, a growing number of Catholics have been using this report as a way to attack gay people — gay men in particular: the attacks on lesbians are conspicuously absent for obvious reasons — by suggesting that the central lesson of the report is that priests with same-sex attraction are the problem.

In an article in First Things, Daniel Mattson, who is himself same-sex attracted, argues as follows:

“What unites all of these scandals is homosexuality in our seminaries and the priesthood: the result of the Church ignoring its own clear directives.”

According to Mattson, the Catholic Church’s problem with industrial-scale child molestation and rape traces back to the fact that same-sex attracted men are being allowed to become priests. As Mattson explains:

“Most of the horrific abuse detailed in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report involved adolescent boys and young men. This isn’t pedophilia.”

I have to interject here. While I have not read the entirety of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, Mattson’s comment is disingenuous at best, and arguably contradicts the Grand’ Jury’s own presentation of their findings. The report is clear: the issue is not about “homosexuality”: it is about the targeting and abuse of children. The website where the report is available prefaces the report as follows:

“THIS SITE SERVES AS THE HOLDING GROUND FOR THE RESULTS OF A TWO-YEAR GRAND JURY INVESTIGATION INTO WIDESPREAD SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN WITHIN SIX DIOCESES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN PENNSYLVANIA AND THE SYSTEMIC COVER UP BY SENIOR CHURCH OFFICIALS IN PENNSYLVANIA AND AT THE VATICAN.”

Note that the writers of the report present their findings as involving the sexual abuse of children. Open the report and you read the following on page 1:

“Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number – of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward – is in the thousands.

“Most of the victims were boys; but there were girls too. Some were teens; many were prepubescent. Some were manipulated with alcohol or pornography. Some were made to masturbate their assailants, or were groped by them. Some were raped orally, some vaginally, some anally. But all of them were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all” (emphasis added)

In Pennsylvania, a child is defined as “a person under 18 years of age.” (source) Thus the Grand Jury Report chronicles the sexual victimization of children (i.e. persons under 18-years of age) by priests, period. The fact that “Most of the victims were boys” does not make it a “homosexual issue” any more than the rape of five girls from the same family is a heterosexual issue.  Again, in all cases, the issue is the predation upon and abuse of children, period.

What about Mattson’s claim that the issue isn’t pedophilia? Again, this is misleading, at best. In colloquial usage, “pedophilia” involves adults experiencing sexual attraction toward children. As the recent Roy Moore case demonstrates, the popular usage includes teenagers Moore was allegedly targeting 14-17-year-olds and he was roundly condemned as a “pedophile”. A 30-year-old man who is targeting 17-year-old girls may not technically be a pedophile, but his attractions are disordered. They are not simply “heterosexual.” Likewise, a 30-year-old man who is targeting 17-year-old boys may not technically be a pedophile, but his attractions are disordered. They are not simply “homosexual.” And in both cases, this kind of behavior is colloquially described as pedophila.

What about technical usage? Is Mattson correct here? Once again, his statement is at best disingenuous because it obscures the fact that pedophilia is part of a continum of disordered sexual attraction to children (i.e. legal minors) Technically, the crimes of child abuse chronicled in the report are borne by a range of disordered sexual attractions including pedophilia (the disorder of being sexually attracted to children of 12 or younger), hebephilia (the disorder of being sexually attracted to children aged approximately 12-14), and ephebophilia (the disorder of being sexually attracted to children/young adults aged 15-19).

To sum up, when Mattson says the Grand Jury Report is about homosexuality rather than pedophilia, he is attempting to shift the discussion away from sexual attraction to and predation on children and onto the very different topic of male same-sex attraction simpliciter. But that’s not what the report is about at all. To characterize a male predator’s pedophilic molestation of a male child as a homosexual act is every bit as misleading as characterizing a male predator’s pedophilic molestation of a female child as a heterosexual act.

So here’s an obvious question: why are Catholics like Daniel Mattson misrepresenting the content of the Grand Jury Report and seeking to reframe the systemic sexual victimization of children as a matter of failing to identify and block the entry of same-sex attracted men into the priesthood? I can’t say for sure, but it certainly looks like an attempt to shift the spotlight away from the fact that the Catholic clergy has long been a haven for sexual predators and onto a familiar outgroup: the gay community.

This is a terrible thing to do. By seeking to reinvigorate old stereotypes about the relationship between same-sex attraction and child molestation, people like Mattson make it more difficult to identify the real problem of identifying sexual predators and their enablers. And in the process, they demonize and thereby alienate the very people they claim to want to reach.

