Category: ideas

“Judas didn’t start out a monster. The earliest extant biblical writings don’t mention him at all (but then they don’t mention the resurrection either). Paul doesn’t even seem to have heard of him, writing only that Jesus ‘was betrayed’.” Yet over the course of 2000 years, Judas has been portrayed as “the anomalous apostle, the treacherous pariah, the ‘homophilic’ kisser of Christ, the rash Zealot and the unhappy fall guy for the salvation of mankind” – and, most harmfully, as “the monstrous, anti-Semitic totem figure of the Judas-Jew.”

“Many American religious thinkers are more liberal than their churches. They wish that Christianity were more open – not a stone wall of doctrine. To these people, the Gospel of Judas was a gift. As with the other Gnostic gospels, its mere existence showed that there was no such thing as fixed doctrine, or that there wasn’t at the beginning.”

“[P]eople handle anger differently when they’re lying on their backs, compared with sitting upright. University students who heard personal insults while seated exhibited brain activity linked to so-called ‘approach motivation’ – the desire to approach and explore something. This potential urge disappeared when students took their insults lying down, despite their anger remaining.”

“Mortals not only overestimate our ability to resist temptation, we also tend to miscalculate the amount of temptation we can handle. Homer was onto it: Odysseus put wax in his shipmate’s ears and had himself tied to the ship’s mast before being exposed to the Sirens’ song. But humans today may need a sociological study to understand that our abilities to control impulses are not what we think they are.”

“Nothing makes people more excessive than talking about excess. We tend to become either extremely disapproving or unusually enthusiastic and excited about the most recently reported celebrity orgy, or managing director’s pay rise.”

“Who decides that laughter is a lesser response than the sigh or the sob? Why isn’t the gift of transfixing audiences with delighted surprise, with forging new connections from the absurdities of life, with undercutting pretentiousness and reminding us of the shock of the real, not considered a profound thing?”

“It used to be held that small children are not only irrational but also immoral and egotistical… We may have been doing them an injustice. The notion that moral ideas develop only in adolescence — as Piaget, for one, claimed — appears to be wrong.”

“Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famous ape man is the subject of a [highly popular] summer show at the Musée du Quai Branly … Its organizers cogitate, with Gallic élan, on Tarzan’s proto-environmentalism; his philosophical roots in Rousseau and the 19th-century nudist movement; his literary antecedents in Kipling and H. M. Stanley; and his mythological reliance on the stories of Hercules and Romulus and Remus.”

“What was the most important year in human history? That was the question we put to you in our first More Intelligent Life poll, which brought votes from nearly 3,000 readers. And the winner is … 1439, the year Johannes Gutenberg figured out how [to] print words on paper. The arrival of the printing press saw off all other events including the birth of Jesus.”

“A team of archaeologists have matched etchings made 14,000 years ago on a polished chunk of sandstone in northern Spain to the landscape in which it was found. They claim to have the earliest known map of a region in western Europe – a prehistoric hunting map.”