The Coffee-Table Sex Atlas

FROM A CHURCH PRESS

One of the most bedeviling facts of the human condition is that you cannot resolve questions of value by piling up observations and data. You cannot, for example, arrive at “Thou shalt not kill” by amassing endless statistics about how many human beings there are, and how much more intelligent (watch out: what do you mean there?) we are than flatworms and aardvarks, and how most people prefer to be alive rather than dead, and so forth. Information is inert. Roses are red, 2 + 2=4, Mozart wrote divertimenti, the Saxons arrived with fire and sword: all of these data are as dull as ditch-water unless there is a “better” and a “worse” built into the whole enterprise, and unless you and I have some capacity in us that corresponds to those two qualities.

TH

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Thomas Howard

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FROM A CHURCH PRESS

One of the most bedeviling facts of the human condition is that you cannot resolve questions of value by piling up observations and data. You cannot, for example, arrive at “Thou shalt not kill” by amassing endless statistics about how many human beings there are, and how much more intelligent (watch out: what do you mean there?) we are than flatworms and aardvarks, and how most people prefer to be alive rather than dead, and so forth. Information is inert. Roses are red, 2 + 2=4, Mozart wrote divertimenti, the Saxons arrived with fire and sword: all of these data are as dull as ditch-water unless there is a “better” and a “worse” built into the whole enterprise, and unless you and I have some capacity in us that corresponds to those two qualities.