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Are Gay People More Likely to be Pedophiles?

Christians have long associated homosexuality with pedophilia. In an article titled “Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation,” Gregory Herek (Professor of Psychology at UC, Davis) observes that this kind of association is part of a common pattern of marginalizing outgroups:

“Members of disliked minority groups are often stereotyped as representing a danger to the majority’s most vulnerable members.” (source)

Joe Kort points out how this prejudice is propagated by highlighting homosexual associations with deviant crimes and downplaying or obscuring heterosexual associations:

“Anna C. Salter writes, in Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists and other Sex Offenders, that when a man molests little girls, we call him a ‘pedophile’ and not a ‘heterosexual.’ Of course, when a man molests little boys, people say outright, or mutter under their breath, ‘homosexual.'” (source)

Despite these common associations, Herek concludes his literature survey as follows:

“The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so.”

As a Christian, I have long been concerned with the ongoing tendency of Christians to propagate prejudices based on false and questionable assumptions, and that includes this common association of pedophilia and homosexuality. So when I saw Michael Brown making that very association on Twitter today, I felt the need to address it. Our rather lengthy exchange (lengthy for Twitter!) is recorded below:

* * *

MB: “Finally. Catholic leaders are saying openly that the sexual scandal in their midst is primarily homosexual. But of course! Who hasn’t known that all along? May God have mercy on the victims and bring repentance to the abusers.” [Brown then included this link to Cardinal Burke’s comments linking homosexuality and pedophilia.]

RR: “It’s not “primarily homosexual”. It’s primarily pedophilic sexual predators.”

MB: “False. The data is clear. Men primarily abusing boys, in particular young teens. That’s homosexual.”

RR: “They’re clearly pedophiles and sexual predators. Do you think people who are same-sex attracted are thereby predisposed to pedophilic sexual predation?”

MB: “Cardinal Burke: ‘It was clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.'”

RR: “That statement doesn’t change a thing I said. These are pedophilic sexual predators. Are you attempting to downplay the pedophilic dimension of these crimes?”

MB: “Nothing more to say. The evidence is clear. Pedophilic abuse would focus more on pre-pubescent children, not pos-pubescent teens. (My last comment.)”

RR: “You need to look up ‘Hebephilia’ and ‘Ephebophilia’ and to stop stigmaziting [sic] the gay community simpliciter with child-sexual attraction and sexual predatory behavior. Demonizing others in this way is about the least neighborly thing you can do.”

MB: “You need to read my carefully documented chapter dealing with those very issues (and terms) from 2011 in A Queer Thing Happened to America. Unfortunately, you reacted to my comment without understanding it, making a generalization you then attacked. (Really, can’t comment more.)”

RR: “I didn’t ‘attack’. I critiqued your association of same-sex attraction simpliciter with minor-attracted sexual predation. The gay community has long experienced the prejudice of that horrific association.”

MB: “What I posted is accurate; what I’ve written is accurate; and I’ve been VERY clear in making distinctions. Again, you reacted. (Really, let’s drop it. I do not have time to interact further here.)”

RR: “I know you’re busy. No need to reply. But you’re playing into a well-established perception that same-sex attracted persons are more likely to be predators who target minors.”

MB: “Please, please, please. Read what I’ve written on the subject.”

RR: “I’m addressing your tweets in which you tendentiously characterized the predatory victimization of legal minors as “homosexual acts”, thereby perpetuating a common perception that same-sex attraction simpliciter increases the likelihood that one will victimize minors.”

MB: “(Mayo Clinic!) But in any case, the point of my tweet was NOT what you took it to be (nor the subject of this link). As I stated before, you misunderstood my point and reacted wrongly to it. Own it. :)”

* * *

If you’re interested in following the actual exchange on Twitter, here’s the first tweet:

Finally. Catholic leaders are saying openly that the sexual scandal in their midst is primarily homosexual. But of course! Who hasn't known that all along? May God have mercy on the victims and bring repentance to the abusers. https://t.co/SObX0Wstmw

— Dr. Michael L. Brown (@DrMichaelLBrown) August 17, 2018

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Does the systemic sexual abuse among Catholic clergy undermine the Catholic Church itself?

Yesterday, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report chronicling the crimes of more than three hundred priests throughout Pennsylvania, predators who raped and traumatized more than one thousand children and young people dating back to the 1940s. The grand jury further chronicled how dozens of people in the church covered up the crimes, acting in essence like a crime syndicate.

