His attribution of Orwellian doublethink to himself is far more confusing. I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe your advice in this post is on point there. But the “absolutely zero effect” quote seems unobjectionable.
One thing I’ve come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.
I don’t have the original text handy, but a quick search on wikipedia brings up this quote from the book defining the concept:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.
The first sentence and the first sentence alone is the definition I had in my mind when I wrote the comment. It has been quite a while since I last read 1984 and I had forgotten the connotation that to “double-think” is to “deny the existence of objective reality.”
This was bad homework on my part; I should have looked the quote up before writing the comment. Instead of focusing on the example of morality that I used in the original comment I’m going to try to step back a bit to clarify my original point… My world-view currently accommodates two traditionally exclusive systems of belief: religion and science.
These two beliefs are not contradictory, but the complexity lies in reconciling the two.
From the original comment:
I don’t have the original text handy, but a quick search on wikipedia brings up this quote from the book defining the concept:
The first sentence and the first sentence alone is the definition I had in my mind when I wrote the comment. It has been quite a while since I last read 1984 and I had forgotten the connotation that to “double-think” is to “deny the existence of objective reality.”
This was bad homework on my part; I should have looked the quote up before writing the comment. Instead of focusing on the example of morality that I used in the original comment I’m going to try to step back a bit to clarify my original point… My world-view currently accommodates two traditionally exclusive systems of belief: religion and science.