The Inimitable Tiff

The online adventures of Tiff Fehr (@tiffehr), a UX engineerette at The New York Times. Feel free to peruse my somewhat popular geek-themed Tumblr, too, if that's your thing.

More personally than the above or below, I document notable adventures (much later than when they actually happen): Oktoberfest '04, Guatemala '08, Europe '10, Wisconsin '10, Middle East '11*. (* in progress)

Aug 23

Confessions of an Ex-Moralist - NYTimes.com

The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted. And what is more, I had known this. At some level of my being there had been the awareness, but I had brushed it aside. I had therefore lived in a semi-conscious state of self-delusion – what Sartre might have called bad faith. But in my case this was also a pun, for my bad faith was precisely the belief that I lacked faith in a divinity.

I’m glad I saved this for this evening, after chores.  Little brain is spinning in the red at the moment.

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