I've said it before: I is somebody else. Arthur Rimbaud agrees.

A snowy view from my office.

I'm ill. Just read this blog.

Yah pom-new chewed-no-yay mg-no-vain-yay. The Art of Translation by Vladimir Nabokov.

Don't be afraid. Eternal life will preserve your shape and appearance. Sort of...

Thank you, for plastinating me.

See more work of the same photographer.

Wanna know what logic is?

Why Euclid's elements are not entirely computationally applicable. Screw it! Fun.

On Form

The external shape, appearance, or configuration of an object, in contradistinction to the matter of which it is composed; in metaphysics, the active, determining principle of a thing as distinguished from matter, the potential principle.
The word form has been used in a number of ways throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics. It was early applied to Plato's term eidos, by which he identified the permanent reality that makes a thing what it is, in contrast to the particulars that are finite and subject to change. The Platonic concept of form was itself derived from the Pythagorean theory that intelligible structures (which Pythagoras called numbers), and not material elements, gave objects their distinctive characters. Plato developed this theory into the concept of "eternal form," by which he meant the immutable essence that can only be "received" or "imitated" by material, or sensible, things. Plato held that eternal forms, though they were not tangible, were of a higher reality than material objects.
For practical purposes Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter (hypokeimenon or hyle) and form (eidos or morphe). He rejected the abstract Platonic notion of form and argued that every sensible object consists of both matter and form, neither of which can exist without the other. To Aristotle matter was the undifferentiated primal element; it is that from which things develop rather than a thing in itself.The development of particular things from this germinal matter consists in differentiation, the acquiring of the particular forms of which the knowable universe consists. Matter is the potential factor, form the actualizing factor. (Aristotle further posited the existence of a prime, or unmoved, mover, i.e., pure form separate from matter, eternal and immutable.)
Thus according to Aristotle, the matter of a thing will consist of those elements of it which, when the thing has come into being, may be said to have become it; and the form is the arrangement or organization of those elements, as the result of which they have become the thing which they have. Thus, bricks and mortar are the matter that, given one form, become a house, or, given another, become a wall. As matter they are potentially anything that they can become; it is the form which determines what they actually become. Here "matter" is a relative term, for a brick on the pile, while potentially part of a house, is already actually a brick; i.e., it is itself a composite of form and matter, clay being matter to the brick as the brick is to the house or to the wall. Matter is that which is potentially a given object but which actually becomes that object only when it is given the right form.
Aristotle's notion of form combines with his teleological viewpoint to give the conclusion that formal development has a direction and may have a goal and that some things are more informed than others. Bricks are more informed than clay, and a house more than bricks.
The Aristotelian concept of form was uniquely adapted to Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, whose works mark the high point of the medieval Scholastic tradition. Aquinas further delineated the concept of form to include "accidental form," a quality of a thing that is not determined by its essence; "sensible form," that element of form that can be distinguished from matter by sense-perception; and other such distinctions. Other Scholastic philosophers, including John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, worked with the Aristotelian concept of form, but none to as great an effect as Aquinas.
For 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, form was a property of mind; he held that form is derived from experience, or, in other words, that it is imposed by the individual on the material object. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant identified space and time as the two forms of sensibility, reasoning that though man does not experience space and time as such, he cannot experience anything except in space and time. Kant further delimited 12 basic categories that act as structural elements for human understanding.
The concept of form is also indispensable to the practice and criticism of several disciplines other than philosophy. In literature, for example, the term may refer to the schema, structure, or genre that a writer chooses for the presentation of his subject--e.g., novel, short story, maxim, haiku, sonnet, etc.; it may also refer to the internal structure of the work, and, to a great extent, a work's critical success depends on the degree to which the artist is able to integrate the content and internal structure within the framework of its external form. In criticism of the graphic arts, the term form refers to the effect achieved by draftsmanship or mass as distinct from that achieved by such elements as colour or texture. In sculpture and other plastic arts, form (or shape) is both tangible and visible and thus is the chief element of organization.

