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And another thing

Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 13th June 2007

Now, by contrast, the new scientific pantheism is secular from the start, fuelled by the democratic process and the popular media. What it designates as sin is automatically transmuted into legal offences and enforced by all the resources of the state. In this sense all Western states are becoming theocratic, as the punitive side of scipan begins to bite. I doubt if it will work better than any other theocracy in the long term. There is already confusion in its basic theology. Rubbish, for instance, has always raised confusion, another form of entropy. As Cassius says in Julius Caesar, ‘What trash is Rome,/ What rubbish, and what offal!’ That is his opinion, the rubbish to be reordered by Caesar’s murder. Once you begin on this path you run into problems of conflicting opinion, that is, politics, at every turn. When Locke, in his Essay on Human Understanding, writes of ‘removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’, by what right does he judge?

It is orthodox Christianity to regard no one as rubbish. The point was put elegantly by Tennyson in In Memoriam:

That no one walks with aimless feet
That not one life shall be destroyed
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God has made the pile complete.

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