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woody allen on life

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The clip above is from episode 9 THE AGE OF PERSONAL PEACE AND AFFLUENCE

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Woody Allen about meaning and truth of life on Earth

Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

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Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

It is striking that Francis Schaeffer over 30 years ago pointed out how much Woody Allen demonstrated how terrifying the world is without God in the picture and he used Woody as example in a key part of one his major apologetic arguments and here it is below. Woody Allen has correctly noted that the humanist secular worldview is just left with despair!!!! Take a look at Schaeffer’s thoughts on this:

The Mannishness of Man
Before we consider various possibilities, we must settle the question of method. What is it we are expecting our “answer” to answer?
There are a number of things we could consider, but at this point we want to concentrate on just two. The first is what we will call “the universe and its form,” and the second is “the mannishness of man.” The first draws attention to the fact that the universe around us is like an amazing jigsaw puzzle. We see many details, and we want to know how they fit together. That is what science is all about. Scientists look at the details and try to find out how they all cohere. So the first question that has to be answered is: how did the universe get this way? How did it get this form, this pattern, this jigsawlike quality it now has?
Second, “the mannishness of man” draws attention to the fact that human beings are different from all other things in the world. Think, for example, of creativity. People in all cultures of all ages have created many kinds of things, from “High Art” to flower arrangements, from silver ornaments to high-technology supersonic aircraft. This is in contrast to the animals about us. People also fear death, and they have the aspiration to truly choose. Incidentally, even those who in their writings say we only think we choose quickly fall into words and phrases that only make sense if they are wrong and we do truly choose. Human beings are also unique in that they verbalize. That is, people put concrete and abstract concepts into words which communicate these concepts to other people. People also have an inner life of the mind; they remember the past and make projections into the future. One could name other factors, but these are enough to differentiate people from other things in the world.
What world-view adequately explains the remarkable phenomenon of the distinctiveness of human beings? There is one world-view which can explain the explain the existence of the universe, its form, and the uniqueness of people – the world-view given to us in the Bible. There is a remarkable parallel between the way scientists go about checking to see if what they think about reality does in fact correspond to it and the way the biblical world-view can be checked to see if it is true.
Many people, however, react strongly against this sort of claim. They see the problem – Where has everything come from and why is it the way it is? – but they do not want to consider a solution which involves God. God, they say, belongs to “religion,” and religious answers, they say, do not deal with facts. Only science deals with facts. Thus, they say, Christian answers are not real answers; they are “faith answers.”
This is a strange reaction, because modern people pride themselves on being open to new ideas, on being willing to consider opinions which contradict what has been believed for a long time. They think this is what “being scientific” necessitates. Suddenly, however, when one crosses into the area of the “big” and most basic questions (like those we are considering now) with an answer involving God, the shutters are pulled down, the open mind closes and a very different attitude, a dogmatic rationalism, takes over.

This is curious -first, because few seem to notice that the humanist explanations of the big and most basic questions is just as much a “faith answer” as any could be. With the humanist world-view everything begins with only matter; whatever has developed has developed only within matter, a reordering of matter by chance.
Even though materialistic scientists have no scientific understanding of why things exist, nor any certain scientific understanding of how life began, and even though this world-view leaves them with vast problems – the problems Woody Allen has described of “alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness” – many modern people still reject at once any solution which uses the word God, in favor of the materialistic humanist “answer” which answers nothing. This is simply prejudice at work.

We need to understand, however, that this prejudice is both recent and arbitrary. Professor Ernest Becker, who taught at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State College, said that for the last half-million years people have always believed in two worlds – one that was visible and one that was invisible. The visible world was where they lived their everyday lives; the invisible world was more powerful, for the meaning and existence of the visible world was dependent on it. Suddenly in the last century and a half, as the ideas of the Enlightenment have spread to the whole of Western culture, we have been told quite arbitrarily that there is no invisible world. This has become dogma for many secular people today.