The gene wars have started.

The New Yorker on A.S. Byatt: Her creative method--saturating herself in texts, counting on a flood of information to bring her what she needs--seems a hypertrophied form of normal authorial procedure. Her masses of borrowings and imitations are saved from inertia by an Iris Murdochian belief in the momentousness of sexual attraction (usually described from the male point of view), and by a fine eye and ear for natural detail as well as for footnotes.

Our daily attention for an individual that is of some interest to us. Today, a shoemaker, a common man, small of stature, but great in ideas: Jacob Boehme.

I've been here once.

Read all about the Music Mind Machine at my university.

Have a look at a lost interview with our Queen just before she got engaged.
Diamonds, diamonds, all diamonds, mmm....(You need Real Audio though)

Copyleft religiously.

In theology, we tend to forget to apply Ockham's razor, also spelled "Occam's razor", but also called "law of economy" or "law of parsimony". This is a principle stated by William of Ockham, that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity (non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem). This principle was, in fact, invoked before Ockham by Durand de Saint-Pourcain, a French Dominican theologian and philosopher of dubious orthodoxy, who used it to explain that abstraction is the apprehension of some real entity. Galileo did something similar by defending the simplest hypothesis of the heavens, and other later scientists stated similar simplifying laws and principles. It is called "Ockham's razor" because he mentioned the principle so frequently and employed it so sharply. For instance, he used it
to dispense with relations which he held to be nothing distinct from their foundation in things;
with efficient causality, which he tended to view merely as regular succession;
with motion, which is merely the reappearance of a thing in a different place;
with psychological powers distinct for each mode of sense;
and with the presence of ideas in the mind of the Creator, which are merely the creatures themselves.

I think everyone would like to enter Annettes Philosophenstübchen. You and your java-mouse are invited. Beware of some chaostheory and German idealism!

Our daily biography is dedicated to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, considered a madman by many, the most inconsistent and incomprehensible philosopher of all times by most, read by just a few.

Richard Southern died. Read his obituary.

I recommend you to let Entropia use your spare processor capacity for scientific research, e.g. AIDS research. Read their mission statement carefully.

Poetry should be made by all!

A picture of Raimundus Lullus' HyperMachine(Mallorca 1617).

Johannes Scotus Erigena stated: That which creates but is not created is God;
that which creates and is created: the Word or Logos;
that which is created but does not create: the sensible world;
that which which does not create, nor is created: God as supreme end.

Are you skilled in the art of Arithmetic? or How things can be both Created and Eternal.

I have to study on the Medieval problem of universals.

Artifacts are contrasted to natural objects; they are products of human actions. Consequently an artifact has necessarily a maker or an author. Using the word ‘author’ in a somewhat generalized sense, we may thus adopt the principle:
(A1) If an object is an artifact, it has an author.
Can (A1) be strengthened to an equivalence? Experimental artifacts are unintended products of the experimenter’s plans and actions, but otherwise the word is usually applied only to intended products: not all products of an agent’s actions are artifacts. If we restrict the application of the expressions ‘author’ and ‘authorship’ in a similar way, we might strengthen (A1) to
(A2) An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.
According to (A2), artifact and author are correlative concepts (Hilpinen 1993). It should be observed that (A2) allows the possibility that an artifact has more than one author: such objects may be termed ‘collective artifacts’. (A2) makes the concept of artifact equivalent to that of work (as product as opposed to activity); for example, according to (A2), all works of art, including musical and literary works, should be called ‘artifacts’ insofar as they have authors. In aesthetics, the expression ‘artifact’ has been used in this wide sense when it has been argued, as many philosophers have done, that works of art are necessarily artifacts. In a more restricted sense which is closer to the "archaeological" meaning mentioned above, artifacts are physical objects or in any case inhabitants of the physical, spatio-temporal world. If we say that an author can create a work only by making some artifact (e.g., to write a novel, one has to produce a manuscript), the expression ‘artifact’ is used in this narrow (or primary) sense.
An object which is an artifact in this primary sense is usually made from some pre-existing object or objects by successive intentional modifications; this activity is called work. This feature of artifacts is reflected in the definition of an artifact as an object "showing human workmanship or modification".

