But it wouldn't hurt anyone to be a little more complete, would it?
Click THE JULIAN HUXLEY LIE. You'll find this fellow sounds a LOT like a rational leftist, and this article discusses in huge detail how Julian was originally 'slandered'. Oh and this:
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.
The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality.
We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning--the Christian meaning, they insisted--of the world.
There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever." [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937]
So, Tax Chick, you were not too far off - there is a Huxley out there who liked to 'confute' these people..
Of course, the dude who compiled all this is an evolution defender with lots of free time on his hands, and he does mental pretzels showing that the Huxley's are really ok people. From his point of view, it seems the philosophy of scientific materialism is disconnected from the philosophy of meaninglessness. That evolution is somehow, 'meaningful'. But I didn't get how. I get the distinct impression that evolution is firmly rooted in meaningless, in unadulterated materialism.
Anyway, it was nice to see all the civility...
Oh well, I was getting tired of civility, anyway
You'll find this fellow sounds a LOT like a rational leftist, and this article discusses in huge detail how Julian was originally 'slandered'.
Ah, 'he sounds like a leftist', to gobucks, so the article must be false. That's logic, that is.
There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever." [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937]
Of course, in the standard duplicitous creationist manner, gobucks omitted to note that Huxley was simply setting up a point of view to argue against. Let's post the rest of what the link says about Aldous Huxley, shall we?
As mentioned above, a conservative editor in 1966 printed a paragraph from Aldous Huxley on "the philosophy of meaninglessness" and "sexual mores," and added a title above the paragraph that read, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist." But what the editor failed to reveal to his readers was that Aldous was not an "atheist" when he wrote that paragraph, but was arguing against "atheism." The paragraph itself was taken from Aldous Huxley's book, Ends and Means, written in 1937 (chapter 14, the chapter on "Beliefs"), and he was not speaking about why people in Darwin's day "leaped at the Origin," but speaking about the rise of the "philosophy of meaninglessness" and materialism among the "masses" after the First World War, the generation of the 1920s.
And speaking of Aldous's generation in the 1920s and 30's, John Derbyshire wrote: "The second and third decades of the twentieth century were notoriously an age of failed gods and shattered conventions, to which many thoughtful people responded in obvious ways, retreating into nihilism, hedonism, and experimentalism. Literature became subjective, art became abstract, poetry abandoned its traditional forms. In the 'low, dishonest decade' that then followed, much of this negativism curdled into power-worship and escapism of various kinds. Aldous Huxley stood aside from these large general trends. Though no Victorian in habits or beliefs, he never entered whole-heartedly into the spirit of modernism. The evidence is all over the early volumes of these essays. James Joyce's ground breaking novel, Ulysses, he declares in 1925, is 'one of the dullest books ever written,and one of the least significant.' Jazz, he remarks two years later, is 'drearily barbaric.' Writing of Sir Christopher Wren in 1923, he quotes with approval Carlyle's remark that Chelsea Hospital, one of Wren's creations, was 'obviously the work of a gentleman.' Wren, Huxley goes on to say, was indeed a great gentleman, 'one who valued dignity and restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity.' In his thirties, in fact, Huxley comes across as something of a Young Fogey."
-- John Derbyshire, "What Happened to Aldous Huxley," The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6 (February 2003)
Is gobucks going to argue that Derbyshire is a leftist? Wonder why National Review keeps him on, then?
So let's summarize. The link gobucks provides shows that one line is pulled out of Aldous Huxley's 'Ends and Means' to make it appear that Huxley believed the exact opposite of what he actually believed. gobucks, having read this, proceeds to extract the exact same line and do the exact same thing that the link he himself cites debunks.
It's not just crassly mendacious, it's bizarrely stupid. Why would you post a link pointing out someone else's duplicity, and then commit the exact same duplicity?
BTW, for the information of others, Huxley was actually profoundly interested in religion, particularly after he went nearly blind at an early age; he wrote extensively, for example, about Meister Eckert, the Christian mystic. If gobucks weren't profoundly ignorant, he'd know he could hardly have chosen a worse example of an atheist hedonist. Gosh, even reading 'Brave New World' would tell you that.
I don't know how these guys sleep at night. I really don't.
Thanks for the additional information.