Skip to main content

Americanism:The Fourth Great Western Religion

I recently bought a Kindle from Amazon via my Amazon account. (It's Amazon's amazing new wireless e-book that uses electronic ink, really cool. And worth the 4 week delivery backlog when I got mine earlier this year.)


I love the concept of potentially hundreds of books, blogs, daily newspapers, etc. just showing up (for a small fee to Amazon & partners) on my Kindle when I get up in the morning. I also love having nearly infinite degrees of freedom in directing the Kindle's wireless delivery service (initially free) to send me just the stuff I want. The Kindle'e product hardware is still rough dispite it's $500 price tag (e.g. the Kindle freezes up quite frequently and has to be rebooted manually) but by and large it's worth the price.

But, the Kindle is also a little dangerous. It enables easy access to certain online media (books, DVDs, CDs, etc.) via the "Kindle Store" which is a subset of the real Amazon store. The Kindle store has been modified to exploit the product's features and push the convenience of owing an e-book. Personally, I find it addictive to be pursued so often by so many good books and at such relatively low prices. I've responded by buying many more books on Kindle than I ever did on Amazon and that I ever intended to on Kindle. It's just too easy.


The first book I read on my Kindle was (Yale Professor) David Gelernter's new book; Americanism - The Fourth Great Western Religion. As always, Prof. Gelernter's work is thoughtful and well written. I particularly liked the history lesson (on Puritanism) and the way he summed up Puritanism's influence in shaping Americanism in these lines:

"Tolerance is American but secularism is not"

"Religious freedom is American but contempt for religion is not"

"Religious doubt is American but religious indifference is not"

"Religious debate is American but cold academic disdain is not"

"Chivalry is American but complacency is not"

"America is a blblical republic, and Americanism is a biblical religion."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DouglasRoss.com

Network Solutions is having a sale on URL's. Mine (http://www.douglasross.com) doesn't do anything at the moment (I'm saving it for a rainy day) but it was coming up on ten years and I needed to renew it to protect my name. So I decided to take them up on their pay-in-advance 20 year package sale for $279.00 or $13.95 per year (about half of the regular annual fee...probably not that good a deal in hindsight.) But the kicker was, after I hit the pay button it dawned on me that I'll be over 83 years old when this thing expires. How creepy is that? If I make it I'll take it as a good sign and re-up for another 20 years. And by then maybe I'll have done something with it.
Post a Comment
Read more

Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ.com

This Wall Street Journal article Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ .com made the right basic point about liberal hypocrisy in the Climate Change debate, but disappointingly it failed to cite the best sources of real information from an unbiased scientific point of view. I believe that source is Dr. S. Fred Singer & Dr. Craig D. Idso , from the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, who coauthored "Climate Change Reconsidered; The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" published in 2009. In this book, the petition letter shown here from Dr. Frederick Seitz ( Ph . D. Physics) President Emeritus of Rockefeller University was published. Dr. Seitz circulated this letter: urging fellow academics with qualifications in the physical sciences to sign the petition at http://www.petitionproject.com/ and thereby acknowledge their agreement with this statement in the petition: Accor...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.
Post a Comment
Read more