When a person intends to make an object, his productive intention has as its content some description of the intended object; the agent intends to make an object of a certain kind. An author’s intention "ties" to an artifact a number of predicates which determine the intended character of the object. The existence and some of the properties of the artifact are dependent on its intended character. This is expressed by the following Dependence Condition:

(DEP) The existence and some of the properties of an artifact depend on an agent’s (or author’s) intention to make an object of certain kind.
The causal tie between an artifact and its intended character -- or, strictly speaking, between an artifact and the author’s productive intention -- is mediated by the author’s actions, that is, by his work on the object. The actual properties of an artifact constitute its actual character. The success of the author’s productive activity depends on the degree of fit or agreement between the intended and the actual character of the object. The actual character of an artifact is of course always much richer than the intended character; the artifact fits the author’s intentions if and only if the former includes the latter. At least one of the descriptions included in the intended character must be a sortal predicate which determines the identity of the object and the criteria by which it can be distinguished from other objects. For example, ‘painting’ and ‘chair’ are sortal descriptions, but ‘red thing’ is not: it is possible to give a definite answer to the question of how many chairs there are in a given room, but not to the question of how many red things there are in the room.

So, why IS there a cosmos.

I bored myself with some Game Theory.

And now, the Ultimate Pursuit Of Tradition Picture Quiz!!!!!
If you know them all, you're in good company forever. By the way, the quiz has moved to the side.

How do you photograph ideas? What colour and texture are concepts? If these are relevant queries for a film about Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is not least because the early Wittgenstein was himself much preoccupied with the gap between showing and saying. Language could manifest in its inmost structure something of its relation to the world; but it could not state it, since this would involve having another language to gauge the distance between reality and our discourse about it. This would be like laying a ruler alongside an object to measure its length, and then trying with that very same ruler to calculate the distance between it and and the object. Whatever the appropriate image, some utterly self-defeating piece of acrobatics is stake here, some self-reflexive flip or mind-bending double take whereby we could jump on our own shadows or see ourselves seeing something; and though for the early Wittgenstein any such hauling of ourselves up by our linguist bootstraps is quite out of the question, since our language can get a handle on itself no more than a tin-opener can slice itself open, it was a goal towards which the great wave of European modernism, to which the Tractatus secretly belongs, never ceased to strive. For the true coordinates of that astonishing mystical text are Russell or Frege, but Joyce, Schoenberg, Picasso, all those self-ironising avantgardists who sought in their own fashion to represent and point to their representing at a stroke.

The beautiful tradition of unbelief.

The Ptolemaic universe.

The barren Copernican universe.

Whatever we may think about the idealistic, the Platonic, and the excessively religious components of those projects, they include nevertheless the plausible hypothesis that the process of a person's broad education is in part brought about by a type of experience that reaches consciousness not via speech, but rather via preconceptual observation. In order for this observation to have a formative effect, there is need for an objective Gestalt that contains the educationally effective qualities in a sensually evident manner. The late idealistic-romantic view proposed to identify this idea in various directions. On the one hand, there was the direction of "meaningful" forms such as Goethe's "archaic plant" as a pattern for developmental metamorphosis, Runge's lily unfolding to the light and associated play of colors at different times of day, Goethe's picture collection of the "educational province" (probably thought of in a classicist manner), or the forms handed down through the history of myths. On the other hand, reflections about the meaning of symbols for education took an "elementary" direction, above all among educators. As if they had studied Nikolaus Cusanus, they searched for the origin of every sort of broad learning in the simplest forms such as the circle, triangle, square, ball, or cube, in which something cosmic was represented and that, therefore, could be considered of universal and fundamental origin. Both directions followed a normative interest; they wanted to prescribe the proper process of education.