The statistics numb the mind. But it’s when you get down to the individual stories that you really begin to get a sense of the absolutem horror of these crimes. Consider, for example, the priest who molested five sisters from the same family. Some of these priests continued their serial abuse for up to forty years while the church in Pennsylvania covered up their crimes, in effect enabling the abusers to victimize many more children.

One anguished woman who had been raped as a child observed through tears, “The word ‘God’ makes me think of him.”

Even worse, this sickening revelation is but one more chapter in the ever-expanding horror story of the Catholic Church’s systemic sexual abuse of children. The modern era of reporting began with the Boston Globe’s 2002 reporting, and ever since then it seems we do not go but a few months without some other terrible revelation of sexual abuse on an industrial scale somewhere in the world.

All this prompts the question: how many people reject Christianity because the word ‘God’ makes them think of him?  

Yesterday, I posted the following survey:

Today, yet another horrifying priestly sex scandal (300+ predator Catholic priests in Pennsylvania) hit the media. This is part of a terrible pattern of abuse going back decades. But does it provide a sufficient rational basis to reject Christianity as false?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 14, 2018

I agree with the 93%: the Catholic Church’s industrial scale sexual abuse of children does not entail that Christianity is false.

However, what if we construe the question more narrowly? Today, I asked a Catholic on Twitter the following hypothetical question: if you discovered that every single clergy member in the Catholic Church had raped a child or empowered another rapist, would you leave the church? His answer: no.

The reasoning behind that response arguably traces back to the third century when Christians debated whether the sacramental rites of priests who later apostasized would thereby be invalidated. The church concluded with a no: even if the priest turned out later to be an apostate, the sacraments would remain valid.

There is a good reason for this logic: after all, if you believe that the sacraments (e.g. baptism; confession; Eucharist) are necessary means of salvation, then you don’t want your salvation hanging in the balance of the spiritual condition of the officiant, a condition that you cannot know. The efficacy must instead reside in the office, irrespective of the life and conduct of the officiant. And with that, one can conclude that even a church full of abusers and enablers would retain its objective status as the one true church.

But as for me, I would be inclined to conclude that any church whose clergy consisted solely of abusers and enablers has thereby ceased to be a true church.

And from that, we can turn away from that horrible hypothetical to the actual world, the world in which the percentage of clergy who are abusers and/or enablers is very much a minority. But if there is a threshold of abuse at which a church is finally discredited, then when is it? How widespread would the kind of behavior chronicled by the Pennsylvania grand jury need to be before you would leave the Catholic church? How widespread would it need to be before you would conclude that the church perpetuating the abuse was not, in fact, a true church at all?

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Encountering Mystery at the Summer Waterslide

Wild ‘n’ Wet, 1981.

This article is equal parts summer nostalgia and rumination on mystery. But let’s start with the summer nostalgia.

Summer Nostalgia

I grew up in the 1980s when land prices were sufficiently low that it made sense to devote a large tract of land to a summertime waterslide. (Sadly, those days are long gone and that land is now occupied by — ugh — a cadre of condos.)

Back when Pac Man dominated the arcade and Star Wars and Rocky dominated the box office, we spent many long summer days at Wild ‘n’ Wet in Kelowna, BC, running up the concrete steps and hurtling down the fiberglass twists and straightaways.

It’s funny to look back now and laugh at the side of a dirt hill which somehow passed for landscaping in the 1980s. But we didn’t know any better. To us, this was but one step away from Disneyland.

The faucet of endless mystery and wonder.

I have a lot of great memories from Wild ‘n’ Wet. But I also have one existentially poignant memory, one that knocked on the door of mystery itself. That memory concerned the mysterious faucet that stood in the center of the park and blasted a torrent of water all day, every day, and all with no discernable source. Even more incredibly, the entire time, the faucet levitated in mid-air, unsupported by any apparatus. How was this possible?

I remember as a young kid — perhaps six or seven years old (hopefully not much older!) — staring in wonder and puzzlement at that faucet. For the life of me, I could not grasp the mystery of it all. How could it blast forth a stream of water seemingly from nothing hour after hour, day after day? Even more incredibly, how could it do this all while levitating day after day in mid-air?!

Eventually, I learned the truth. One day, I lingered a little too long at Wild ‘n’ Wet and I was still around when the faucet was turned off. In a moment, the torrent of water disappeared, and with it, the mystery. In that moment, summer became a bit less magical as a rusty white pipe was revealed to the world.