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If everything is put into the machine, of course there is no place for God. But also there is no place for man, no place for the significance of man, no place for beauty, for morals or for love. When you come to this place, you have a sea without a shore. Everything is dead. But the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system does not explain the two basic things that are before us: (1) the universe that exists and its form, and (2) the mannishness of man.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)

Modern man says, “No, we are just machines — chemically determined or psychologically determined.” But nobody consistently lives this way in his life. I would insist that here is a presupposition which intellectually, in the laboratory, would be cast out simply because it does not explain what is.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
If we do not begin with a personal Creator, eventually we are left (no matter how we string it out semantically) with the impersonal plus time plus chance. We must explain everything in the uniqueness of man, and we must understand all of the complexity of the universe on the basis of time plus chance.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)
But modern man does in fact assume — wittingly or unwittingly — that the universe and man can be explained by the impersonal plus time plus chance. And in this case man and his aspirations stand in total alienation from what is. And that is precisely where many people today live — in a generation of alienation: alienation in the ghettos, alienation in the university, alienation from parents, alienation on every side. Sometimes this takes the form of “dropping out,” sometimes it takes the form of “joining the system” to get along as easily as possible and to get as much from the system as possible. Those who are only playing with these ideas and have not gotten down into the real guts of it forget that the basic alienation with which they are faced is a cosmic alienation. It is simply this: there is nobody there to respond to you. There is nobody home in the universe. There is no one and nothing to conform to who you are or what you hope. That is the dilemma.

Let me use an illustration I have used previously. Suppose, for example, that the room in which you are seated is the only universe there is. God could have made a universe just this big if he wished. Suppose in making the only universe there were a room made up of solid walls, but filled up to the ceiling with liquids: just liquids and solids and no free gases. Suppose then that fish were swimming in the universe. The fish would not be alienated from the universe because they can conform to the universe by their nature. But suppose if by chance, as the evolutionists see chance, the fish suddenly developed lungs. Would they be higher or lower? Obviously, they would be lower, because they would drown. They would have a cosmic alienation from the universe that surrounded them.

But man has aspirations; he has what I call his mannishness. He desires that love be more than being in bed with a woman, that moral motions be more than merely sociological something-or-others, that his significance lie in being more than one more cog in a vast machine. He wants a relationship to society other than that of a small machine being manipulated by a big machine. On the basis of modern thought, however, all of these would simply be an illusion. And since there are aspirations which separate man from his impersonal universe, man then faces his being caught in a terrible, cosmic, final alienation. He drowns in cosmic alienation, for there is nothing in the universe to fulfill him. That is the position of modern man.

Beginning with rationalism, rationally you come only to pessimism. Man equals the machine. Man is dead. So those who followed Kierkegaard put forth the concept of an optimism in the area of nonrationality. Faith and optimism, they said, are always a leap. Neither has anything to do with reason.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)

Society has reaped the rewards of its escape from reason. From modern science to modern, modern science, from man made in the image of God to man the machine, from freedom within form to determinism and autonomous freedom, from harmony with God to cosmic alienation, from reason to drugs and the new mysticism, from a biblically based theology to god words — this is the flow of the stream of rationalistic history.
(Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, Ch. 1)

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Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

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Woody Allen Blue Jasmine Interview BBC Newsnight 2013

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Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

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Returning to Woody Allen for a minute.

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Featured artist is Ryan Gander

[ARTS 315] What’s Going on Today, part 1 – Jon Anderson

Published on Apr 5, 2012

[ARTS 315] What’s Going on Today, part 2 – Jon Anderson

Published on Apr 5, 2012

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Meet the artist – Ryan Gander: ‘Living is a creative act’

Published on Oct 16, 2012

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Ryan Gander artwork below:

Another artwork of his below:

Ryan Gander

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Ryan Gander (born 1976) is an English artist born in Chester, Cheshire, who lives and works between London and Suffolk. His work “involves a lot of playful puzzles, cultural collisions and meta-versions of reality.”^[1]

Life and career

Education

Gander trained in Interactive Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, receiving a First Class Degree in 1999. In 2000 he spent a year at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands, as a Fine Art Research Participant. Then he participated in the artists residency programme of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2001 – 2002.