Commit yourself to the The Dark Side.

And noooow (soft airy voice), some.......re-la-xa-tion by concentrating on organic software (everybody close their eyes and smile in a satisfied way.



Find more here.

Tja, we hadden het nodig. Nu we allemaal deel uitmaken van de Kerk van de Heilige Isidorus hebben we een patroonheilige nodig.

Every word we speak, every pulsation of our veins, is related by musical rhythms to the powers of harmony.
It's official. The geeks have their own patron saint:
Isidore of Seville.

I became a member of the American Academy of Religion.

To catch up with contemporary lifestyle, I read Computer Music Magazine and .Net Magazine.

This is an old crap photograph of the building that I work in. 17th floor, to be precise.

What a creative representation of my workplace.

Have a look at an illuminated Universal Turing Machine.

Finally, the Virtual Sublime has arrived.

So, why did the chicken cross the road?

If you think Intuition is vague...

A forgotten philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey and his view on the human sciences.

A scholastic view on art of Jacques Maritain. Read it on your e-book.

Where God-speak and Cyber-space meet?

I'd like to scroll the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

If its true that in 2050 we will live twice as long, I promise to read this.

And this is my project of the week. Find out more about Jorge Luis Borges.

Take a look at Sigrid's new borderline terrier.

Finally, there is a Hans Urs von Balthasar Website. Bravo! Bit pious though.

Check out George W Bush and the reinvention of lateral thinking.

Thinking 'bout subculture, I found, not surprisingly, some Christian values - no, not the dark, but the sparkled ones - on the Utah GOTHICS Page.

.

The question of God certainly does not begin with metaphysics. But it seems-- or at least was able to appear-- that since metaphysics was coming to an end, being completed, and disappearing, the question of God was coming to a close. Throughout the century that is now ending, everything happened as if the question of God could do nothing other than make common cause, positively or negatively, with the destiny of metaphysics. Everything also happened as if, in order to keep the question of God open so as to permit a "rational worship" of him (Rom. 12:1), it was absolutely necessary to stick to the strictly metaphysical meaning of all philosophy.

But could one not and therefore should not one also pose, in an opposite direction, an entirely different preliminary question: Is philosophy equivalent to metaphysics? In order to remain rational, must the question concerning God necessarily and exclusively take the paths that lead to the "God of the philosophers and the scholars" because those paths issue necessarily from the decisions of metaphysics? (Blaise Pascal, "Memorial," Oeuvres completes de Pascal, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris, 1954), p.554) Such a reversal of the question can surprise and disturb or, on the contrary, seem to dodge the radicality of this century's philosophical situation. It seems to me nevertheless inevitable, in that only such a reversal still leaves truly open the possibility of taking into proper account at least three questions, which I will evoke here without claiming to answer them explicitly, (a) At least according to its historical destiny, did metaphysics not reach its end-- positively with Hegel and negatively with Nietzsche? (b) Did philosophy not devote itself throughout an entire century to overcoming that end by assuming nonmetaphysical forms, of which the most powerful (I am not saying the only) remains phenomenology? (c) Does Christian speculative theology, understood in its exemplary figures (and here I am obviously thinking first of Saint Thomas Aquinas) belong to metaphysics taken in the strict sense, or has it responded to the particular conceptual demands of the Revelation that prompted it?

In succession, then, we will examine the metaphysical figure of philosophy and the thought of God that it actualizes, and then the phenomenological figure of philosopophy and the possibility that it keeps in store for God

For your second life. The work on imagination and the mind of Nigel Thomas.

Let's put some ethics in machines.

Keep an eye on Generation 5.

Read the Avant-Pop Manifesto.

Or the Future Culture Manifesto.

