Now, I'm reading what Gadot (AKA "Wonder Woman") tweeted, and it's exactly what I thought: "Rest in peace Dr. Hawking... Now you’re free of any physical constraints. Your brilliance and wisdom will be cherished forever."
To me, that's like saying about a Christian who has passed on something like "It's so sad that his beautiful soul is gone forever." You're imposing your religion on the person who had his own religion/atheism.
But it's worse than that, because it's saying that the life that he did have was a burden he's lucky to be rid of. Especially given that he did not believe in an afterlife (or so he said), the life he had was all he had. It was not worse than nothing. Hawking said (at the second link, above): "I accept that there are some things I can't do. But they are mostly things I don’t particularly want to do anyway. I seem to manage to do anything that I really want." And:
Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.I'm now reading what the supposedly pissed off people said, and it's what I thought, not just people flying off the handle and being inappropriately mean to an "innocent" actress trying to deliver a "tribute":
I think you’re fantastic Gal but this tweet is very ableist. His physical constraints didn’t stop him from changing the world. People with disabilities don’t wish for death to be free of their challenges. We wish to be valued for what we CAN do, not pitied for we can’t.You know, Wonder Woman, Gadot's movie character, has superpowers, and we love our superpowers in the movies. We need to think harder about what we celebrate, and Hawking is a stellar example of living well within limitations, and we all have limitations.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 210 of 210You uncharacteristically overstated your case: "But it's worse than that, because it's saying that the life that he did have was a burden he's lucky to be rid of." Gadot said, "Now you’re free of any physical constraints." She was not saying his life was a burden, merely that he had physical constraints. He had acknowledged that. Of course, constraints can be good or bad.
Consideration of heaven, and of the significance of this earthly life, often lead to overstatement. For obvious reasons. You're in good company, though, Althouse. Hawking overstated too, and exploited his genius celebrity all in one. Proselytizing by asserting, as a fact, a matter of faith (that there "is no heaven or afterlife . . .").
It sucks when you try to say something nice about some one and get called out because it wasn't nice in the appropriate way.
What is wrong with people?
Free will is a causeless cause.
Very easy concept to understand.
Blogger mccullough said...
Free will is a causeless cause.
Very easy concept to understand.
3/16/18, 10:55 PM
Not in physics, it ain't. Hawking's philosophical musings on the beginning of the universe were mocked for his inability to correctly state the problem "how does something arise from nothing?"
I neither expect nor want Hollywood celebrities to share their opinions with us.
Hawking's philosophical musings on the beginning of the universe were mocked for his inability to correctly state the problem "how does something arise from nothing?”
God has the exact same problem, BTW. But quantum mechanics tells us that particles blink in and out of existence all the time, when did that start? The human mind just can’t deal with these problems very well. No matter how highly developed.
You're imposing your religion on the person who had his own religion/atheism.
Not really. The person is dead, so you aren't imposing anything on him. You're only imposing on people who don't like your viewpoint and want to take offense at it.
This is terrible - I mean criticizing someone's attempt to cope with a death because you can find some nit to pick in how they expressed themselves.
Should we never refer to gaininig angel wings because it implies that we're somehow incomplete down here in our mortal bodies without angel wings?
What's wrong with expressing our own thoughs from our own point of view within the frame of our own religion? Must I keep an index of every person's precise thoughts on every conceivable subject so I can ensure I never say anything - my oown thoughs, from my own point of view, within the frame of my religion - that might be at odds with what they believed?
I hope that Panzram finally repents of his evil when he stands before God. I hope he recognizes that he is the prodigal son, the lost sheep, that God loves and that Christ came to redeem. I think you're wrong to suggest I should self-censor that thought because the person I'm praying for might not appreciate it. Just like I think it would be wrong for a professor to self-censor a lesson because it might offend their student.
Wetzel: Free will became a big issue because of theism. As Saint Paul put it, "But why does he still find fault? for who can resist his will?" Or in the vernacular, if God totally controls whether you sin or not (as follows from omnipotence), where does he get off punishing you for sinning? To his credit, Paul was rigorous enough not to try to get around this with a defense of free will; he said straight out that God created you and he can do anything he wants with you, just as the potter can do as he likes with his pots.
In explaining his more obscure theories, Hawking often employed as a premise statements in this form: "x is y at t-1" and "x is not y at t-1. In other words, x is both y and not y at the same time. Of course, most people find this kind statement incoherent. But its value is that if you use it as a premise in an explanation, you can prove anything.
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