Existential Mystery

It’s at this point that I switch seamlessly from summer nostalgia to a rumination on mystery. (Though it is admittedly not so seamless that it lacks the seam of the previous sentence.)

If my six-year-old mind represents the limited perspective of the human mind, the mystical faucet represents the transcendent mysteries of our world. And I’m not simply thinking about God here. As atheist philosopher Colin McGinn has pointed out, all manner of fundamentally intractable puzzles — e.g. the nature of rational intuition; the puzzle of property exemplification; the curious mind/brain relationship — may remain beyond the cognitive grasp of our “six-year-old” minds. (See McGinn, Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry (Wiley-Blackwell, 1993). It takes a certain all-too-human hubris to think the world as it is should be rationally apprehensible by finite human minds.

Who says the human mind, in its present state, should be able to understand the mystery of consciousness and brains or, for that matter, a God who is one-and-three? To be sure, the water could get turned off at some point and we might discover a rusty white pipe. But it could equally be that the water never stop running and we remain forever puzzled by the mystery. Reality doesn’t guarantee us another outcome. And for that reason, if no other, epistemic humility is the wise course, not only at the summer water park, but all year long.

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Do you need to know how the internal witness of the Holy Spirit works in order to receive an internal witness of the Holy Spirit?

Many Christians claim to form justified beliefs based on a spiritual experience (e.g. the internal witness of the Holy Spirit) or a spiritual cognitive faculty (e.g. the sensus divinitatis). The skeptic retorts: ” Wait, how is this internal witness (or this sensus divinitatis) supposed to work?”

Now, this is a perfectly fair question. However, it is also perfectly fair for the Christian to reply, “I have no idea.”

The skeptic replies indignantly: “But how can you form justified beliefs from a spiritual experience or cognitive faculty if you don’t know how it works?” And I’ll reply in kind:

“I assume you have justified beliefs about your current bodily location. And you also have justified sense perceptual beliefs about your immediate environment. And you have justified beliefs based on your memory, and your rational intuition, and testimony. Do you know how proprioception, sense perception, memory, rational intuition, and the epistemology of testimony all function? Is that knowledge of cognitive function requisite for gaining justified beliefs from these various doxastic faculties? Surely not.”

“Hold on,” the skeptic says. “There’s a big difference between those universal, common, mundane faculties and your so-called internal witness of the Holy Spirit.”

“Is there?” I reply. “Let’s take the first example: proprioception. Many people suffer various degrees of proprioceptive malfunction. How widespread would that malfunction need to be before the person with a properly functioning proprioceptive capacity would be required to explain how it functions in order to be justified in accepting the deliverances of proprioception? And why is that threshold required? Who decides such things?”

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If you reject evolution, should you accept a flat earth?

Yesterday, I posted the following tweet:

“I’ll agree that ‘evolution is only a theory’ if you’ll agree that it is the only theory which offers a viable account of biological diversity.”

The tweet received the following response from (what I assume was) a young earth creationist:

“Whether the earth is flat or not makes no difference for any theological issue. However, if we allow the evolution theory to influence our exegesis of Genesis, we are forced to reconsider or reinterpret many theoligical [sic] issues.”

The implication of this tweet is that there is something problematic with using the deliverances of natural science to inform biblical interpretation in a way that would affect Christian doctrines. This exchange is worth highlighting because I regularly encounter Christian conservatives who believe there is something problematic with revising their understanding of passages of the Bible based upon natural science.

The problem with that objection (more correctly, one of many problems with that objection) is that Christians have already adapted their reading of the Bible on many occasions based upon the science of the day, even when that rereading had significant theological implications. Perhaps the clearest and most dramatic example in history is the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican cosmologies in the 16-17th centuries. The young earth creationist today is probably very comfortable with a spherical earth hurtling through a vacuum around the sun, but this was a shock four centuries ago. And so, I replied:

“Ahh, so you’re okay reinterpreting the Bible based on scientific theories so long as the reinterpretation “makes no difference for any theological issue.” Well, I have bad news for you: Copernicanism required a revision of many “theological issues”: e.g. ascension of Jesus, the interim state and nature of sheol, the relative placement of heaven in the divine economy, etc.”

In short, if you are going to oppose evolution based on the claim that it is wrong to revise Christian theology based on scientific theories, and Copernicanism required the revision of Christian theology, then it follows that it was wrong to revise Christian theology based on Copernicanism.