Read why the male is an
incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. And why to be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a
deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples in the Scum manifesto.

try out

Who can send me a link to the monk olympics website?

planet?

See my face in perspective.

Blob again. And again.

The Blob

My analysis of the day:

What is represesentation (Denotation alone is a necessary and a sufficient condition for representation)?

1. x represents y iff x denotes y.
2. If x denotes y, then x may not resemble y.
3. x represents y.
4. Therefore, x denotes y.
5. Therefore, x may not resemble y.
6. Therefore, x represents y and x may not resemble y.
7. Now, suppose that resemblance is a necessary condition for representation.
8. If resemblance is a necessary condition for representation, then it is not (possibly) the case that x represents y and that x may not resemble y.
9. Therefore, it is not the case that x represents y and x may not resemble y.
10. Therefore, resemblance is not a necessary condition for representation.

Illusionism:

X represents y iff x causes the illusion of y in spectators.

Conventionalism:

X pictorially represents y only if x denotes y in accordance with some established system of established conventions.

Neo-naturalism:

In the first argument: Change ‘resemblance’ for ‘recognition’ and ‘may not resemble’ for ‘may not trigger the recognition’.

Conclusion: Recognition is not a necessary condition for representation.

Post, you preposterous plunking pitiful page

A non-working system is not a system.

Myths and microchips in Techgnosis.

So, is there cybergrace in cyberspace? Or is it neo-alchemist crap? On Jennifer Cobb's ideas on the new anima mundi.

I really like Technology and Culture. Silly serious me. Done by Jesuits of course. Species of my own kind.

Aaaaaaaarrrgghh! Extropians and other transhumans. Fear them or join the MIT Extropians-Discussion Email list. Or play a Transhuman role playing game. Men like Gods. Mmmmmmm. Spoooooooooooky....

My man Joe should work harder. Instead, he gets stuck in front of the telly, fancying a female tv-presenter who is friendly to people of the gay persuasion.

The censorship of sluggishness.

The mental inertia of machinery

So why is technology so ambiguous in fulfilling its promises of a better
life? As Noble concludes, "on a deeper cultural level, these technologies
have not met basic human needs because, at the bottom, they have never
really been about meeting them. They have been aimed rather at the loftier
goal of transcending such mortal concerns altogether. In such an
ideological context, inspired more by prophets than by profits, the needs
neither of the mortals nor of the earth they inhabit are of any enduring
consequence. And it is here that the religion of technology can be rightly
considered a menace."

Noble, David F. (1997). The Religion of Technology - The Divinity of Man
and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Another one scared? Cyberpower: the culture and politics of cyberspace and the Internet by Tim Jordan.

The evil Vatican according to the people of the Nexus magazine. God is not in bussiness, but has a company that is though.

Check out the Tijdschrift voor Theologie!

This is the place where I work. The site should be updated any moment.

I wish I could show some photo's as well. Looked for in on the net. Couldn't find anything yet. How weird.

I found a map though.

God Almighty planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.

Francis Bacon, On Gardens

Saturday late afternoon. Isn't it a beautiful time to read the essays of Francis Bacon and Michel Montaigne?

I find that there is nothing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason, than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things. They are savages at the same rate that we say fruit are wild, which nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas in truth, we ought rather to call those wild, whose natures we have changed by our artifice, and diverted from the common order. In those, the genuine, most useful and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate. And yet for all this our taste confesses a flavor and delicacy, excellent even to emulation of the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound without art or culture. Neither is it reasonable that art should gain the pre-eminence of our great and powerful mother nature. We have so surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own purity and proper luster, she marvelously baffles and disgraces all our vain and frivolous attempts.

Michel Montaigne, On Cannibalism

The ethics of kapitalism

Ad forbidden by a Dutch ad company:

I always wanted to learn Japanese characters.

From Lullus via Bruno to Peirce. Or The Evolution of a Theory of Semantic Fields.