Artistic practice

Gander is represented by the Lisson Gallery.^[2] His work is formally diverse and has included, “a chess set, a new word, a children’s book, jewellery, customised sportswear, glass orb paperweights and maps,” as well as photography, films, and drawings.^[3] Considering Gander’s work, “Appendix”, art critic Mark Beasley said: “It’s an unwieldy yet fascinatingly open account, somewhat like lucid dreaming, which shows the artist at his most arch, open and revealing … an attempt to discuss practice in a form sympathetic to the work in discussion.”^[4]

Exhibitions

From 2002 – 2003, early presentations of Ryan Gander’s work were in the form of lectures which he delivered to the public in many venues: ‘Loose Associations Lecture 1.1’ and ‘Loose Associations Lecture 2.1’. These encapsulated his position as an interactive artist. Gander’s recent solo exhibitions include The Happy Prince for the Public Art Fund in New York, USA in 2010 and more recently Now there’s not enough of it to go around, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument between Theo and Piet regarding the dynamic aspect of the diagonal line and attempting to produce a chroma-key set for a hundred cinematic scenes at Taro Nasu Gallery, Tokyo, Japan in 2011.

Disability-related works

Ryan Gander is a wheelchair user with a long-term physical disability. His work for the 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition featured an action-figure sized sculpture that represents him while he falls from a wheelchair. “It is a self-portrait in the worst possible position”.^{[5] [6]} In 2006, his installation at the old Whitechapel Library, ‘Is this guilt in you too?’, was part of the Art Council’s ‘Adjustments’ exhibitions whose aim was ‘to address transitional thinking on disability equality and inclusion’.^[7] His other works are normally not related to disabilities. However, Matt Higgs argues in his commentary about Gander’s work,^[8] that his disability actually contributes to Gander’s unique way of seeing: “The first thing I ever noticed about Ryan was that he uses a wheelchair. I mention this not in passing, nor as a gratuitous aside. Whilst I accept that some people might argue that this information is irrelevant, I would like to think that the fact that Ryan uses a wheelchair does – at least – have some bearing on my subsequent understanding of his work.”

Personal life

Gander is married to the director of the Limoncello gallery, Rebecca May Marston, with whom he has a daughter.^[9]

Critical response

• “Ryan Gander is a story-teller, a teller of tales” … “His art is an attempt to see beyond the internal art referent, to hug an idea so tightly that its innards are squeezed onto the walls” ^[10]

• “The work of London-based artist Ryan Gander is multi-faceted, ranging through installation, sculpture, intervention, writing and performative lecturing” ^[11]

• “Ryan Gander’s practice involves a lot of playful puzzles, cultural collisions and meta-versions of reality.” ^[1]

• “Humour underpins much of Gander’s work, rescuing it from mere ‘institutional critique’, engaging us with its dead-pan, self-deprecating knowingness. It is as rigorous as it is strangely, accessible.” ^[12]

Ryan Gander won the Prix de Rome for sculpture (the national Dutch art prize) in 2003. He was nominated for the Beck’s Futures prize in 2005.^{[citation needed]}

Works

• Loose Associations Lecture 1.1, 2002
• Loose Associations Lecture 2.1, 2003
• This Consequence, 2005
• A Future Lorem Ipsum, 2006
• Didactease Necklace, 2006
• My Family Before Me, 2006
• The Neon Series, several neon works, 2006–2011
• As it presents itself – Somewhere Vague, 2008
• A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped form my table and fell to the floor, 2008
• Degas Ballerina Series, several bronze sculptures, 2008–2011
• Man on a bridge – (A study of David Lange), 2008
• The New New Alphabet, 2008
• Associative Templates Series, #1 – #31, 2009
• The Happy Prince, 2010
• The book of ‘The Sitting’, 2009
• Ftt, Ft, Ftt, Ftt, Ffttt, Ftt, or somewhere between a modern representation of how a contemporary gesture came into being, an illustration of the physicality of an argument, 2010

Public collections

Gander’s works are included in both international public and private collections including Tate Collection, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum Moderner Kunst, Wien; Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain du Nord Pas-de-Calais; FNAC, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; MaMBO, Bologna; The Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Arts Council, London; Welsh Museum, Cardiff; Government Art Collection, London.

References

External links

• Ryan Gander’s website

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Related posts:

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