Thus, anyone who consistently raises this type of objection as a basis to reject evolution needs to consider why they do not consistently revert to the ancient Israelite three-storied universe.

For more on the ancient Israelite three-storied universe, you can read my review of Robin Parry, The Biblical Cosmos.

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Being a former Christian doesn’t ensure you’re an informed and fair critic of Christianity

Yesterday I posted the following tweet:

A note to my atheist friends: the fact that you grew up attending a Baptist church in rural Kentucky or a Catholic parish in Toronto does not automatically give you an informed perspective on the intellectual breadth and strength of the Christian tradition.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 9, 2018

Here is that point: participation within a specific Christian community does not automatically familiarize a person with the intellectual resources of the entire Christian tradition. So for example, the fact that you grew up in Podunk Community Church, sang in the church choir, attended church picnics, and taught Sunday school may give you valuable data on the church culture of Podunk. What it doesn’t do is guarantee that you have been exposed to a comprehensive understanding of hermeneutics, biblical studies, church history, philosophical theology, and systematic theology. So when post-Christians make categorical statements on the intellectual problems with Christianity based on their history at Podunk Community Church, they make a grave error.

The tweet elicited a range of responses from atheists. A few seemed to understand and acknowledge the point I was making. A few more didn’t quite understand it, but we had a good conversation that clarified the point amicably.

Unfortunately, many more responded with vulgar insults, derisive mockery, and/or dismissive condescension. As you can guess, many of those responses ironically provided corroboration for the initial tweet.

Consider, for example, this tweet from a person named “Beamer”:

“Ahem, I did grow up in churches in Kentucky. I also learned in Kentucky that dead people don’t come back. Donkeys don’t talk. The earth doesn’t stop spinning and there isn’t enough water on earth to cover the highest mountains by twenty feet. Oh, and owning a person isn’t moral.”

I replied:

“Thanks, you just made my point for me.”

Beamer replied with a curious non sequitur:

“I see you didn’t really put an emphasis on testable predictions relating to religion. Why not?”

That led me to reiterate the point applied to Beamer specifically:

“I was pointing out that your church in Kentucky did not acquaint you with a knowledge of hermeneutics or theology, leaving you apparently to conflate Christianity with a particular stream of North American fundamentalism.”

Christians should keep the same point in mind, of course. If you have some limited exposure to atheists (e.g. you read The God Delusion and attended the skeptics club on your university campus a few times), that does not provide you with a sufficient basis to dismiss the intellectual credibility of the various perspectives that are commonly grouped together as atheistic, skeptical, and/or naturalistic.

To conclude with a point on which we can hopefully all agree, we would all do far better to chasten our opinions pending careful and extended study in the fields on which we would like to opine.

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Can an evangelical believe this?

Yesterday, I posted several Twitter surveys, polling people on the question of whether an evangelical can affirm a particular position on various “hot-button” issues. Here are the (very interesting) results:

Can you be an evangelical and believe that all people will ultimately be saved by Jesus either in this life or the next?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 8, 2018

Can you be an evangelical and believe that God created through evolution?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 8, 2018

Can you be an evangelical and believe that God approves of monogamous homosexual relationships?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 8, 2018

Can you be an evangelical and deny biblical inerrancy?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 8, 2018

Can you be an evangelical and believe that elective abortion should be legal?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) August 8, 2018

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Ungatz: How a Lucky atheist faces his mortality

“It’s all going to go away … into blackness, the void.”

“And what do you do with that?”

“What do we do with that?”

“You smile…”

Harry Dean Stanton was the quintessential actor’s actor and his last film is a fitting final act for a stellar career. (Stanton passed away on September 15, 2017 at the ripe old age of 91.) In Lucky (2017) Stanton plays an aging atheist who begins to contemplate his mortality. His quiet ruminations, interwoven with many memorable interactions with townfolk, culminate at the local diner when he shares war stories with a WW2 vet (Tom Skerritt). The vet recalls invading an island of terrified Japanese people who expected the American soldiers to massacre them en masse. Then one smiling girl appeared. The vet observed to his superior officer that at least one person is glad to see them. The officer replied sagely that, in fact, the young girl was a Buddhist who willed a smile to meet what she believed to be her certain fate.

That powerful story provides the answer Lucky the atheist has been looking for. And in the penultimate scene of the movie, he gives this speech to his friends at the local watering hole:

Lucky’s speech reminds me of this oft-quoted passage from Bertrand Russell’s famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship”:

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Or as Lucky puts it, You smile…

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