"If understanding followed no rule at all,
there would be no good in the understanding nor in the matter understood,
and to remain in ignorance would be the greatest good."

"Without producing, no man can love,
nor can he understand or remember,
nor have the power of feeling and being."

"Man is nobler for his knowledge
than for the gold and goods he possesses,
even though these be gained with great good will."

(Ramon Llull, The Hundred Names of God.)

W h e r e
a r e
y o u
n o w ?

The drunken poet holds court (continual libation).

I should start an inventarisation of the history of the negative tradition, which should actually start with Socrates, but normally mentions Pseudo-Dionysus as its protagonist. It continues in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Jacques Derrida. Is there more to come?

Since the unknown of what is beyond being is something above and beyond speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe to it an understanding beyond being. (…) Just as the senses can neither grasp nor perceive the things of the mind, just as representation and shape cannot take in the simple and the shapeless, just as corporal form cannot lay hold of the intangible and incorporeal, by the same standard of truth beings are surpassed by the infinity beyond being, intelligences by that oneness that is beyond intelligence. Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process.

Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, the Source of all unity, this supra-existent being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore itself transcending existence, it alone can give an authoritative account of what it really is. (…)
And yet, on the other hand, the Good is not absolutely incommunicable to everything. By itself it generously reveals a firm, transcendent beam, granting enlightenments proportionate to each being, and thereby draws sacred minds upward to its permitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it. (…)
Realizing all this, the theologians praise it by every name - and as the Nameless One. For they call it nameless (…) and yet on the other hand they give it many names, such as "I am being", "life", "light", "God", the "truth" (…) good, beautiful, wise, beloved, God of gods, Lord of Lords, Holy of Holies, eternal, existent, Cause of the ages (…) source of life, wisdom, mind, world, knower (…)

And so it is that as Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is. (…)
Given that the God transcends everything, as indeed it does, its nature, unconfined by form, is the creator of all forms. In it is nonbeing really an excess of being. It is not a life, but is, rather, superabundant Life. It is not a mind, but is superabundant Wisdom. Whatever partakes of the Good partakes of what preeminently gives form to the formless. And one might even say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above all being. Repelling being, it struggles to find rest in the Good which transcends all being, in the sense of a denial of all things.

Pseudo Dionysus, On the Divine Names

Arts & Letters Daily is a nice starting point for websurfing if you run out of ideas, which I do easily.

When animal sapiens became homo sapiens, bestialism turned into humanism.

A nation of friends should publish silence

So this is silence?

So this is silence?

Scenarios rather than measurements.

Now this really is silence.

I am challenging tradition with my favourite Dominican Giordano Bruno, a polymath like me.

Born in 1548, died February 17, 1600, Bruno is perhaps the best-known philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Ordained a Dominican priest in 1575, he was accused of heresy and in 1576 left his order. After some travel and further study, he taught (1580-81) theology at Toulouse. Soon he found favor with Henry III, who in 1583 sent him to England, where he taught at Oxford. Following sojourns in Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfurt, he went back to Venice, where in 1592 he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. Refusing to recant, he was burned as a heretic. Bruno's philosophy owed much to such diverse sources as Thomas Aquinas, Averroes, Copernicus, John Scotus Erigena, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Hermetic literature. In his De umbris idearum (On Shadows of Ideas), Bruno pictured nature in all its multiplicity descending from divine unity to matter and darkness. At once, he distinguished God from the world and yet tended toward a completely contrary pantheism. His insistence on divine immanence, linked with a doctrine of panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind), anticipated both Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. He rejected the geocentric and anthropocentric universe, believing that the Earth and human individuals are ultimately accidents of a single living world-substance.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

The World Socialists call Bruno A man of insight and courage.

The Dadaists admire him for the practice of the Reminiscence form of the art, by stressing systematic classification of observable material and representing it in a manipulatable symbol, transforming it into a science of nature.

According to the pantheists, he is the first pantheist martyr in the modern world.